Housing: worrying about worrying

There is a lot to worry about housing right now. House prices have never been higher, lockdowns have revealed the inadequacies of where many people live, it is estimated that social housing waiting lists could hit more than two million due to the economic impact of COVID-19, and some have warned of a rapid rise in homelessness this winter. But there is something else to worry about; people aren’t worrying about housing as much as they once were.

During 2016-19, Ipsos MORI’s monthly Issues Index (our ‘barometer of concern’) recorded an average of 17% of Britons spontaneously mentioning housing as among the most important issues facing the country. Last month, only 5% did. And if we look past salience, there are other signs that housing’s pull on public and political attention is weakening.

An Ipsos MORI survey last October found a weaker sense of a national housing crisis. Yes, 67% think we’re in crisis, but this is down from 74% in 2019 and just 38% think there is a housing crisis where they live. Support for home-building has fallen too.

The US presidential election highlighted how suburban housing has become a new political battleground, and we had ‘Rentquake’ in 2017, but things are different now. For one, the conversation about housing has largely been reduced to something akin to a nuclear arms race with parties trading new supply targets. This is important because a vital precondition of an issue being important electorally (and, consequently, of interest to politicians) is that people need to discern some differences between the main parties.

Additionally, people don’t tend to like what they see in terms of attempts to address the housing crisis. We’ve found a strong sense of fatalism surrounding the issue alongside confusion about who pulls the policy levers. This may suit the conservatives who may be warmer to social housing than they once were but remain avowedly pro-ownership and probably have an interest in ‘de-weaponising’ an issue which has tended to be more naturally owned by labour. Plus, the housing crisis is very different in ‘red wall’ areas and less of a concern there compared to London and the south of England.

True, the salience of other issues such as crime (mentioned by a tiny 3%), immigration (6%), climate change (10%) even the NHS/healthcare (17%) has also dropped as COVID-19 dominates, and housing has not necessarily slipped into permanent obscurity. Things could change as we move into a post-vaccine era, or people could stay in the habit of worrying about other things.

Housing is one of the defining issues of our time with all sorts of consequences which cannot be ignored. The worry is that if the general public is indifferent, it probably makes it harder to do anything about it.