Ihave got used to a scene that has been repeated in wildly different places all over the UK. Close to the centre of a town or city, there will be a construction project, centred on the delivery of brand new apartments. The air will be filled with the loud clanking of machinery; a hastily finished show flat might offer a glimpse of what is to come.
I have developed an unexpected addiction to these places, always photographing the hoardings that hide building work from passersby, which usually feature ecstatic thirtysomethings drinking coffee and relaxing in upmarket domestic environments (they are usually accompanied by slogans like “live, work, relax, dream”). And I have come to expect a kind of encounter that goes straight to the heart of one of our biggest national problems. Up will walk a member of the public, looking sceptically at what is under way. Their words may vary but the basic message is always the same: “Who’s this for? Not me.”
Atthe last count, 1.3m households in England were on local authority housing waiting lists, the highest figure since 2014. About164,000 childrenlive in temporary accommodation. Average rent increases in the private sector recentlyhit a record highof 9.2%.Figures just releasedby the Home Builders Federation show that the number of new homes given planning consent in England in the first quarter of 2025 was the lowest since 2012, something partly blamed on the absence of any government support scheme for first-time buyers. The market for homes people can buy remains a byword for exclusion and impossibility, which is why those new apartment blocks are always such a dependable symbol of fury and frustration.
The same anger has long since seeped into our politics. Fifteen years ago, I can vividly recallreporting from the London borough of Barking and Dagenhamabout chronic housing problems caused by themass sell-off of council houses, and the area’s increasingly toxic politics. 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 flat full of pigeon droppings that had apparently made him chronically ill. They were on the council waiting list. “But every time,” she told me, “she’s, like, number 200 or 300.”
She and her husband, she said, were going to vote for the neo-fascist British National party. At the time, it felt as if what I was seeing still sat at the outer edge of politics. But these days, the same essential story has taken up residence at the heart of the national conversation: the BNP has been chased into irrelevance and protest votes now go en masse toReform UK, and the connection between the housing crisis and the febrile state of the political mainstream is obvious. Certainly, it’s impossible to grasp the salience of immigration without appreciating many people’s visceral feelings about the scarcity of homes.
In the inner circles of Keir Starmer’s government, there must be voices keenly aware of the need to finally tackle all this. Some of the right instincts were evident in Labour’s promise to oversee the building of1.5m new homesin England by the end of this parliament. The chancellor has recently reiterated the aim of delivering the“biggest boostin social and affordable housing in a generation”. But what that means and whether any such thing is on its way are still clouded in doubt.
The clock is loudly ticking down to this week’s spending review. Last weekend, the Greater Manchester mayor, Andy Burnham, addressed an event put on by the progressive pressure group Compass, and said Rachel Reeves should “unlock public landfor mayors to use to build a new generation of council homes at pace – akin to the drive of the postwar Labour government”.Housing associations have pleadedwith the chancellor to reclassify social homes as critical infrastructure (a category that covers such essentials as food, energy and “data”), which would allow increased funding to fall within her fiscal rules.Meanwhile, Angela Rayner – the minister in charge of housing, who is said to be fiercely attached to the dream of a social housing renaissance – is seemingly locked in intense last-minute negotiations with the Treasury.
Although the budget unveiled in March contained an extra £2bn for the government’s affordable homes programme in 2026-27,its own publicity material saidthis was merely “a down payment [sic] … ahead of more long-term investment in social and affordable housing planned this year”.Rayner is reportedly pushing the plain factthat the ever-more doubtful 1.5m target will be missed without much higher funding. We will see what happens on Wednesday, but housing seems to have fallen out of the government’s messaging. Of late, it has seemed that Reeves and Starmer think investments in defence and public transport are a much higher priority than dependable shelter.
There is a vital point at the core of this issue. Even if Starmer has often given the impression that the answer to the housing crisis lies in clearing away planning law and letting corporate developers do the work, their ring-road faux-Georgian cul-de-sacs will not provide anything like the entirety of the solution. Social housing – which, at the scale required, needs to be largely the responsibility of councils – is not just what millions of British people need as a matter of urgency; it will also have to be hugely revived if the government is to meet its aims: 1.5m homes in a single parliament equates to 300,000 a year. The last time such a feat materialised wasin 1977, when about half of all new-builds were delivered by local authorities.
A new version of that story will not be easy to realise. Threadbare councils are in no state to play the role in a housing revival that they need to. The UK is also faced with a dire construction skills crisis: despite the government’s plans to train 60,000 new construction workers,industry insiders are adamantthat we will only build what’s required with the help of building workers from abroad. But failure should not be an option: it will not just deepen this country’s social decay, but also boost malign forces on the hard right, and present a huge obstacle to Labour having any chance of winning the next election.
In the midst of last year’s contest,I went to Aldershot, the old garrison town at the centre of a constituency that Labour won from the Tories on a swing of 17 points. Grand buildings once used by generals and majors were full of luxury flats, and the town centre was scattered with empty shops. There, I came across a new development calledUnion Yard, which was on its way to completion. It contains 128 student “units”, 82 properties for private rent, and a mere 18 classified as “affordable” (which, in keeping with one of the grimmest aspects of the politics of housing, means they will be let for no more than 80% of local market rent), set aside for people over the age of 55.
Not long before, the waiting list for council homes in the surrounding county of Hampshirehad hit 30,000. On a Tuesday afternoon, I sat facing the images of the high life that adorned the development’s outer edges, and had a long conversation with a twentysomething woman who was full of a striking mixture of sadness and anger. I knew what she was going to say, and it came out pretty much verbatim: “Who’s that for? Not me.”
John Harris is a Guardian columnist