Because she has my best interests at heart, my wife has put a tenner on a porno property lottery. Right now, that tenner buys me a chance of winning a £2.5mn cliff-front creation in Kent. But what chance? Well, assuming the lottery breaks even and no-one spends more than a tenner, my chances are about one in 250,000. I’m not holding my breath.
If I had a housing problem, this would not be the solution.
And so to council housing. A month ago, I emailed the Dept for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (D-LUHC) asking for council house waiting list data, and now they have replied. As of 2021, there were 1,188,762 households on council house waiting lists.
We can put that in context: 1.188mn households on the waiting list, but the total number of council-house lets is running at 80.5k. So the waiting list is a record 14.2x the number of council-house lets.
But how many new council-house lets are offered each year ? In 2020/21 only 47.8k new council house lets were made. So the waiting list is equivalent to 24.9x the number of new lets being made. To put it another way, if you’re on the waiting list, you can expect to be there for 25 years. Better get your name down in your teens. Or, like Eton, get the lad’s name down at birth.
The deterioration in council-house availability has been vertiginous. Since the turn of the century, the number of council-house lets has fallen 75%, and the number of new lets by 78%. In 2000, waiting lists were equivalent to a breezy 3.2 years of lets, and 4.7 years of new lets. If you were on the list, you had a chance.
London has the largest problem, with 296k on the waiting list: including Newham 31.9k, Lambeth 30.9k, Brent 24k, Tower Hamlets 21.2k and Greenwich 19.1k. Still, with a population of 9.54mn, that 296k waiting list represents only 3.1% of the population. This proportion is slightly lower than the average of 3.4% waiting list/population for the top 10 waiting lists.
Here’s the top 10.
It’s impossible to ignore how prominent Yorkshire is in this list. In particular, the problems for Wakefield (7.8%), Leeds (4.6%) and Bradford (3.9%) are among the worst in the country, with Sheffield (2.9%) in the mix as well. The comparison with the worst Lancashire has to offer is stark: Liverpool at only 1.7%, Manchester at only 0.5%.
If council house waiting lists are a good proxy for the intensity of Britain’s housing problem, then they tell us where the SDP’s new housing policy (local development corporations able to cut through planning restrictions, and financed by 50% of the ‘planning uplift’) should be initially focussed.
For now, however, essentially no new council houses are being built. Data collected by Admiral Home Insurance found that 89% of councils completed no new council houses last year up to 3Q21, with only 9% even starting. Yorkshire and Humber, where the waiting lists/population are the longest managed to build, er, zero council houses in 2021. Zero. The most active council-house builder was Newcastle, which completed 160 new houses - they take the palm, although those completions represent only 3% of the city’s 5.71k waiting list.
What this data reveals is unambiguous: as far as Britain’s housing supply crisis is concerned, all levels of Britain’s government have dismissed council housing as of any relevance. Council house waiting lists offer false hope. If you’re on a waiting list, your chances would scarcely be worse if you entered the lottery.
If councils and those who are elected to them still claim to have a concern about housing, they are pretending. In practice, councils have abdicated from that responsibility, and have not the will, imagination, finance or interest in picking it up. If we want to address the issue (and do we, really?), then councils must be elbowed aside, and new structures, new personnel tasked with the job. As so often, it is the SDP - frustrated and powerless as we are - which has imagined better.
Michael Taylor / Coldwater Economics / Coldwater Economics Substack