17 May 2022
The urgent story of this country’s biggest crisis, told through the lives of those it most affects
Tony is facing eviction instead of enjoying retirement; Limarra isn’t ‘homeless enough’ to get help from the council; and for Kelly and her asthmatic son Morgan, another new rented house is a matter of life and death. This is twenty-first century Britain, where millions are trying to build lives in privately rented accommodation, which creates profit for landlords but not safe and stable homes for tenants.
This fierce and moving account tells their stories, and the story of how we built a housing system where homelessness is a constant threat. Award-winning housing journalist Vicky Spratt traces decades of bad decisions to show how and why the British dream of homeownership has withered and the safety net of social housing has unravelled. She has spent years talking with those on the frontline all around the country. Here, she illuminates the ways this national emergency cuts across generations, class and education and is devastating our health, destroying communities and transforming the social, economic and political landscape beyond recognition.
But it is not irreversible. The Covid-19 pandemic showed that radical action is possible, and there are real steps we can take to give everyone the chance of a good home. This urgent, ground breaking book leads the way.
Follow Vicky on Twitter @Victoria_Spratt and on Instagram @vicky.spratt.
Read an extract from Tenants below. Get your copy here.
Private renters are tenants. A tenant is someone who has temporary possession of land or property which they rent from a landlord. The word has its roots in Old French and feudalism; it is related to the verb tenir, which means ‘to hold’ and is derived from the Latin tenere, which means ‘to keep’ or ‘to grasp’. To be a tenant in Britain today is to try everything in your power to hold on to your sense of security, often clutching at straws.
The business of private renting is simple: private renters add to their landlord’s wealth while (usually) diminishing their own; but private renters like Anthony are generally poorer than owner-occupiers to begin with. Over the past twenty years, the number of people in England’s private rented sector has doubled. There are now some 11 million people living in precarious rented homes which could be taken away from them at any time. From 2011 to 2018, rents in England rose by 16 per cent, outpacing wages, which only increased by 10 per cent on average during the same period, according to the housing charity Shelter.
In the year May 2020 to May 2021, the cost of rent to household income ratio (the amount of rent you pay compared with the amount of money you earn) increased in most regions in the United Kingdom. On average, private renters spend a third of their pre-tax earnings on rent (London 34 per cent, south-west 32 per cent, south-east 31.8 per cent, east England 31.3 per cent, north-west 29.4 per cent, Wales 29.1 per cent, East Midlands 29 per cent, West Midlands 29 per cent, Northern Ireland 27.6 per cent, Yorkshire and Humber 26.8 per cent, Scotland 25.2 per cent, north-east 24 per cent). This means that most renters (63 per cent) struggle to save. Unlike homeowners, their place in the world becomes neither legally nor financially more stable over time.
Across the UK there are currently 17.5 million adults without a safe, secure or stable home (if children are included, this rises to 22 million people). That’s one in three. Maybe that’s you or someone you love. Women and people who are not White British are disproportionately impacted by this. But not only has rent skyrocketed in the past ten years, house prices are now more than 65 times that of the average home in 1970. Meanwhile, average weekly wages are only 35.8 times higher. Now there is not, according to the independent not-for-profit organisation the Women’s Budget Group, a single place in the UK where a single woman on an average income can afford to buy or rent a home on her own. A third of all young people will be renting privately from cradle to grave. The number of older people who rely on a private landlord has also grown.
Private renting is now so unaffordable and unstable, it has fuelled homelessness (particularly in London, but increasingly elsewhere, too). The number of families who became homeless because they were evicted or could not afford their rent despite being in work, went up by 73 per cent between 2013 and 2018. In the most basic – financial – terms, this has cost the state greatly. Figures from the Local Government Association (LGA) show that councils in England spent £142 million placing homeless households in bed and breakfasts (most of which are privately owned, and, as I have reported, sometimes funded by offshore investments) in 2019/20, compared with £26.7 million in 2010/11 – that’s a 430 per cent increase over the course of a decade. At the start of 2021, 253,000 people in England, 130,000 of whom were children, were homeless and living in temporary accommodation – hostels, bed and breakfasts and even converted office blocks where you might find an entire family living in one room, sharing a bathroom and kitchen with total strangers.
And so this book is about those people – like Anthony – who don’t own their homes. It’s also about those who help them. And it’s about the landlords, letting agents and investors who make money from this crisis while politicians look the other way. It unpacks a complex truth: that we aren’t facing one homogeneous housing crisis in Britain right now. Hardest hit, as ever, are those on no and low incomes, who would previously have lived in social housing. But so, too, are those on average and middle incomes who would once have been able to buy a home relatively easily. This is the story of a series of localised crises which are distinct and distinctive. Reporting from HMOs in Bradford, modern slums in Weston-super-Mare, social housing in south London and the offices of Members of Parliament in Westminster, this book assesses the human impact of bad housing policy. It looks at how we got here, and how we can make things better in both the long and the short term. It asks a vital question: in an ideal world, what would we do with housing policy? And, ultimately, as the stories in this book show, the housing crisis underpins a range of social evils, from inequality to energy inefficiency, from mental health to regional inequity, and from the cost of living to social mobility. And so, this book asks whether fixing housing could fix everything else, too. Could a more compassionate and loving social, political and economic model, one that brings more humanity to housing, be within reach?
