The Housing Question No 2: The politics of home ownership
This week: The local elections, owning and voting, thinking the Tory unthinkable, the Queen’s Speech, Poundbury, housing and Brexit
Welcome to the second issue of The Housing Question, my newsletter covering everything to do with, well, housing. It’s still a work in progress but let me know what you think and please consider subscribing and sharing on social media if you like what you read.
Was it home ownership that lost it?
The fall of the Conservative bastions of Wandsworth (for the first time since 1978) and Westminster (for the first time ever) in the local elections is a huge psychological blow to the party. I explore the history of both, and why the results are a symbolic moment in the politics of housing, in a column for Inside Housing.
Michael Gove is in no doubt about one of the major reasons for the results, telling the Sunday Telegraph that:
‘There is a particular challenge for us in London and I think that challenge in London relates to ... home ownership. There are other factors. But I think that for young people in London, there is a responsibility on the incumbent government to address some of the factors that have made it more difficult for them to own their own home. That's one lesson that I would draw at this stage.’
The results do not all point in one direction - the Labour victories in the two Ws and in Barnet (also for the first time ever) were balanced by the loss of Harrow to the Conservatives – but they do seem to highlight yet again the importance of housing tenure in voting behaviour.
The foundation stone?
That is hardly a new observation, of course. Ever since Noel Skelton argued in the 1920s that the property-owning democracy should be central to the Tory response to the extension of the franchise, home ownership has been an important political aspiration for the party.
It became a foundational one in the 1980s, with the introduction of the Right to Buy linked to wider themes of asset ownership. As the 1987 manifesto put it:
‘Nowhere has the spread of ownership been more significant than in housing. Buying their own home is the first step most people take towards building up capital to hand down to their children and grandchildren. It gives people a stake in society - something to conserve. It is the foundation stone of a capital-owning democracy.’
Ever since then Conservative ministers have been obsessed with new schemes to boost home ownership and ‘bring back Right to Buy’. Yet, just as the initial wave of privatisation was consolidated into ownership by overseas investors and state-owned utilities, so the tide of property ownership ebbed. The Right to Buy worked for one generation only: overall levels of owner-occupation in England are now no higher than they were in 1987.
Thanks to the rise of Buy to Let and second homes, individual ownership of homes is still significantly higher than that, but the Tories have slowly woken up the unfortunate fact that owning multiple homes does not give you multiple votes.
Owners, renters and voters?
Nevertheless, the evidence still points to the importance of housing tenure in elections. These were the vote shares by housing tenure at the last general election, according to Ipsos MORI:
Owning and renting seem to be pretty clear political dividing lines. Note that these results actually underplay the impact of tenure because they do not reflect differential turnout. In 2019, 70 per cent of outright owners voted, compared to 64 per cent of owners with a mortgage, 52 per cent of social renters and 51 per cent of private renters.
However, 2019 was an unusual election thanks to Brexit, with support for Labour falling across the board. The swing was actually greatest among social renters, with the Conservative share rising by seven points and Labour’s falling by 12.
For comparison, here’s what happened in 2017 when the national result was much closer:
Note that Labour support among renters was significantly higher but that the result was very close among mortgaged owners. There is also more going on here than just tenure of course. We know that age has a significant impact on both voting intention and turnout and most outright owners will by definition be significantly older than people with a mortgage and private renters, for example.
But could there be another explanation for that marked difference between outright and mortgaged owners? The implications of the building safety crisis were already becoming clear by 2019 but since then there have been estimates of anything up to a million leaseholders affected by it. It seems reasonable to suggest that this will have become even more of a factor in the last three years and the affected blocks are heavily concentrated in big cities, precisely the areas where the Conservatives did least well last week.
In reality, of course, voting behaviour is not binary and politics is more like 3D chess than snakes and ladders: voting will be influenced by negative as well as positive partisanship; supporters of a party may not switch sides but merely not turn out to vote; and support for a third party may be heavily influenced by the leaders or policies of the other two.
