‘The Housing Crisis Has Spread To Everybody’ , Says Former Boss Of Shelter

[Tony Gosling]

Bristol self-building its way out of the housing crisis

http://www.radio4all.net/index.php/program/90677

‘The Housing Crisis Has Spread To Everybody’, Says Former Boss Of Shelter

http://tlio.org.uk/the-housing-crisis-has-spread-to-everybody-says-former-boss-of-shelter/

<http://tlio.org.uk/the-housing-crisis-has-spread-to-everybody-says-former-boss-of-shelter/http://tlio.org.uk/the-housing-crisis-has-spread-to-everybody-says-former-boss-of-shelter/>27/01/2017 
- Isabelle Fraser – 8 JANUARY 2017

<http://tlio.org.uk/the-housing-crisis-has-spread-to-everybody-says-former-boss-of-shelter/http://www.telegraph.co.uk/property/house-prices/robbthe-housing-crisis-has-spread-everybody/>http://www.telegraph.co.uk/property/house-prices/robbthe-housing-crisis-has-spread-everybody/

 From the roof of the east London office of the 
charity Shelter, you can see the remnants of over 
a century of the capital’s housing policy. Old 
terraced houses, turn of the century estates, 
oppressive Sixties tower blocks, the Modernist 
grandeur of the Barbican, and the knot of skyscrapers in the City beyond.

Years before he became chief executive of 
Shelter, Campbell Robb lived in a Peabody estate, 
much like the one below. Well-built and available 
at affordable rents, these kinds of homes are 
increasingly unavailable for London’s burgeoning 
Generation Rent, which PwC estimated that will 
increase from 40pc in 2000, to 60pc in 2025.

Downstairs in Robb’s office, there is a poster 
with ‘Enough is Enough!’ written in big red 
letters, commissioned for the charity’s 50th 
anniversary this year. Shelter started life 
campaigning for the millions of ‘hidden 
homeless’, who lived in slums; it was the same 
year as Kathy Come Home, Ken Loach’s famous film about homelessness.

It is now a powerful voice calling for ways to 
help solve the housing crisis, and ameliorate 
conditions those renting privately or struggling 
to find anywhere to live. Recent victories 
include the Government’s announcement in the 
Autumn Statement to ban letting fees for tenants; 
the charity continues to campaign for long 
tenancies for renters and runs a helpline for homeless people.

Now, Robb is leaving his post after seven years 
in the top job to head up the Joseph Rowntree 
Foundation. “One of the biggest challenges has 
been
to get enough people to recognise this was a 
housing crisis that was beginning to impact every 
bit of society. People thought it only affected 
certain kinds of people, the very poorest in slum 
conditions that Shelter was founded on,” he says. 
Since he joined, housing has made it way up the 
public’s priority list. When he arrived in 
January 2010, housing came in 18th on Ipsos 
Mori’s survey which finds the “single biggest 
issue” for Britons. In November 2016, it came fifth.

“The reason for that is affordability,” he says. 
The housing crisis “has spread to everywhere. 
It’s not just poor people, or those who are just 
managing, it’s right up there.” The average house 
price in the UK has climbed 29.4pc in the last 
seven years; in London it has soared by 69.6pc, far ahead of wage increases.

As a result, it has become a hot potato. “It’s a 
political issue that has become real for a lot of 
people across the country. Not just in Labour 
seats, but Conservative MPs have people in their 
constituencies who are saying my children can’t 
afford to buy,” he says. “We have a group of 
people who are in their 50s and 60s for the first 
generation since the Second World War, looking at 
their children’s housing prospects, and they are worse than their own.”

Not only is there political pressure coming from 
voters, but also from big companies.

Deloitte and KPMG both bought flats in the 
capital for their graduates to live in, and 
Shelter has teamed up with companies such as 
Starbucks to introduce a rental deposit scheme 
which workers can pay back, interest free.

It could have been even worse, he says. “In the 
last seven years, if interest rates had gone up 
by 2 or 3pc you would have seen a raft of 
repossessions like those in the 80s. You would 
have seen a crisis beyond what we already have. 
So in some ways housing policy has been lucky.”

