Recorded at the Battle of Ideas festival 2025 on Sunday 19 October at Church House, Westminster.
ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION
Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner made housing a central pillar of their domestic agenda when they were elected. Yet from two disgraced housing ministers to younger generations’ desperation about astronomical rents and unaffordable property prices, housing controversies are rarely far from the headlines.
The government’s rhetoric remains impressive. Rayner, the former housing secretary, put forward the Social and Affordable Homes plan, to deliver 300,000 new homes, with ‘180,000 earmarked for social rent’ and claims Labour will ‘build, build, build’ – even on the sacred green belt. But despite the promise to deliver 1.5million new homes in England over the five-year parliamentary term, evidence suggests a disappointing failure to get even close to meeting their own housing targets – just like previous governments. So, we seem, yet again, to be stuck in a rut of not enough homes for those who need them.
UK housing has been in crisis for a long time. For years, demand has overwhelmed supply, and both rents and mortgages continue to climb. The Office for National Statistics’ private rents index shows that renting in England is now 50 per cent more expensive than 14 years ago. London’s 2.7million private tenants saw their rents rise by 11.5 per cent in 2024 alone.
Some still blame Margaret Thatcher’s 1980s housing reforms: the right to buy was sold as a pathway to homeownership and social mobility, but instead led to a decline in social housing and made private landlords rich. One think tank has claimed the policy cost taxpayers £200 billion.
However, in Bricking it: The UK Housing Crisis and the Failure of Policy, Charlie Winstanley argues that while the significant economic and social changes under Thatcher shaped the housing landscape today, there are much wider demographic, social policy, financial and industrial shifts that have accumulated to create such an unstable housing situation.
A huge increase in migration has also become part of the debate. Is the problem more about too many people rather than too few houses? Meanwhile, shadowy plans to turn residential properties into homes of multiple occupancy (HMOs) to replace asylum hotels add to a sense of grievance, shifting the problem to residential areas without consulting locals.
Other factors have created an escalating sense of crisis: eye-watering service charges and ground rent for leaseholders; landlords complaining that Renters’ Rights legislation will mean taking properties off the market; politicians pandering to NIMBY voters; labyrinthine planning laws.
Is the government going about its housing strategy in the wrong way? How can we solve the housing crisis?
SPEAKERS
James Heartfield
lecturer and writer; author, Britain’s Empires 1600-2020 and Let's Build!
Helen MacNeil
consultant architect, shedkm; founder, Honest Architecture (HA!) free-speech dinners
Matthew Torbitt
political commentator and writer; senior fellow, The Centre for Social Justice
Charlie Winstanley
author, Bricking it: The UK Housing Crisis and the Failure of Policy; public affairs & social policy development professional
CHAIR
Sheila Lewis
retired consultant; former housing association chair
