‘Consider Margaret Thatcher’s premiership as ground zero for the mess we are in now’: The British Housing Crisis in Non-Fiction

The UK is in the midst of a housing crisis that is causing hardship for millions of Britons. Over the past few years, the worsening situation has been reflected in the market for non-fiction books. In a small bookshop in north London, I counted more than half a dozen new titles dealing with the housing crisis —and a more systematic search brings the number up to at least fifteen published in the last five years. How do these books explain the crisis? In what follows, I would like to take a close look from a historian’s point of view. To what extent are these accounts informed by the contemporary history of housing and housing policy? I am not attempting a comprehensive collective review, but I would like to consider the following non-fiction books: Nick Gallent’s Whose Housing Crisis? and Liam Halligan’s Home Truths (both 2019), Bob Colenutt’s book on The Hidden Reality Behind the Housing Crisis (2020), the award-winning Tenants by Vicky Spratt (2022), A Home of One’s Own by Hashi Mohamed (2022), and All The Houses I’ve Ever Lived In by Kieran Yates (2023). This selection takes in books from very different backgrounds, including those by journalists and social scientists, but also by activists and people affected by the situation, whose books resemble memoirs. This not only reveals the breadth of the debate and its broad political horizon. Since none of the books eschews a historical perspective, the selection also makes visible a widespread understanding of the neoliberal history of recent decades and its strengths and weaknesses in explaining the present.

‘Consider Margaret Thatcher’s premiership as ground zero for the mess we are in now’. This succinctly sums up the basic consensus on which all the authors can agree: that the current problems in the housing markets are rooted in the 1980s and have a lot to do with Margaret Thatcher’s policies. This sentence, which is hard to beat in terms of clarity, comes from Vicky Spratt’s Tenants.¹ Spratt sees the ‘ground zero’ for today’s lack of affordable housing, for exorbitant price increases and displacement, mainly in two laws passed by the Tory government that came into power in 1979: the ‘Right to Buy’ of 1980 and the extensive deregulation of the housing market that followed the Housing Act of 1988. The former triggered the privatization of council housing, was tantamount to a sell-off, and at the same time heralded the end of state housing. And since 1988, Spratt argues, landlords have been free to do as they please, as the Housing Act ended the Fair Rent System by introducing the Assured Shorthold Tenancy with its infamous Section 21, which up until today allows terminations without giving cause. In her view, the combination of the two laws has had a particularly disastrous effect: not only has the ‘Right to Buy’ decimated the stock of affordable housing, but a large proportion of the local authority homes sold to tenants ended up in the portfolios of large housing companies within a few years—and thus in the deregulated private rental market.

Spratt’s much-praised book not only tells the political history of the crisis but skilfully interweaves her description and analysis with the stories of individuals, the ‘People on the Frontline’. Kieran Yates and Hashi Mohamed take a similar approach to telling the story of, as Yates puts it in the subtitle of her book, the ‘system that fails us’; in both cases it is their own ‘housing biography’ that is at the centre. Of all these books, Yates’ is the most personal. In All The Houses I’ve Ever Lived In, she unfurls an oppressive panorama that also has a historical depth of focus. For example, Yates, a freelance journalist, describes her childhood in the 1990s on the Green Man Lane Estate in West Ealing, London, which was built in the 1970s but had been left to decay. At times, Yates’ book reads like the biography of an entire generation that has been particularly affected by the current crisis, having grown up in a housing market marked by Thatcherite ‘flexibility’.

This generation features in almost all the books. Characteristically for the British debate, it is referred to simply as ‘generation rent’. Hashi Mohamed also belongs to it. A Kenyan refugee who came to England with his siblings in 1993, Mohamed, like Yates, grew up in the new reality of housing instability between council housing and private renting. Now a lawyer, he has managed to become a homeowner. A Home of One’s Own starts off with the story of this journey, the end point of which is out of reach for the vast majority of younger Britons, given the dizzying rise in house prices since the 1990s. However, the pursuit of home ownership, which following Mohamed is firmly anchored in the British ‘psyche’, is also problematized in the book. For Mohamed too: ‘Beginning with 1979, we let the genie out of the bottle.’² However, he is concerned with more than just housing policy, arguing that it only had such a serious impact because Conservative governments simultaneously created a broad low-wage sector and unleashed the financial markets, while losing sight of the concrete living conditions of the majority of society.

