Lee Anderson column: Social housing should be for British workers
This week, Richard Tice and I announced a series of new Reform UK policies around social housing.
The way social housing works in Britain has fundamentally changed since its creation.
Having worked at Citizens Advice for a decade, and later having been a district councillor, I have seen first-hand how council housing has regressed.
Social housing used to give working Britain access to the secure housing needed to get on, close to their workplace, with space to raise a family.
Allocation wasn’t based solely on need at a single point in time, but on suitability.
Being given a council house was seen as a privilege, creating a generation of hard-working, houseproud Brits.
This has all changed.
Social housing has become a reward for living on benefits.
To give a local example, the recent policy changes to the Homefinder system in Ashfield and Mansfield excludes couples who earn over £25,000 per year between them from social housing, introducing a de-facto rule that anyone who works can’t have a council house.
The result is that over half of those occupying existing social homes are not in work, and over half a million social homes are currently occupied by foreign nationals.
Meanwhile, young British men and women increasingly cannot afford to move out of their family home and when they do, often find themselves sharing a house with strangers, with no realistic prospect of forming a family or getting on.
Right now, there are 1.3m people on local authority waiting lists in England, the highest figure since 2014.
There are thousands of people on the social housing waiting list in Ashfield alone.
The fact that so many are waiting for social housing does not remove the cost from the taxpayer – it moves that cost on to the housing support bill, which now stands at a shocking £37.3 billion a year.
It is clear that social housing needs significant reform.
Affordable housing should enable work, boost productivity, and help families.
It should be seen as a privilege, not a right.
This is what Reform UK will do.
A Reform UK Government will deliver the most radical affordable house building programme in a generation.
Firstly, we will end access to social housing for foreign nationals, evicting them after a short grace period.
We will also deliver an additional 500,000 new affordable homes over a 10-year period to make around one million homes available for British families.
The criteria for occupation of new and existing social housing will be overhauled with priority given to veterans, those in work, and married couples.
A significant portion of these new affordable homes will be exclusively for young British born workers, aged under 35.
Strict criteria will be reintroduced for the maintenance of property and estates, with evictions required for repeated breaches of standards.
And finally, the sale of up to 25,000 social houses per year through a reinvigorated Right To Buy programme will create a new generation of homeowners, with proceeds used to part fund this national building project.