It is a crunch time for rigids and reeves: either social living space or lose the next choice John Harris

I I got used to a scene that was repeated in completely different places throughout the UK. There will be a construction project near the center of a city or a city that focuses on the delivery of brand new apartments. The air is filled with the sounds of reducing machines; A hastily completed show apartment could give a look at what will come.

I have developed an unexpected addiction to these places and always photographed the hoarding, hide the construction work from passers -by, in which you usually drink ecstatic thirty years of coffee and in high -rise domestic environments (you are normally accompanied by slogans such as “Live, work, relaxation, dream”. And I have expected a kind of encounter that is one of our biggest national problems. Skeptically dealt with what is going on.

At The last count1.3 million households in England were on the waiting lists of the local authority, the highest number since 2014. 164,000 children live in temporary accommodations. Average rent increases in the private sector recently Beat a record high of 9.2%. Figures have just released The home building association has shown the number of new houses in England in the first quarter of 2025 since 2012, which was partly held responsible for the lack of a state support system for first buyers. The market for houses that people can buy remains a synchronous case for exclusion and impossibility. That is why these new apartment blocks are always such a reliable symbol of anger and frustration.

The same trouble has long entered our politics. I can vividly remember fifteen years ago Reporting from the London district of Barking and Dagenham About chronic residential problems through the Mass sale of councilorsAnd the increasingly toxic policy of the region. A 60-year-old owner of a bakery told me about her daughter, who lived with her four-year-old son in a privately rented apartment full of pigeon droppings, which apparently had made him chronically ill. They were on the Council’s waiting list. “But every time,” she told me, “she is like number 200 or 300.”

She and her husband would vote for the neo -fascist British national party. At that time it felt as if what I saw was still on the outside of politics. But nowadays the same essential story has held in the center of the national conversation Reform UKAnd the connection between the real estate crisis and the febrile state of the political mainstream is obvious. It is certainly impossible to grasp the importance of immigration without appreciating the visceral feelings of many people about the scarcity of the houses.

In the inner circles of Keir Starrer’s government, the need must be aware of finally tackling all of this. Some of the right instincts showed themselves in Labor’s promise to monitor the building of 1.5 m new houses in England at the end of this parliament. The Chancellor recently repeated the goal of delivering this “The biggest thrust in social and affordable living space in a generation ”. But what that means and whether something like this is still in doubt.

The clock is loud to the expenditure assessment of this week. Last weekend, the Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, spoke an event of the Progressive Pressure Group Compass and said Rachel Reeves should “unlock public country So that the mayors can build a new generation of councilors – similar to the drive of the post -war government. ” Housing associations have planned With the Chancellor, Social Houses as a critical infrastructure (a category that covers important foods such as food, energy and “data”), which would enable increased financing to fall into their fiscal rules. In the meantime, Angela Rayner-The Minister responsible for residential construction, who is severely connected to the dream of a renaissance of the social housing, seems to be locked up with the Ministry of Finance at the last minute.

Although the budget presented in March contained an additional 2 billion GBP for the government’s affordable homes program in 2026-27 His own advertising material said This was just a deposit [sic] … before long -term investments in social and affordable apartments that are planned this year. ” Rayner reports that the simple fact is urged That the always dubious 1.5 m target is overlooked without much higher financing. We’ll see what happens on Wednesday, but the apartment seems to have fallen out of the government’s news. Lately it seemed that Reeves and strikers think that investments in defense and public transport have a much higher priority than reliable protection.

There is an important point in the core of this problem. Even if Starrer often gives the impression that the answer to the real estate crisis is to eliminate the planning law and to do the work developer, its ring-road-faux-Georgian-Sackgasse does not provide anything like the entire solution. Social housing, which must largely be the responsibility of the councils in the required size, is not only what urgently need millions of British. It must also be revived if the government is to achieve its goals: 1.5 million houses in a single parliament correspond to 300,000 per year. The last time that such a performance materialized 1977about half of all new buildings were delivered by the local authorities.

A new version of this story will not be easy to realize. Dempating councils are not in any state to play the role in an apartment pollution that you need. Great Britain is also confronted with poor construction skills: despite the government’s plans to train 60,000 new construction workers Industry experts are determined That we only build what is necessary with the help of employees from abroad. However, failure should not be an option: it will not only deepen the social decay of this country, but also increase malignant forces on hard law and present a great obstacle to the work that has the chance to win the next election.

In the middle of the competition last year, I went to AldershotThe old garrison city in the center of a constituency that Labor won from the Tories at a swing of 17 points. Large buildings that were once used by generals and majors were full of luxury apartments, and the city center was scattered with empty shops. There I came across a new development called called Union YardWhat was on the way to completion. It contains 128 students “units”, 82 properties for private rent and only 18 classified as “affordable” (which means in harmony with one of the grimest aspects of the politics of the apartment system that they are admitted to no more than 80% of the local market rent), which are set aside for people over 55 years.

Not long before the waiting list for councilors in the surrounding county of Hampshire Had hit 30,000. On a Tuesday afternoon, I sat down with the pictures of the high life that adorned the outer edges of development, and had a long conversation with a woman who was full of sadness and anger. I knew what they would say and it came out quite literally: “For who is? Not me.”