And housing tenure is just one of many influences on voting behaviour. We know that education is another important demographic, reinforcing that age effect. At the last election, the Tories led Labour by 59-23 per cent among voters with no qualifications but Labour was ahead by 39-34 among those with a degree or higher. It may not be for nothing that I heard Wandsworth described last week as the most educated electorate in the country.
However, if it’s clear that education is important, you don’t need a PhD, or even a first degree, to know that there is something wrong with a housing system that leaves you locked out of owning while paying rent that finances someone else’s mortgage.
Thinking the unthinkable?
The significance of housing in the results has not been lost on Conservative commentators.
Clare Foges, a former speechwriter for David Cameron, concludes in her Times column that the Tories are ever to win in London again they need to do a Frank Field and ‘think the unthinkable’ on housing.
Her agenda – forcing developers to build more quickly, releasing Green Belt land near stations, a Tory-led mission to build more council housing, tackling empty homes, street votes, restricting foreign property ownership – comes from both Left and Right although it noticeably steers clear of truly unthinkable areas such as land ownership and the taxation of property wealth. She concludes that only ‘a hyperactive and no-holds barred secretary of state’ like Michael Gove is equipped to tackle the ‘blob’ of well-heeled developers and nimby Tories. Whether that’s true or not, it’s hard to disagree with her conclusion about ‘the housing crisis’:
‘It has been around so long that we no longer see it as a set of man-made problems for which there may be man-made solutions but something almost beyond mortal control, a weather system permanently blighting the UK. Millions have given up hope that anything can ever change. If the Conservatives are ever to win back London, they need to restore the hope that it can.’
Paul Goodman, editor of Conservative Home, identifies housing as a key structural element in our politics in a piece that joins the dots between low home ownership levels among the under-35, young couples putting off having children and pressure from employers for higher immigration. ‘For all the nobility of levelling up,’ he argues, ‘Britain needs a proportion of new owner occupied homes where people actually want to live. Some of these will have to be in the Greater South East if mobility is to rise and migration to lessen.’ From his perspective, the Queen’s Speech was Boris Johnson’s ‘last chance to make the most of leaving the EU, and tackling the greatest crisis in a generation’.
Except of course, that he didn’t take it, as summed up in a tweet by one of the co-founders of Conservative Home this week:
[Edit: Since writing this, the Conservative housing crisis has been proliferating. ‘The Conservative Party has to fix the country’s housing problems or we will face oblivion,’ says Tom Tugendhat, MP and potential future leadership candidate, while The Spectator’s political editor James Forsyth goes one step further with ‘The housing crisis puts Tories in a death spiral.’]
Calm down on 300,000
I explore the Queen’s Speech in detail in my latest column for Inside Housing but since I wrote that Michael Gove has been everywhere explaining what it means. Aside from the comedy accents (something I think should be compulsory in all political interviews), it was hard to avoid the number of times he played down the government’s manifesto target of 300,000 new homes by the mid-2020s. ‘We will do everything we can,’ he told the Today programme.
Although he was (in journalistic parlance) ‘slapped down’ by No 10, this was entirely consistent with the Bill and it was blindingly obvious to his predecessor as housing secretary. Speaking in the Commons debate that followed the Queen’s Speech, Robert Jenrick said that the government will miss the 300,000 target ‘by a country mile’. It was Jenrick that proposed a Planning Bill in the 2021 Queen’s Speech that aimed to speed up housebuilding by liberalising the planning system and making it harder to object to new homes and it was Jenrick who lost his job after a backbench Tory rebellion.
By contrast, Gove’s Bill drops the compulsion and attempts to persuade communities to accept development with an emphasis on aesthetics (design codes and street votes) and finance for local services (a reformed infrastructure levy). The impact of these measures depends on the details: a generous interpretation would be that the levy will continue to finance affordable homes and street votes could become a route to gentle densification in the suburbs; an ungenerous one would point out that the levy replaces a Section 106 system that finances up to half of affordable homes and street votes may merely enrich existing owners who want to build loft extensions and landlords who want to convert houses into mega HMOs.