This affordability crisis has been compounded by 
a “failure of certain policies”, he says, as well 
as the financial crisis and the austerity that 
followed. The previous governments, including New 
Labour and the coalition, all failed to build 
enough and put little focus on the supply side, 
he argues. They all “believed the way to solve 
the housing crisis was on the home ownership and 
on demand side, to effectively make money 
available cheaply through Help to Buy-type 
products, [which enables first-time buyers to 
purchase a home with a 5pc deposit] and less so 
in direct investment in house building.” Help to 
Buy was a crucial policy after the downturn, 
designed to get house builders moving again by 
stimulating demand. But that policy has 
continued, even while house builders are posting record profits once again.

There’s a problem with this model of solving the 
housing crisis, says Robb: “it’s broken”. “With 
the death of public housing and local 
authorities, the private house builders have had 
to carry that weight and they can’t,” he says. 
Part of the problem is due to the land market; 
the high cost of land forces developers to keep 
upping prices and making homes smaller. “You 
can’t criticise them for doing what they were set 
up to do, they are there to maximise profit for 
their shareholders,” he says. “That doesn’t 
necessarily translate into the best housing 
policy for Britain. That’s why you need more 
small builders, more land available – public and 
private – and you need public building”.

With the new Government, the rhetoric has changed 
noticeably. “This is a government that’s got more 
sense of a failed housing market than any of the 
previous ones,” he says. It has become more 
interventionist, even pinching policies from the 
Labour party’s manifesto, as was the case with 
banning letting fees. There is less focus on the 
importance of home ownership, and more money for 
affordable homes and talk of other types of 
housing, such as the private rental sector. Now, 
after seven years, the “house building budget has 
come back to what it was in 2008,” he says. “So we have seen a very big cycle”.

Part of the policy shift is a recognition that 
the market has changed remarkably during that 
time. “Over those seven years there was a massive 
growth of people in the rental sector, and the 
Government is finally catching up with the need to regulate that.”

Another change is the recognition of housing 
being a form of infrastructure, which Robb 
describes as “a big step”. “It’s never done that 
– it’s always separated it from roads and 
transport. They seem to finally recognise that 
investment will be an improvement to the economy 
like other types of infrastructure.”

Small movements and policy tweaks such as these 
are key to making up the deficit of homes that 
must be built, rather than big, sweeping changes, 
he argues. “It would be good if the Government 
had lots of different small things [planned for 
the upcoming housing white paper] because 
actually with a bit of investment, and a bit of 
policy and political will you can make this happen.”

Where others may see as an insurmountable 
challenge, Robb is hopeful about ending the 
housing crisis. “I am optimistic that it can be 
fixed. Having waited seven years, I have a 
government whose public pronouncements
 are more 
nuanced and thought through than many of the 
previous governments’,” he says. With a promising 
Autumn Statement which promised billions to 
affordable housing, and a housing white paper on 
the way, “they may be swallows that don’t make a 
full spring but we can begin to hope that if they 
follow those things through, we might begin to 
see a start
 I’m optimistic until I’m proven otherwise.”

So much emphasis is placed on select Jewish 
participation in Bormann companies that when 
Adolf Eichmann was seized and taken to Tel Aviv 
to stand trial, it produced a shock wave in the 
Jewish and German communities of Buenos Aires. 
Jewish leaders informed the Israeli authorities 
in no uncertain terms that this must never happen 
again because a repetition would permanently 
rupture relations with the Germans of Latin 
America, as well as with the Bormann 
organization, and cut off the flow of Jewish 
money to Israel. It never happened again, and the 
pursuit of Bormann quieted down at the request of 
these Jewish leaders. He is residing in an 
Argentinian safe haven, protected by the most 
efficient German infrastructure in history as 
well as by all those whose prosperity depends on his well-being.
<http://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fspitfirelist.com%2Fbooks%2Fmartin-bormann-nazi-in-exile%2F&h=eAQErj17O>http://spitfirelist.com/books/martin-bormann-nazi-in-exile/   
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