Labour is “staking everything” on using billions of pounds of investment to reverse Britain’s decline, Angela Rayner has said, promising people would feel the housing crisis ease by the end of the parliament.
The UK housing secretary is now in a race to persuade housing associations to take on social housing projects, with nearly £40bn for affordable and social homes to be spent over 10 years, the culmination of lengthy negotiations with the Treasury.
She admitted it was the start of a long road to attract associations under huge financial pressures to invest again in social housing. Many are turning down opportunities from developers when they offer section 106 homes as part of their social housing obligations.
Rayner said it was still unclear whether the majority of the homes would be for social rent. “We’re prioritising social rent,” she said. “Now we’ve got to go away and do some of the work with the social landlords.
“The priority of this government is to significantly increase the amount of social rents that are available because that is a real pressure point. I’ve got 164,000 children in temporary accommodation. You can do the maths on that. That is a hell of a lot so I need a hell of a lot of social homes.”
The housing secretary admitted she had once had significant doubts about the government’s ability to hit its 1.5m homes by the end of the parliament – which she still described as a “stretch target”. It is a pledge that industry experts have suggested cannot be met.
She said: “We know the only time that Britain has built at that sort of level is the post-second world war era and that was with massive amounts of social housing. At the beginning, when we inherited the £22bn black hole, we had meetings and I said: ‘let’s reassess this, are you sure we’re going to be able to do this?’”
Rayner said there had been no cabinet split over the resolve to try to meet it. She said: “They were absolutely clear that we’ve got to at least start to turn the tide on the housing crisis we’ve got.”
But the deputy prime minister said young people in insecure tenancies or on the social housing waiting list would not immediately begin to feel the effects of the investment.
She said: “I think that would be a challenge because there’s 1.4 million people on the social housing list, but what I can guarantee is that we’ll have the biggest wave of social housing and affordable housing in a generation. Yes, we will see an improvement, but I won’t solve the housing crisis that has been over a decade in the making within a couple of years, but I will get us on a very steep trajectory to the solution of it, and it will make a difference to people, this parliament.”
Rayner also promised that allowing social landlords to raise rents by 1 percentage point above inflation for the same period – a key demand of housing providers – should begin to bring improvements in the often abysmal standards of socially rented homes and said the renters’ rights bill should do the same for private tenants.
The minister, who grew up in social housing while raising her son while she was a teenager, said she had recently visited a friend from school in horrendous living conditions.
Rayner said: “She couldn’t use three rooms. It was a private landlord and she was frightened to raise it because the house would get condemned and then she’d not be able to live there with her kids, and the kids went to the local school.
“And she was paying ridiculous [rent]. I mean, she’d switched the kettle on and the washing machine would come on. The electrics were what I would consider to be really dangerous. And so I’m acutely aware that people have got really terrible living standards and they’re too frightened to raise the concern for even low-level repairs that people need.
“They’re really worried about the landlord having more power and then they’ll just throw them out on a no-fault eviction. And that’s why we’ve brought in the renters’ rights [bill] because we want to give people more protection so that they can challenge and get these repairs done.”
after newsletter promotion
Rayner said two-year-old Awaab Ishak, who died because of the mouldy conditions in his council flat, was always on her mind. She said: “We’ve got to do this as a matter of urgency because we’ve already had one young child tragically die because of the living conditions they were in.”
The housing ombudsman said recently that “simmering anger at poor housing conditions” could boil over into social tension. Rayner said she was acutely aware too of the frustration of the younger generation, unable to buy a home or a social tenancy, with costs rising amid a decaying public realm and public services.
“It does worry me,” she said. “This is a generation that has not been given those opportunities, whether that’s through not having the industrial strategy, not having the investment in our public realm and public services.
“We’re doing that downpayment of investment now … whether that’s through the energy transition, which will bring us security as well for our energy needs, whether it’s the defence spending, which again is about security but will create thousands of skilled jobs. The construction industry, which means that those jobs will be available for people.
“It’s a government that’s going to do the hard yards to transform our economic outlook into the future.”
Another cost expected to increase significantly as a result of the spending review is council tax. It is expected to rise by 5% a year to pay for local services, though at councils’ discretion. Councils will receive a 1.1% increase in grant funding, but the spending review assumes spending power for councils would rise by 2.6% because of council tax rises.
For many councils, that small increase will still mean running an austerity-level service, even if billions are being spent on long-term infrastructure. Rayner is a self-described “creature of local government” and said it was the start of a long process of easing the pressures.
But she admitted it would be “challenging” for councils, even with the 5% rise. Rayner said: “I completely understand what the councils have been through during the austerity years and you can’t undo 14 years in 10 months. But we’ve listened and we’re starting to do the recovery phase.”