Despite this broader perspective, politics plays first fiddle for Mohamed too. For Bob Colenutt, Nick Gallent, and Liam Halligan, the emphasis is different. They agree that privatization and deregulation have indeed been far-reaching, creating a fundamental ‘market dependency’. However, they place greater emphasis on the dynamic role of the housing industry and housing markets since the 1980s. Accordingly, the current housing crisis has its own economic history. For Colenutt, a social scientist, the question of blame is clear: his book is called The Property Lobby, and in it he meticulously analyses the interests and strategies of landowners and volume builders. His historical references are blurred. What is clear, however, is that the ‘finance–housebuilding complex’ was already firmly in the saddle before the financial crisis of 2008. According to Colenutt, the oligopoly of the large housebuilders emerged from a process of concentration closely linked to the ‘takeover of the housing market’ by the City of London and speculation in the twenty years before the millennium.³

This financialization of housing is at the heart of Gallent’s Whose Housing Crisis? The geographer is strongly inspired by neo-Marxism and interprets recent economic history accordingly on the basis of an ‘over-accumulation’ crisis in the 1970s. In Gallent’s view, it was primarily because the returns from the ‘productive industries’ fell that capital sought new, more profitable investment opportunities—and found them in ‘real estate’ and ‘property’. For Gallent, this ‘capital switch’ marked the beginning of a fundamental change in the function of housing in the last third of the twentieth century. Whereas flats and houses had previously been primarily ‘homes’, the economic function of housing was now increasingly replacing its social function: ‘homes’ were becoming ‘assets’.⁴ This process, he argues, really took off in the UK in the mid 1980s, when the Financial Services Act permitted the securitization of mortgages. Since then, growth in property values and rising rents have become increasingly important for the economy as a whole.

Liam Halligan agrees that the main problem is the seemingly unstoppable rise in prices. But for the economist and former fund manager, his Home Truths are not primarily about the financial markets. His main concern is the question of ‘access to reasonably priced land’ and, like Colenutt, he places overbearing volume builders at the centre of his explanation of the housing crisis.⁵ Since the Land Compensation Act of 1961 scrapped a more or less efficient system of ‘land value capture’, land banking has become a profitable strategy for companies such as Barratt: they buy up large portfolios of land, but do not build on them; instead, they speculate on rising prices. Together with the sell-off of social housing over the past four decades, this has contributed significantly to today’s undersupply of affordable housing.

Taken together, the six books provide a detailed picture not only of the British housing crisis, but also of how it came about. In their search for causes and explanations, none of the authors hesitate to reach far back into contemporary history. This is not surprising. But it is also not self-evident, given the logic of the non-fiction market and the short-term diagnoses that sell particularly well on it. Indeed, the very term ‘crisis’ suggests a short time horizon. However, unimpressed by such objections, the authors place the current housing shortage in the context of British history over the last forty years—and thus in the era of neoliberalism. Its beginnings in the UK were closely linked to the Thatcher years. However, I also read the more economic books as arguing that the history of neoliberal housing policy should not limit its focus to the ‘Iron Lady’. At the same time, even they—with good reason —cannot help but address the game-changing Conservative policies since the 1980s.

The books by Colenutt, Gallent, and Halligan illustrate particularly clearly something that surprised me overall: all six books are decidedly critical of capitalism. Halligan’s Home Truths and his criticism of the ‘volume builders’ who exploited their market power are particularly striking. Halligan is a liberal conservative commentator who now works for GB News. So, across all camps the political message is that capitalism, the market, and housing are not working; history teaches us this and we experience it every day. Ironically, this also makes it painfully obvious what is almost completely absent from all the accounts: the historical critique of capitalism itself. The books describe the end of the post-war social democratic consensus on the housing issue—and Labour and the Left are only mentioned in passing. Why was social democracy—potentially the most powerful force in the critique of capitalism, or at least the strongest advocate of state-controlled capitalism—unable to counter these problems? The New Labour governments are not omitted; but the authors clearly struggle to explain their policies and sobering record in housing.

I believe this is not a minor point of criticism. It points to a larger problem. Even if the history of neoliberal housing policy presented in these books is by no means told as an airy history of ideas far removed from historical and political reality, neoliberalism itself comes across as peculiarly ahistorical. It is not made historically plausible; it is not explained as a development with a history of its own, but basically appears as a plague that ‘somehow’ infected the country. This is also a problem for a contemporary history of today’s housing crisis, for how can we learn from it if we do not understand where the phenomenon that needs to be overcome derived its persuasive power? What I am talking about is not so much neoliberal policy itself but the broad societal acceptance of it. This can only be explained by also looking at the concrete problems of the post-war consensus that severely undermined its legitimacy. In housing, for example, these included paternalistic management and racist allocation practices. I would place only limited responsibility for this shortcoming on the non-fiction literature; after all, historical and social science research on neoliberalism have only just begun to seriously discuss these themes. The escalating situation in housing described in all the books reviewed suggests it is high time for this debate.

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Feature Image: Redevelopment area in Elephant and Castle, London. Photo by Flemming Falz.

1. Vicky Spratt, Tenants: The People on the Frontline of Britain’s Housing Emergency (London, 2022), quotation at 31. [↩]
2. Hashi Mohamed, A Home of One’s Own (London, 2022), 96. [↩]
3. Bob Colenutt, The Property Lobby: The Hidden Reality Behind the Housing Crisis (Bristol 2020), 1, 27, 53. [↩]
4. Nick Gallent, Whose Housing Crisis? Assets and Homes in a Changing Economy (Bristol, 2019), 4, 69. [↩]
5. Liam Halligan, Home Truths: The UK’s Chronic Housing Shortage—How It Happened, Why It Matters and the Way to Solve It (Hull, 2019), xxii. [↩]

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