How a city welcomes migrants gives us an insight that allows us to understand the city, as a place of arrival and as a place of inclusion. It can be a framework for analysis and a very human way of understanding the process of migration as it is felt by people, both the newcomers and the longer-standing residents of the city.

This book aims to conceptualise this welcoming process in relation to the city, drawing on academic research, policy and practice. It draws substantially from a seven-year programme of research and knowledge exchange called Inclusive Cities, a network of 12 UK cities that worked with academic researchers to improve their understanding of welcoming and inclusion and translate that research base into policies and practical action at the local level. The programme, developed in the immediate aftermath of the Brexit vote, was co-developed by cities and researchers in response to a perceived gap in city-level practice. City leaders increasingly felt responsibility to support and promote newcomer inclusivity and to respond to risks to community cohesion, but did not feel they had the framework or resources to respond to these challenges. The programme provided a framework for learning between the cities, from the research base and with international peers.

Vision for a welcoming city

Let's imagine arriving as a newcomer in a truly welcoming city. We might find ourselves welcomed by our family and friends or, if we knew no one, by volunteer greeters. At the airport, we might see a campaign telling us that we are welcome here. Someone might point us to the local one-stop shop where we would be able to find the information we need for day one (a map and emergency numbers), but also for our first weeks and months, providing guidance on the customs of our new home as well as practical information in how to get around, enrol our children in school and get medical support. Perhaps, that evening, we receive an invitation for dinner with someone locally and are pointed in the direction of clubs and community centres that can help us to make friends. If we need to learn English, we have the option to learn online, with videos teaching us about our rights in the city, or in person, with community classes, taught by local volunteers, that can also help us make friends. If we are ready to get into work, we receive support from a local major employer or other help to make sure that we can use the skills and assets that we bring, as a doctor or teacher, or we receive support to set up our own business. While we are learning, we have access to resources in our own language to help us get by. The spaces and places of the city have been designed to promote welcoming, thinking about how people from different groups can meet and interact in an easy, convivial way, such as in parent cafes, co-developed housing spaces and museums, including those dedicated to migration.

Our current housing crisis is possibly the most pressing social and political issue today, and rests upon at least 40 years of disastrous decisions taken by the UK government on almost every imaginable strand of housing policy. In the UK today, there appear to be no roadmaps to achieving any clear housing outcomes beyond an array of short- term funding pots for limited objectives (such as tackling the visible symptoms of homelessness or helping first- time buyers onto the housing ladder). Many of these initiatives (as has been demonstrated in the case of the perverse impact of Help to Buy on inflating property prices) operate counter to their stated intentions and in fact worsen the overall situation. Others are simply ineffective and small scale – such as the litany of disconnected short- term funding pots for mitigating the most visible aspects of the huge explosion in street homelessness.

It remains to be said that the UK is not alone in experiencing this crisis. Globally, it is estimated that 1.6 billion people worldwide lack access to adequate housing, expected to rise to three billion by 2030. In a note to the 78th session of the UN General Assembly in 2023, several universal ‘systemic shifts’ were identified at the heart of the global affordability crisis, including:

The loss of Britain's once substantial council housing stock has had huge ramifications across the housing sector, and sits behind so many of the disjunctures we now face within our housing system.

Council and social housing has historically provided three key functions in stabilising the housing market. First, as a counterweight to general rent and house- price inflation, as well as a safe haven of affordability. Second, as a controllable source of accommodation which can be improved, adapted and directed towards the most acute instances of need. Third, as a huge addition to housing delivery and source of new available accommodation (in the absence of councils taking on roles as developers, the private sector has never filled the gap in delivery that we have seen since the 1980s).

The single most important policy towards resolving this country's housing crisis would be unlocking the power of councils (and housing associations) to build council houses at scale once more. With the government's own figures from 2022 to 2023 estimating that 1.29 million households are currently on local authority waiting lists for homes,1 a clear demand for council housing is not being met which will be crucial in resolving our present crisis. In this chapter, we will cover the two major areas required to unlock this potential, and begin building the homes we need at scale once more.

In many areas of the country, the housing crisis is also experienced through pressures on long- standing communities, particularly in areas where high affordability pressure creates ‘gentrification’ (the pricing out of residents and their children from the areas they have lived in throughout most of their lives). Within the UK, these pressures have to date been felt most acutely in the Greater London and Greater Manchester conurbation areas, both areas which are widely celebrated within the development sector as prime examples of successful urban regeneration from post- industrial decline. However, increasingly, in many urban areas pockets of gentrification are occurring and gentrification is also emerging as an issue in rural areas, particularly those seen as tourist destinations with a high demand for holiday properties and short- term rentals.

Any rapid changes to the social and economic composition of an area can create tensions for communities – particularly in the context of residents being ‘priced out’ of housing and amenities. Such impacts are directly counterposed to many strategic intentions of both national and local government housing policies; yet at the same time are exacerbated by the approaches taken to house- building and community regeneration pursued by experts and policy makers. Creating areas of ‘high value’ is a central ambition of many local and national planners, driving investment into new and old building stock, which increases housing numbers, housing quality and improves the public realm and social amenity

What defines a housing crisis?

