'Council tax hike will help houses become homes'

My Northern Agenda guest op-ed

This is a guest op-ed I wrote for The Northern Agenda, which you can read here.

Who will stand for Britain’s young? Because by God, someone has to. The average UK working age person is facing the biggest fall in living standards on record after 15 years of wage stagnation.

Their real income is now predicted to drop 5% by the end of 2023, and the OBR predicts they’ll still be 0.4% below pre-pandemic levels by the end of 2028.

That will coincide nicely with the highest levels of public spending since the 1970s, funded by the biggest tax burden since World War Two. The fall in living standards does not take into account the single biggest living expense, however; housing.

The average house price is now around nine times the average earnings. The last time it was this high was in 1876. Whilst wages have been flatlining, house prices have risen 20% in the last five years. 

As a result of these huge increases home ownership rates are dropping, driven largely by a squeezing of young people out of the market. In 2011, 43% of the 25-to-34 age group were homeowners. Last year it stood at just 24%.

Since nearly half a million social homes have been lost since 2000, these young people are part of an increasingly large cohort who privately rent — but rents are soaring. 

Now more than 1.6m people “are living in dangerously low-quality homes, plagued with cold, damp and mould — and without functioning bathrooms or kitchens”, and there are a further 1.6m people on the social housing waiting list.

Government now spends £23.4bn a year on housing benefit. That’s more than the MoJ, DfT or the Home Office – simply to enable people to live in a housing market that doesn’t function properly. And why doesn’t the market function? It’s Britain’s complete, systemic inability to build enough houses.

This is not a party political problem, but a systemic one. Britain has a 4.2 million home deficit. The government has a target to build 300,000 homes a year, which would clear that backlog in 50 years; but no government has built that many houses since the late 1970s.

The difficulty of increasing supply is that our planning system is unfit to do so; it’s increasingly weaponised by NIMBYs who, by blocking not just housing but green energy, nurseries and cancer care centres, are ‘pressing down on the brow of labor this crown of thorns, this cross of house prices’.

NIMBYs are often characterised as immoral monsters. In fact, I’ve just done it. But just because a point is raised by a NIMBY doesn’t make it a bad one; Increasingly supply is the right – the only - thing to do. But in order to do that we need to allay some of the reasonable concerns that communities raise about new housing. First among them is making sure that houses become homes. 

North Yorkshire has the highest number of second homes in the region, attracted by some of Britain’s most attractive areas: the Moors, the Dales and coastal towns like Whitby, Scarborough and Filey. 

Added to the problem of supply is ownership; why would you be in favour of a new development and the resulting disruption when every time you go for a walk through your village or town, you’re walking past empty homes? 

The importance of fixing the housing problem is clear, but without addressing the demand from second home owners, that would be carrying wood into a burning house. That’s why, as North Yorkshire Council, we’ve voted to increase council tax by 100% on second homes.

Some would argue it’s not a particularly Conservative policy; to them I would say that conservatism is about a lot more than small government and low taxes. In a market that can’t match supply to demand, housing is a zero-sum game; This is a particular problem for the young, as second homes tend to be similar types of property as a first-time house. 

That means a deeply unlevel playing field; a second home-owner is always going to have the buying power to outbid a first-time buyer, which forces people who grew up in places like the Dales to look elsewhere to find homes of their own, outside the communities they grew up in.

For post-liberal conservatives like me, as Adrian Pabst writes, “Individual fulfilment based on personal autonomy has to be balanced with mutual flourishing.” We need active government that’s prepared to rebalance the scales towards mutual flourishing.

That means intervening to ensure a level playing field rather than leaving our residents at the mercy of a market that doesn’t work. It means pricing people into and not out of our communities.

Only planning reform can prevent landbanking, end the monopoly of large housebuilders and give the communities the safety and security of appropriate development. 

But in the meantime we must deliver what we can with the tools we have available. It’s beyond the remit of councillors to deliver that reform. But it is for us to stand up for Britain’s young, and by God it’s time we did.