Britain’s Housing Crisis is powered by rage. It is a long time since I have seen a documentary so nakedly angry, so clear in its point of view and unabashed about standing by it. Which is not to say it is unbalanced. The makers’ fury has made it meticulous in the use of governmental and other sources to explain policies – along with the thinking behind decisions whose detrimental effects are predicted and attested to by activists and workers from charities such as Shelter. If the subject were not people being made homeless by underinvestment in social housing and mismanagement of the property market by successive governments, plus the greed and corruption of some housebuilders, you would be tempted to buy popcorn and settle down to enjoy the cathartic rush.
As it is, the two-part film will have you nodding in bitter recollection before that gives way to open-mouthed incredulity. By the end of the second hour (which covers the right-to-buy bill, the leasehold homes scandal and assorted other measures of venality by the various powers who hold the happiness of ordinary people in their grasping hands), your head will be bowed in despair.
It begins with a quick trot through the various promises made to make home ownership available to all, the cheap borrowing, the late 90s’ property price boom and the rapid evolution of houses from somewhere to make a home and nurture a family to assets to be traded for profit like any other.
The episode then slows down to walk us through the consequences of this shift: the concentration of houses into fewer hands as a new rentier class was born, the ever-increasing prices and the gulf it opened up between ordinary wages and their ability to fund what had once been the reasonable ambition of owning your own home. With so many forced to rent, rental prices shot up. And when people were unable to rent, the pressure on social housing provision increased.
The programme details the chronology, the causes and effects neatly and accessibly, taking in the 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent effects of the quantitative easing that was triggered in response, partly to protect homeowners from a property price crash. It keeps figures to a minimum but they are always well chosen. The graphic showing house price rises whizzing up not just year by year but quarter to quarter on an electricity meter-like counter nicely underlines the points being made.
A lot of information is beautifully marshalled and effectively delivered (though I do always think anything Michael Gove pops up in should come with a warning before the credits), but two elements mark the film out. First is its commitment to drawing out the interconnectedness of all parts of the market and the ramifications of each government policy on various demographics, and its emphasis on that under-acknowledged factor/villain (delete according to taste, tax bracket or number of properties owned), housebuilders. Their part in the crisis, via land banking, slow building to maximise profits, appalling substandard work when they do get around to building anything, and the aforementioned leasehold homes scandal is heavily scrutinised.
The second element is the show’s willingness to pull back and look at issues from a wider perspective. The Battersea regeneration project, for example (whose original 636 affordable homes pledged by the private consortium that bought the site were reduced to 386, with 250 of those left to be built when it becomes “financially viable”) is a study in the unsuitability of private sector solutions to a public housing crisis. And it digs deeper still, giving time and space to several activists to make the point that the only way most matters to do with the property market and social housing make sense is if you posit that the Conservative party (in particular) has no real interest in creating a level playing field, no desire to reverse the trend that allows very few people to become very rich at the expense of the taxpaying masses and no belief that it is the state’s job to provide housing at all.
It is fine, furious work. Now, what are we going to do?
Britain’s Housing Crisis was on BBC Two and is now on BBC iPlayer