While political leaders across the spectrum acknowledge that the UK is facing a housing crisis, the precise nature of this crisis is often poorly understood or oversimplified. Much public commentary around the crisis is reactive; the costs of rents and mortgages are increasing, there is a rise in homelessness and homeownership is becoming more difficult. But the solutions to these issues rarely touch upon the underlying causes, and the crisis is rarely addressed in the round – experienced instead as a series of intractable individual policies and questions of resource scarcity. But defining the housing crisis, and placing it within its historical context, is essential in developing effective mitigations and solutions.

At its core, the crisis can be broken down into three fundamental pillars: availability, affordability and quality. Each of these interwoven issues contributes to the growing instability in Britain's housing market, affecting millions of residents nationwide. The UK's current crisis is the result of decades of shifting economic policies, changing demographic patterns and legislative reforms that have shaped the housing landscape.

A crisis of availability

The housing crisis is on one major level a crisis of availability of accommodation to those that would wish to use it, and particularly those for whom alternatives are not an option. The availability crisis in the UK's housing system draws from several spheres; partly, it is a matter of general housing supply and the number of housing units failing to keep change with the combined impact of population growth and changing usage patterns.

From the introduction of Right to Buy in 1980, new council- house building dropped to negligible levels under consecutive governments – but it was not simply the numbers of new council homes which were at issue. Equally as significant to the demise of council houses as the drop in production was a prevailing policy hostility to the delivery of council homes, and an emphasis on moving ownership of these homes out of local councils and towards private individuals and social housing providers.

Not only were millions of homes sold at a huge discount following the introduction of Right to Buy, but millions more were transferred into social housing providers particularly under New Labour. Since, there has been a steady loss of housing from the social housing sector as well as from homes lost through Right to Buy, particularly in the last decade as the funding model for social housing providers has become less reliable and housing associations have been forced to adopt more overtly commercial business models.

Throughout most of this period, political discourse paid little heed to the loss of council and social housing, and a general culture of stigma developed in which council estates were associated with poverty, deprivation and violence. Very little political appetite to build more came either from the Conservative or New Labour administrations in government with numbers of new council houses falling to a nadir under New Labour in 2004 (ONS).

With 38 per cent of the UK's houses built before 1946, the country has the oldest housing stock in Europe, and possibly the oldest housing stock in the world. The UK's first stock condition survey was conducted in 1967 amidst the huge post- war slum clearances and house- building initiatives of that era. The results of that survey were worse than had been expected – of the 40 per cent of the nation's homes at that time which had been built prior to 1919, a quarter had no access to hot water, nearly 20 per cent had no indoor toilet, and 5 per cent required maintenance exceeding £1,000 in value (more than £15,000 in 2024).1 Since then, the UK has held regular housing surveys and, today, has some of the most comprehensive data based on continuous inspections of trained professionals in the world.

The slum clearances and huge house- building programmes of the post-war era paved the way for a gigantic leap forward in the quality of British housing stock, yet in recent years, as new house- building has fallen behind, the country is once again falling behind in standard benchmarks of success. The 2021 Census found that 73.8 per cent of households in England and Wales still used mains gas as their primary source of heating, compared to 23 per cent in Spain, 22 per cent in Ireland and only 17 per cent in Denmark and Greece. Comparatively, the UK competes poorly in floor space (with an average of less than 84 square metres per house) than its European neighbours, and higher heating bills.

It is very easy to be overwhelmed by the levels of dysfunction in the UK's policy and legislative landscape towards housing. The UK's housing crisis is not merely the result of short- term political dysfunction – it is the culmination of decades of policy missteps, ideological shifts and an erosion of the post- war housing settlement which still provides our general benchmark for ‘normality’.

At the heart of this failure lies a lack of appreciation for the innovative policy solutions employed in that era which generated such a period of relative availability, affordability and increasing quality of housing. Between 1945 and the late 1970s, housing policy was guided by an integrated national vision connecting economic growth, public health and planning. Prior to this period, housing had never been affordable for most, nor good quality (with different conceptions of ‘availability’ in different historical epochs). For the first time, the average person on an average income could reliably and feasibly attain a house which met the contemporary standards in quality and decency, leading to a long- term and sustained increase in owner- occupation and the near historic obsolescence of age- old problems such as homelessness and rough sleeping. The kernel of this success was a system that prioritised large- scale social housing construction, state intervention to assure affordability, strict regulations enforcing housing quality and the construction of huge numbers of housing units, and one which restricted the availability of inflationary investments and credit.

This book is the product of nearly a decade of work and thinking on housing policy, from the perspective of a Local Government Political Advisor to the City of Salford's elected Mayor, Paul Dennett. As Paul's advisor, I worked closely with him as a researcher, organiser and confidante while he held several political portfolios within the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, in particular his five- year stint as political lead for Planning, Housing and Homelessness. Through this time, I also worked closely with local government officers and civil servants at the coal face of delivering practical solutions for the housing crisis engulfing our country, dealing closely with the limitations of budgets, the imposition of politics and the absurdities of legislation in the attempt to deliver meaningful change for Greater Manchester's residents. The content of this book is borne largely from this experience, and the struggle of delivering practical policy solutions on housing for Salford and Greater Manchester residents. That, and the kindly imparted wisdom of some of my esteemed and dedicated colleagues, many of whom have worked for decades within the world of housing policy and delivery.

