Britain is not broken and public housing is not all about ‘sink estates’. Nevertheless, while most of our public housing serves its tenants very well, the evidence that this report presents strongly suggests that concentrated public housing is not just a symptom of poverty and disadvantage but is also a cause.

For many people, our housing policy has been nothing short of disastrous. By the age of 30, public housing tenants born in 1970 are twice as likely as the population as a whole to suffer from mental health problems, eleven times more likely to be not in employment education or training, and nine more likely to live in a workless household.

But this is not only about the poor. As many middle class homeowners, first time buyers, and people living in cities know, housing policy has failed across many social groups. And this is only being made worse by the recession.

We need to get housing right for the recession years and for the longer term. This report finds a strong association between public housing and worklessness. Given the lack of support provided by our benefits system this also means that there are very high levels of income poverty too.

Public housing is tainted by association with the imagery and stigma of the sink estate and this undermines popular support for all public housing. The mutual respect we owe each other becomes undermined, with some citizens seen as welfare dependents and somehow ‘other’: alien beings in a subculture that horrifies and fascinates middle England in equal measure. This report makes hard policy proposals to deal with our ‘apartheid cities’.

The repercussions of this ‘othering’ corrode the moral and political legitimacy of the welfare state, making it harder to justify the redistribution of wealth and resources that is needed if public housing is to be valued as a vital public good like the NHS.

How to narrow the gap
Breaking this vicious circle requires a fundamental shift in the way we think about public housing and simply building more houses cannot be the answer. The 1970s ‘rush to volume’ was a mistake then and it would be now. Instead we need a series of reforms that rebalance our housing to meet our needs.

*     Mix public and private housing

We need to pursue housing mix with real conviction. This means integrating public housing with private housing, not just in special project ‘mixed communities’, but across the full range of our housing stock. Though this kind of mix is currently considered best practice in planning guidelines, it is too often only honoured in the breech.

*     Use housing management holistically

Public housing management needs to be about far more than maintenance and rent collection. It should also be used as a means of delivering employment and training services, through the use of proactive outreach programmes where necessary.

*     Replace Housing Benefit with a Housing Cost Credit

This report suggests an outline for a Housing Cost Credit (HCC) to replace not only Housing Benefit, but all forms of financial assistance that the state provides to meet housing need. Crucially, this will include all the current (and future) measures to assist homeowners experiencing difficulty in servicing their mortgage payments.

*     Reassess the ‘right to buy’ and the ‘right to sell’

On the ‘right to buy’, we should admit that Labour in the 1980s was wrong about the benefits of the individual freedom it gave people. But the Tories got it disastrously wrong by failing to plan for the reduction in the housing stock it created. It also led to the increasing concentration of poverty in the public housing that remains. A right to buy a home should not mean that tenants should have a right to take public housing stock with them if and when they choose to leave the tenure.

So we need a rebalancing: a remodelled and reassessed right to buy with a right to sell. Labour should introduce a flexible option to sell, in which households are given the option of transferring some or all of their equity to their Local Authority, thereby reducing mortgage payments to a manageable level.

Dr James Gregory is Research Fellow at the Fabian Society