Gove goes to Poundbury
Gove discussed all this in his Sunday Telegraph interview, which (not insignificantly) took place after a visit to Poundbury in Dorset with Prince Charles. The urban extension to Dorchester led by the Prince of Wales appeals to Tories precisely because of its aesthetics, its rejection of modernist architecture and neo-classical masterplan. To Gove, it embodies a mantra he’s dubbed BIDEN – beauty, infrastructure, democracy, environment, neighbourhood.
I’m a frequent visitor to Poundbury because my mum lives there and I’ve become a big fan. Yes, it’s been criticised for its pastiche architecture and artificial feel, but that is to compare it to the existing towns it imitates. Compare it to virtually every new housing development built this century and it wins hands down. It’s walkable, it’s mixed tenure, there’s open space and a good bus service and there are even shops and businesses interspersed with the homes.
But this is no accident. Poundbury did not come about merely because the aesthetics miraculously neutralised local opposition to development. The land identified for housing in the local plan happened to have an owner who wanted to take a stake in the development and turn it into an exemplar rather than make an instant profit. Without the element of compulsion provided by the duty to meet local housing need it may not have happened at all; without Prince Charles taking an interest it would not have happened in the way it did.
As an illustration of this, look what’s happening in the case of another big proposed development nearby. The man pictured talking to Gove on his visit to Poundbury in this story is local Tory MP Chris Loder urging him to review the Dorset local plan to remove plans for 4,000 new homes north of Dorchester.
The point of all this is that it exposes yet again the fault line within the Conservative Party between free marketeers who see new homes as the only way to boost home ownership and their electoral support in the long term and small c conservatives who do not want them in their back yards and know this is the way to appeal to existing home owners in their constituencies in the short term. The climbdown on planning reform in the Queen’s Speech (delivered of course by Prince Charles) is just the latest in a series of political victories for the latter.
Housing, Brexit and Le Pen
Broadly speaking, the academic literature has assumed that home ownership makes people more conservative and more hostile towards welfare state expenditure. In this interpretation, the front-loading of mortgage payments makes home buyers more hostile to higher taxes, while the self-provisioning of housing becomes a form of private insurance for income in later life once the mortgage is paid off. These assumptions underpin much of the reasoning above.
However, there are other ways of thinking about the political impact of the housing question. A special issue of West European Politics in 2020 looked at many of them in detail and it’s worth picking out one in particular.
Adler and Ansell [free to access PDF here] consider the impact of housing on the rise of populism in the UK and France. In their account, ‘the housing market has had a profound impact on the distribution of winners and losers across advanced capitalist economies’. While the traditional links made between house prices and voter preferences work in a ‘first dimension’ of economic and material outcomes, there is also a second, group-based dimension to politics that operates in issues of identity and values. In this account, people in areas that have experienced relative house price deflation over the last couple of decades will be more supportive of populism.
Their empirical analysis looks at the EU membership referendum in the UK in 2016 and the French presidential election in 2017. Controlling for other factors such as the unemployment rate and proportion of voters over 65, they find a significant relationship between areas with lower house prices and support for Brexit and Marine Le Pen. By contrast, areas with higher house prices gravitated away from populism. Their conclusion?
‘Our results suggest that the performance of the housing market not only informs voter preferences over welfare spending, but also shapes voters’ views of the political “establishment” and its overall validity. As housing markets continue to polarise between booming cities with knowledge industries and struggling cities suffering from industrial decline, we should expect the relationship between housing and politics to become even stronger.’
It follows that ‘populism is primarily a politics of place, and place is a product, in part, of the housing market’. This is certainly an interesting way of looking at the results of recent elections, and I’d guessing the same pattern would emerge from analysis of the 2019 general election and 2022 French presidential election. They do not, as far as I can see, consider the impact of lower home ownership in areas with high house prices.
However, If they’re correct, this has important implications for how we consider the results of recent elections in the so-called Red and Blue Walls. If ‘housing markets harden geographical borders’, the politics of place, fuelled by our dysfunctional housing market, has made it significantly harder for mainstream parties to connect with voters across those borders.