New Labour, new Britain? What did Tony Blair really do for housing?

For a long time, Tony Blair’s name was mud. A pall of broken promises hung over his governments; sometimes the cliché was that they were more spin than substance. Above all there was the spectre of Iraq, which severed Blair’s links to the electorate like nothing else. The warm spring of election victory seemed a long way away by the time he left office in 2007.

Still, in recent years a reassessment has set in, and that’s true on housing and homelessness just as every other policy area. Under Blair the number of houses being built increased somewhat, even though that took until New Labour’s second term between about 2002 and 2007.

There was no new wave of council housing, once the jewel in the crown of Labour’s ambition; but Blair’s ministers spent tens of billions upgrading the existing social housing stock while restricting its sale into the private sector. 

The number of people defined as homeless overall also fell away, but again only after 2003. Rough sleeping was cut right back, although the exact numbers are disputed. Most of this was in stark contrast to what came before and after Blair’s time.

So what we need here is a balanced look at a government that started a long time ago now: nearly 30 years have passed since Blair moved into No. 10. Looking back, yes, perhaps an opportunity to build a whole new kind of housing settlement was missed.

When Blair talked of a ‘third way’, what he imagined was housing associations taking on the role of most local councils to form a new and resilient pillar of the housing system. But they couldn’t do everything, and Labour’s deep distrust – even dislike – of local government held them back from pulling every lever they might have done.

It’s become clearer and clearer that Britain in the early 21st century faces a housing emergency. In response, a housing drive is required on something akin to an emergency basis, and one that covers all bases. We need more council housing and more build-to-rent – and more construction for owner-occupation. We need everything.

New Labour just didn’t build nearly fast enough, and that stored up a whole load of trouble for the future. Those hard times are measured not in numbers but in children growing up in mould-infested flats and B&Bs or crushed in with their grandparents; young people who can’t afford to buy a shoebox; a new surge in sleeping on the streets.

Read more:

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But in the 1990s and early 2000s ministers didn’t know, couldn’t know, how much the population would surge by the 2020s and 2030s. They were trying also to push economic growth and opportunity out from the overheated and crowded South-East of England too, and had some high hopes of doing so that often weren’t met in practice.

The economy of London and its surrounds started to boom uncontrollably instead, a new phenomenon alien to those of us who grew up thinking of a London in decline. The same financialisation that filled the Treasury’s coffers brought buyers aplenty into the London housing market, eventually crowding out anyone ordinary enough, young enough or without rich parents across the whole region. That wasn’t quite expected either.

Can we learn anything from the Tony Blair years? Undoubtedly we can. The first important lesson is that housing is key to everything: moving to get a job; the ambition to have children and give them a good start in life; people’s sense of place; saving and ‘getting on’. Without fixing the housing market, and that means building just as much as we can for as long as we can, any ambitions the Starmer government retains on those fronts will be frustrated.

A second insight is that Britain has for far too long talked about ownership and management, not either building enough dwellings for everyone or getting different sectors to work together. We’ve been stuck arguing about ‘social housing’, ‘renters’ and ‘buying’ since probably the late 1960s – to no-one’s particular benefit, and to the profit of class prejudice and snobbery. That should have been a New Labour discovery, but their focus on owner-occupation and replacing councils with housing associations blurred their vision. What we need now is building of all sorts, all the time.

Third and last, we need to expect the unexpected. The birth rate rose at the turn of the century, and immigration went up, making even the increase in housebuilding New Labour managed inadequate. The economy surged ahead, especially in London, making housing a great investment rather than somewhere to live. Together those factors meant that New Labour raced and raced to meet demand, but was always somehow falling short.

So: housing is at the root of poverty and wealth, advantage and disadvantage; we should stop talking about who owns things, and start a conversation about who needs things; and last of all we must give up the idea that we can look in any sort of crystal ball.

If this government’s motto really is ‘build, baby, build’ that will give it a margin of safety on all those fronts: but they also have to look further ahead than just this housing crisis. That will mean good design, as well as rapid building.

All in all, New Labour tried hard to do all that, but two or three steps forward were often matched by one or two steps back. We cannot afford yet another era of mixed messages and patchy progress.

Glen O’Hara is professor of modern and contemporary history at Oxford Brookes University.

His new book, New Labour, New Britain? How the Blair Governments Transformed the Country, is out on 10 February (Manchester University Press, £20. You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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