OLDHAM SHOWS SOCIAL HOUSING IS THE MOST NEGLECTED ISSUE TODAY
Today’s news that court applications in Oldham for repossession are now 31% higher than a year ago pinpoint the savagery of the deepening recession. Not all of these applications will of course lead to eviction, but it is likely that at least half will. And then there is nowhere else to go. Oldham Council already has 12,000 households on the waiting list, which compares today with its total housing stock of 12,500. A third of all those who come to my constituency surgeries are desperately searching for housing, often telling the most heart-breaking stories and saying that I am their last resort. It is agonising having to explain that the options available are so appallingly restricted.
Oldham, like so many other towns, has built hardly any houses since the mid-1980s. Last year however it did build 69 social housing units, but in the same year it was also obliged to sell off 250 houses under the Right to Buy and a further 300 were also demolished. So there was still a net loss of nearly 500.
Worse, the quality of Oldham’s social housing continues to slip steadily. The Council/ALMO needs an additional £9 million a year, over and above the Housing Revenue Account flow of revenues, to maintain homes brought up to the Decent Homes standard (a minimum standard that refers only to the external structure, roof, windows and insulation, not to the kitchen, bathroom or environment). The Housing Options review of all Oldham Council’s properties just completed revealed that on average £8,500 was required per property simply to bring them up to an adequate standard, at a total cost of some £100 millions To bring them up to a good standard would cost £11,000 per property (total cost £130 millions). And as a comparison, the PFI sheltered housing scheme in Oldham is providing £80,000 per property in order to modernise to a high standard.
So what should be done? The root of the problem is that Government expenditure on social housing nationally has plummeted from 6.1% of GDP in 1981 to 1.6% in 2005. What this means is that if the Government today were spending the same proportion of GDP on social housing as it was in the late 1970s, it would be spending no less than £22bn extra on housing for low-income families. In 1990, even at the end of Thatcher’s premiership, Britain was still building 13,000 Council houses a year. Last year it was just 200! New Labour has been as ideologically indifferent, or even more hostile, than Thatcher to the public rented sector. The inevitable result has been the misery and deprivation and anger spilling out at every surgery I hold in Oldham.
What is needed is a major national switch of resources back into housing, with the emphasis heavily targeted on building more and better social housing. Local Authority and Housing Association housing uniquely caters for about a quarter of the population, and the objectives in terms of adequate supply and high standards should match the owner-occupied sector. Nor is this a pipe-dream when what is chiefly needed in a severe economic downturn like this one is a major increase in public works, and house-building is the prime candidate for this role both because it meets a desperate social need and because it has a widespread multiplier effect in generating activity across the whole economy.

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