ANOTHER VOICE
The problem of housing the brightest and the best
AUBERON WAUGH
Figures produced by Which? magazine in its 30th anniversary issue confirm what I have always thought and often written, that we in Britain have been living through a Golden Age of ever-increasing prosper- ity. It was in 1957 that Mr Macmillan (whose identification as a Soviet Agent can surely not be delayed by much longer than six months) told us we had never had it so good. Since then, the average weekly wage has crept up from £12.10 a week (worth £87 today) to £190 now (worth £26.43p in 1957). In real terms, our affluence has more than doubled. We drink three times the spirits and ten times the amount of wine. In 1957 two million Britons took a foreign holiday. This year it will be 16 million.
The great majority of people should be able to look back on these 30 years with the same exclamation as Wordworth fatuously applied to the French Revolution: Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive But to be young was very heaven!
Why, then, do our young people look so hang-dog? Why are they turning to the false nostrums of the SDP, or the unprinci- pled opportunism of the Liberal Party? I refuse to believe that it is anxiety about unemployment, since the employed seem worst affected. Young people earning most — in the City for instance — seem most miserable. Far from rejoicing in new wages and slightly milder rates of personal taxa- tion, nearly everybody complains of pov- erty and nobody complains of poverty more than the young married couple, both employed, living in London or south-east England. With two inflated wage packets, taxed separately, they should be richer than ever before. Where there should be bliss and heavenly sensations, there is nothing but resentment and rancour.
After brooding long and hard on the present discontents I reluctantly decided that they had nothing to do with my own feelings of dismay at the new proletarian culture being foisted on us by television, by the Times and Sunday Times and by the language of political debate. They are attributable almost entirely to a single cause, and one which, as it happens, does not affect me in the least. The one cause of all this misery, resentment and compara- tive poverty is the cost of housing. Perhaps I had better explain. The average house in 1957 cost £2,170, worth £15,602.50 at present values. The average house in 1987 costs £41,150. This increase of 164 per cent in real terms is, of course, considerably greater than the in- crease in the real value of wages (118 per cent), but it does not take regional varia- tions into account. In Liverpool, where wages are much the same as they are in the south-east for 80 per cent-odd in employ- ment, the cost of housing has almost certainly fallen in relation to wages. In London and the south east, the price of housing has risen enormously.
A free marketeer will say that the answer is simple: all that is brightest and best must go to Liverpool and Newcastle, not to mention Wigan, and work there for the grotesquely high wages available in government employment. But of course, they won't. All that is brightest and best will continue to come to London, as it always has and always will. Only stupid people, socialists, saints and crooks can flourish in the north of England. Very well, the free marketeer will say, the b and b must be prepared to pay for their prefer- ence and suffer in consequence. Which is what they do, but the wail of anguish set up by these young b and bs, as they struggle to survive in bedsitters at £70 a week, or share a three-room flat with five others, sets the mood of the entire nation. Worst of all, young marrieds complain bitterly that both of them are condemned to work for at least 15 years, until inflation has taken the edge off their mortgage payments or one of them is earning enough to shoulder the burden alone. If they have children in that time, they will grow up, through local authority nursery schools and latchkey schooldays, into criminals. Since the collapse of state secondary education in London, parents also have to pay for their children's education; the important point is that the brightest and best are condemned to pass what should be the happiest years of their lives in comparative but fairly acute poverty. Whether one likes it or not, it is the disgruntlement of these people, not the moans of the northern unemployed nor the tribulations of London's half-million `homeless' — in emergency accommoda- tion or free bed-and-breakfast establish- ments — which sets the political tone. It is this disgruntlement, I maintain, which explains the unpopularity of Mrs Thatcher, the Alliance threat, even the result of the Oxford Chancellorship election. Conventional free-market wisdom hopes that repeal of Labour's various Rent Acts will solve the problem at a stroke by providing new housing for rent at competi- tive prices. Professor Norman Stone set out these arguments once again in the Daily Telegraph last week. Logically, they make sense, but the experience of New York, with the same problem as London in even more extreme from, has been that de-regulation does not increase supply: it merely produces the same housing stock at higher prices. Those who doubt the terrible effect of these prices should read Tama Janowitz's excellent book of short stories, Slaves of New York (Picador).
The problem is that where an essential of life is in short supply, free market mechan- isms go haywire. They cannot cope with a sellers' market. The classic example of a salt monopoly comes to mind. In England, the threat of a future Labour government will always deter investment in rented accommodation. Professor Stone's plea for inter-party agreement on the subject is typical ivory-tower stuff. Politics, dear Professor, is about winning elections, not about helping people. What determines the ludicrously high cost of housing in the south-east is partly the shortage of it, partly a taxation policy which ensures that personal savings, to escape confiscation, must be invested in bricks and mortar rather than industry or business. If the Government threw more money at the problem — in further tax concessions, for instance — it would merely raise the value of property still further. Nor will the price of rented accommodation ever come down while the value of freehold continues to rise.
Yet the Conservatives must come up with some scheme if they are to escape the odium which free market policies entail. Subsidies are not the answer, since they are too expensive to be cost effective in house- buying, nor will they increase the stock of housing available. I would suggest a simple Bill which not only de-regulates rents but also requires that any accommodation left vacant for six months be put up for sale by public auction. This would not only in- crease the amount of housing available, but might also produce some surprising offers of cheap rented — or even rent-free — accommodation for the brightest and the best as they continue to descend on London in their millions.
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