The main part of this book provides a fairly contemporary assessment of the present state of UK housing policy. Wherever possible, I have utilised the most up to date instances of government documentation, legislation, national datasets and political commentary to contextualise my historical assessments and predictions for the evolution of both the UK's housing crisis, and our policy response. Much of the material is very current.

According to government figures, rough sleeping has almost trebled since 2010 – numbers which shocked many British people as huge numbers swelled on pavements and in alleyways, with new tent cities springing up across the country. A decade on from the explosion in numbers, rough sleeping now has an established presence in the streetscene of Britain's major cities and has initiated a national debate on the crisis – and how to deal with it.

But the problem of homelessness goes beyond rough sleeping. The Local Government Association believes that there has been a 430 per cent increase in the use of temporary accommodation by councils since 2010, with 10,510 households across the country currently being put up in B&Bs, and over 95,000 people living in temporary accommodation of all kinds across the country. In March 2024, the News Agents reported that this figure could be under- reported, with claims that 140,000 children alone are currently living in temporary accommodation. Following a shocking investigation conducted by Dan Hewitt of ITV News which uncovered widespread homelessness among pupils, The News Agents interviewed Daniel Moynihan, the chief executive officer of the Harris Academy of London- based school academies, the reality of temporary accommodation for these children is articulated in horrendous detail. Of temporary accommodation, Moynihan states:

Tenancy in the private rented sector (PRS) is the fastest growing form of household habitation in the UK, with as many as 9– 10 million people and the number of PRS households doubling since the year 2000.

It seems like an expanded PRS is the likely immediate and medium- term future for housing in the UK, and increasing numbers of British residents will expect to spend their entire lives in PRS. Given this is the case, currently there are startlingly few policy controls, levers and regulations to protect the rights of tenants, or to maintain the condition of properties (or upgrade them to net- zero standards).

Prior to the 1988 Housing Act, the UK's PRS was subject to substantially more regulation than exists today. From 1915 and the introduction of the Rent and Mortgage Interest (War Restrictions) Act, varying degrees of rent controls and limitations on landlords right to evict tenants were embedded in legal statute. From 1945 onwards, these controls were increased, with the ‘Protection from Eviction Act’ in 1964 establishing universal protection from eviction for all tenants, and the concept of property valuation into the setting of rents, assessing acceptable rent levels on the basis of the state of the property. These protections lasted until the creation of the Assured Shorthold Tenancy under the 1988 Housing Act.

The period from 1964 to 1988 correlated with the period of the greatest improvements in housing standards in recorded history, alongside the period of the most affordable accommodation.

Encouraging homeownership was a flagship standard of the Conservative government since its election as part of the Coalition government in 2010. In that year, Housing Minister Grant Shapps said:

The Government are committed to helping those who aspire to own their own home. … The coalition agreement included a commitment to promote shared ownership. While grant funding under the new investment model for affordable housing announced in the spending review will primarily target the new affordable rented product, there may be some scope for delivery of low- cost home ownership as part of the contractual arrangements with providers where this is appropriate for local circumstances.

Further measures were introduced in the 2013 budget to assist first- time buyers, including Help to Buy – and in 2015, then Prime Minister David Cameron announced the Conservative Party's intentions to create a ‘property owning democracy’ and announced a raft of initiatives and investments to help first- time buyers onto the property ladder. The agenda has been central to Conservative messaging on housing ever since, under the premierships of Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak. But despite this, rates of homeownership have been declining now for the past two decades. The 2021 Census reported that 62.5 per cent of UK residents owned their own homes either outright or via a mortgage, down from a high of 70.9 per cent in 2003.

Since the post- war era, Britons have experienced a major shift in their expectations of the proportion of income they should expect to pay for their accommodation. At the turn of the 20th century, an average Briton could expect to pay out around 50 per cent of their income in rent.1 By the late 1960s, this figure had fallen as low as 9 per cent.2 Today, measures of housing affordability tend to estimate approximately 30 per cent of income on housing costs as the ‘affordability threshold’ for an average person or household before housing costs become a major driver of poverty and deprivation. With rents making up an average of 34 per cent of a UK renter's income today (and as high as 39.8 per cent in London3), affordability is clearly becoming a key problem in today's housing market.4

While affordability of accommodation by pre- war standards remains normal in the UK, it is clear that in the past three decades living expenses across all tenures have increased substantially as a proportion of incomes, and this trend is anticipated to continue. In this chapter, we will interrogate the different aspects of affordability and the main drivers behind the worsening relationship of incomes to housing costs for UK residents.

Homeownership

A huge element of our contemporary discussion on the housing crisis relates to the ability of our next generation to access the housing ladder. Homeownership remains by far and away the central housing aspiration for most British people, and is widely seen as the most desirable housing situation.