Open House Oxford: We Love Social Housing! Talk

Originally written for Oxford School of Architecture Magazine, October 2019

We Love Social Housing! was a pertinent discussion on the importance of social housing in today's housing crisis, exploring the issues that the housing crisis is posing for us.

Our speakers were Joe Beswick, from the community think-tank New Economics Foundation, and Lou Downe, Director of Transformation & Design for Homes England (possibly the longest job title ever). The floor was also opened up for comments and questions, creating a very open and engaging discussion covering a wide variety of topics, with diverse opinions from all walks of life.

The talk brought up many key points on Britain's current housing crisis: for example, we now have 1 million fewer council homes than we did 40 years ago, but we potentially have around 3.2 million households on the national waiting list for council housing (estimate from homelessness charity Shelter).

If it wasn't clear before, it is now: The housing market is broken. Houses aren't being built where we need them, when we need them, and they're not what we need. To keep up with demand, it has been proposed that Britain needs to build between 100,000 and 200,000 new social rented homes a year - last year the actual number of new social rented houses constructed was only 8,000. And building hundreds of thousands of homes a year won't solve the affordability crisis surrounding the housing market. One comment pointed out that targets get discussed, but reasons why these targets exist never do - we are given an arbitrary number of homes to be built, or budget costs of development projects, with no backing up to base these numbers on.

The planning system is failing, and the housing construction process is so bureaucratic that it has squeezed the life out of small housing development companies. So what can we do about it?

Housing England and the New Economics Foundation propose that now is the time to rethink this model. The housing system should provide for everyone, and should be seen as an asset, not a handout. So should we be thinking of housing as a service? Create a new NHS - the National Housing Service? Should we revive the concept of housing as community?

We may not have all the answers yet, but social housing is a topic that the architectural community and society as a whole cannot shy away from.