John Healey: Britain can be rebuilt with a new investment in housing for future

Even then, only 9,000 new homes were built during the whole of 2011 when there are 27 000 new households a year in Yorkshire, as families split, young people look to set up on their own and others move into the region.

Grant Shapps, the Housing Minister, pledged before the election that Britain would become a “nation of house builders” with the Conservatives. This big boast has proved hollow. But in truth, we have not been a nation of house builders for decades.

In 1970, just over 290,000 new homes were built in England. By 1991, the figure had fallen to 160,000, and a decade later it was down to 133,000.

Even at the high point in 2007, before the global financial crash and recession, we only built 170,000 new homes when independent statisticians were telling us that our changing society and growing population required 240,000 every year just to keep pace.

Over the last two decades demand has outstripped supply and fuelled the house price boom, rapidly rising private rents and longer waiting lists for council or housing association homes.

But it is not just about numbers. As Nye Bevan said when he launched Labour’s great post-War housing programme: “We shall be judged for a year or two by the number of houses we build. We shall be judged in ten years’ time by the type of houses we build.” In more recent decades the market has been failing. So has public policy, and all political parties are at fault.

Our housing failures have created a quiet social crisis in the lives of millions, as those without a home of their own are forced to sleep on friends’ sofas, unable to move out from their parents or put off having a family of their own.

The Government’s past year of no growth and now the fresh recession is finally getting Ministers to think about building homes as a way of creating new jobs and supporting economic growth.

The Treasury is said to be looking at using the Government’s balance sheet to underwrite a major housing programme, and the Bank of England to be considering housing bonds as part of extending its “quantitative easing” stimulus to the economy.

Mindful of the warning that those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it, I’ve taken a close look at what we’ve done in Yorkshire over the last 25 years.

We need to build more homes but more of the same will simply repeat three big mistakes.

First, we’ve not built enough homes to meet the needs of our changing and growing society.

There is over one third more single parent households in the region than 20 years ago, and 50 per cent more single people of all ages living on their own. Even at the height of recent house building in 2007, we were still 10,000 homes short of matching this growth.

Second, we’ve not built homes for all. Since the War, social housing has had a central place in our society, providing homes for the poorest or most vulnerable and settled mixed communities for many who simply want the security of a home to call their own – one in three of those in council or housing association homes are working.

But in Yorkshire we built no new council homes for 12 years, until I changed the rules as Labour’s housing minister in 2009 and started the biggest council house building programme for nearly 20 years. Housing associations have also fallen far short of what we need in the region, building fewer than 6,000 new homes during the last decade as our council waiting lists rose to 272,000.

Third, we thought we were building to meet the dream of homeownership, when we’ve done as much to sate the desire of small landlords. Since 1991, more than a quarter of a million newly-built houses have been sold in Yorkshire but the number of people owning their homes is up by only around half this total. And, in fact, the proportion of owner-occupiers in Yorkshire has actually fallen in the last two decades.

One in seven households in Yorkshire now rent from private landlords and there is no other option for many. This is no longer housing for the young and mobile. Nearly 100 000 families with children in our region, and over a million across England, are building their lives with landlords who can end their tenancy at any time with one month’s notice.

So there’s a powerful social case for housing investment, and a powerful economic case too. The National Housing Federation says building an extra 100,000 homes would generate around 750,000 more jobs and I know from experience when I launched ‘Rebuilding Britain’ in 2009 to help the country pull through our deepest recession since the 1930s this produced 11 jobs for every £1m of public investment in house building.

We urgently need a much bigger but also more balanced growth in new homes than this region and country have seen in the last 30 years.

The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee reminded us of post-War austerity and ambition. Sixty years on, it should be our new “nation-building” mission to make decent, affordable and secure homes available for all.