Campaigning for Housing

Three quarters of the British public think there is a housing crisis in Britain, according to a new Ipsos poll for the Chartered Institute of Housing - but the results also demonstrate the challenges we face to make the voice of housing heard, says Ipsos housing research director Ben Marshall.

The Homes for Britain campaign, which is calling on politicians to commit to ending the housing crisis within a generation, is designed to work at national and local levels, raising awareness and calling for action. This multi-faceted campaign for housing is given further impetus by new Ipsos research for CIH which also highlights several important challenges.

On behalf of CIH we updated our 2013 ‘housing crisis’ poll, while asking similar questions of MPs through our winter 2014 survey. The findings are remarkably similar in important ways; for example, by three to one both Westminster politicians and the wider world recognise that Britain has a housing crisis. This is important – relevance and resonance underpin the success of any campaign.

But the surveys point to a key stumbling block; both the public and MPs are less sure of the local dimension to the crisis. 48% of the public disagree that there is a housing crisis in their local area while 40% of MPs do not think that ‘crisis’ describes the state of housing in their own constituency.

On supply, 68% of MPs choose building more homes as among the highest housing priorities for the next government (from a list of seven potential measures), but we have found only 35% of the public do so (putting it top, but only just). And when we asked the public last year to choose the two or three most important problems facing the housing market in Britain today, house prices were twice as salient as the shortage of new building. Thus, prices remain the iconic housing issue for the public, possibly because they have been such a big part of the narrative about housing for decades.

Encouragingly for campaigners there is a strong sentiment among the public and MPs, that UK governments can do something about housing problems. While housing may be the “wobbly pillar” of the welfare state – and less obviously within the gift of government compared with the top three issues of the NHS, the economy and immigration – it cannot be ignored politically given the sense of crisis and the British aspiration to own property. Thus, housing is one off the Conservatives' six key election themes while Labour and the Lib Dems have repeated pledges to boost supply as well as tackling housing inequality.

There are important geographic and political dimensions to this. Housing is a top three issue in London and our polling shows that people are more likely to feel there is a local housing crisis in the capital and the South East, and less likely in the North of England and Scotland.

Conservative MPs and voters are less likely than their Labour and Lib Dem counterparts to agree that there is a housing crisis nationally and locally. The party’s MPs are also more likely to choose making it easier for first-time buyers to own or part-own their own homes as a government priority; uniquely, this is identified more than building more homes.

So, on this evidence, the housing campaigns are well-founded, but also have their work cut out. In particular, they must work on several fronts, forging links in public and political consciousness between prices, supply and government action while being effective at national and local levels.

The general election provides an ideal stage to do this. 98 days to go. . . 

The article was published in www.cih.org