The acute social housing crisis and what Scotland can teach us

Suzanne Moore got everything else right about the housing crisis but left out land (I’m on the housing ladder but I can’t cheer the rising prices, Journal, 22 February). Throughout the UK, truly affordable council housing was built on public land. The price of borrowing to build and maintain council estates and their communities was recovered over, say, 50 years by low earners paying low rents, which did not include the ever-increasing value of land. Councils are now using the high value of public land to finance developers to demolish council estates and build private housing, which council tenants cannot afford. Hence the 79% increase in homeless families in England to 86,000, including 127,000 children since 2010, some for up to and over 10 years, 1.1 million households on council waiting lists and 4,700 single adults sleeping rough each night.

The New Economics Foundation recently reported that the government sold enough public land for developers to build 131,000 homes, but only 2.6% will be for social rent. There is an urgent need for legislation that forbids the sale of public land and requires it to be used for affordable social housing.
Rev Paul Nicolson
Taxpayers Against Poverty

• Suzanne Moore is right that rising house prices are no cause for celebration, but wrong that “not enough houses are being built”. With housebuilding almost exclusively in the hands of major developers, they will be sure not to flood the market to the extent that prices come down.

There is no lack of units, but acute maldistribution and affordability issues. Research shows there is no absolute shortage of housing; there is overconsumption by the wealthy, many of them non-doms, using our housing stock as investments and pieds-à-terre.

Even at the height of public housebuilding, stock was replaced at a rate of just 2% per year. Our homes are the least energy-efficient in Europe, but the weighting of 20% VAT against the zero rating of new housing is a disincentive to pursuing the “refurbishment first” agenda favoured by the architectural profession as environmentally responsible.

Lessons might be learned from Scotland, where right to buy was scrapped in 2016 and, since 2017, the rights of private tenants have been protected with an end to fixed-term rentals, meaning leases are effectively open-ended, rents can only be increased every 12 months and tenants who believe them to be unfair can refer them to a rent officer. Also, under Scottish law, local authorities are able to levy double council tax on properties that are vacant for more than six months.
Kate Macintosh
Winchester

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