Houses are homes, not assets - Housing Justice

The head of Christian housing charity, Housing Justice, has called on society to place a higher value on houses and flats.

Chief executive Alison Gelder said in the inaugural Housing Justice lecture this week that it was important to regard houses as homes, rather than simply assets.

She urged the Government to develop realistic national housing strategies to allow home ownership by people in low as well as high income brackets.

"We need a realistic, owned by the bottom as well as the top, strategic plan. If I could wave a magic wand though, the key change I would make is to change the way we think about houses and flats," she said.

"I would like us as a society to change to thinking of them as homes rather than as assets; as somewhere to make a life, bring up a family, and play a part in a community.

"Without this philosophical - or is it a theological - change we may be doomed to chasing ever decreasing investment values and property profits rather than creating a long term commitment to making a house a home. Then perhaps we could start to get fair in housing.

"If we continue to build fewer homes per year than the annual increase in households, and we don't want to change the way we think about homes and houses as assets, then house building is also a factor in getting fair," she said.

The lecture was part of Housing Justice's contribution to the Get Fair campaign, the nationwide campaign to eradicate poverty in the UK.

The lecture comes as Communities and Local Government prepares its housing reform green paper, due to be published before the end of the year. The paper will set out a number of social housing reforms to help more people obtain greater economic independence and social mobility.

Gelder said that the house price boom of the last 30 years had left some home-owners with unearned assets, whilst secure local authority tenancies had left some people with security of tenure and a lifetime on a low rent.

She went on to add that the distribution of housing stock was not according to need and that the set of closed systems had stopped people moving between tenures.

Gelder added that the Government was unlikely to meet its target of three million new homes by 2020 and warned that the recession would make housing justice even more difficult to achieve.

"I don't think the recession we are heading for is going to end quickly - or that the turbulence in financial markets will stop any time soon. If I was going to offer a prediction I would go for a U-shaped recession, which means we could be looking at five tough years ahead of us.

"What's more, I don't think house prices have bottomed yet and unemployment has not stopped rising.

"All of which makes me really glad that when we chose a name for the end UK poverty campaign we picked Get Fair. That is because even in a recession, even when times are hard we can still hope for and try to create a fairer society."