Conservatives must fall in love with social housing again, Sir James Cleverly tells UKREiiF
Conservatives must fall in love with social housing again as part of an approach to help more people have a safe, attractive place to call home, according to Sir James Cleverly, Shadow Secretary of State of Housing, Communities and Local Government.
Sir James told the audience at a major business event that policymakers also had “almost a moral duty” to create a beautiful built environment to help people take pride in their neighbourhood.
He attended the UK’s Real Estate Investment & Infrastructure Forum, which was held at the Royal Armouries Museum and New Dock in Leeds, to take part in a public conversation about the Conservative Party's ideas to get Britain building.
Sir James said his father was a surveyor “so I’ve always had an inherited interest in the built environment and housing”.
“I grew up around some really awful bits of London which have been transformed both physically and socially. Very few areas of public policy can have such amazing, quick and positive impacts..When you look at good quality housing versus poor quality housing and the life chances that you help people have; it’s transformational.
"As a Conservative, if my party cannot have some serious answers to one of the most natural and fundamental human desires, which is a home of your own..where you feel safe, where you feel part of a community, if we don’t have a credible route to offering that, then we are out of the game.”
With regards to the social housing sector, he said: “I’ve said to my Conservative colleagues, we’re going to have to learn to fall in love with social housing again.
"There didn’t used to be such a harsh political divide.. When I stay in London my nearest train station is Lewisham; Lewisham has had some really nice new developments..and they are not shifting. They are not shifting, because even though they are flats in Lewisham, above a train station, they are still out of the reach of many people who aspire to live in those houses.
"You can’t magic that income gap away. Hopefully over time, the difference between costs and incomes will converge but as it stands at the moment there are very few credible routes for young aspirational hard working employed people to afford small flats in Lewisham. We’re going to have to find some way of bridging that need.
"Instinctively, I’m not a big fan of tax and subsidise so if that’s not the case, we’ve got to look at a mix of models, a mix of tenures to help people.”
He said private sector landlords have a role to play, as do social landlords and home owners.
"There is almost a moral duty to create a beautiful built environment for the people who can’t buy now with their own money. So if you're wealthy enough, you can buy an aesthetically beautiful period property, or maybe a new property, and you can have it near park land and tree-lined avenues which are paid for with your money.
"If you don’t have the money to do that, you live largely where other people choose for you to live.”
The people who choose where you live should make sure that where you live is beautiful, Sir James added.
"If you’re forced to live in somewhere horrible, you have no emotional investment in it.,if the signal that society gives to you is, ‘I’m going to make you live among this decay’ what message do you take as a person about that?”