As will be further discussed in Appendix A below, Britain is often described as being in the midst of a severe “cost-of-living crisis.”[31] While this is at least partially attributable to recent increases in product and commodity inflation, a major component of the present cost-of-living crisis is also a steady increase in the cost of housing over the past 50 years.

Housing is a major element in the story of Britain’s descent into systemic crisis.

As the Common Sense Policy Group argue in their recent manifesto Act Now: A Vision for a Better Future and a New Social Contract, the housing sector in Britain features “gross regional inequalities in housing costs, falling levels of ownership and high levels of homelessness,” and that this is at least in part due to an extractive and financialised house-building industry “failing to meet the need for sustainability and affordability.”[32]

“Sooner or later,” as Josh Ryan-Collins, Toby Lloyd, and Laurie Macfarlane warn in their book Rethinking the Economics of Land and Housing, “either a crash in property values will reset the market or housing market failure will weigh down ever more heavily on the economy, until the growing frustration of those paying ever larger proportions of their wages in rents triggers a political crisis, with unpredictable consequences.”[33]

The rise in unaffordability of housing is clear in the time series data.

In 1970, social renters paid around 8.7% of their income on housing; private renters paid around 9.4%; and homeowners paid around 5.9%. These percentages slowly climbed through the 1970s before exploding in the 1980s and early 1990s and then somewhat stabilizing at higher levels. In 2023, social renters paid around 23.6% of their income on housing (a 171.2% rise since 1970); private renters paid around 28.1% (a 198.9% rise); and homeowners paid around 9.9% (a 67.8% rise).

In housing, as with the economy as a whole, these patterns are unlikely to shift significantly without major structural change in the housing market – in this instance through interventions capable of “wrest[ing] our cities back from the hands of the rentier, landlord and speculator.”[34]