Damp, decay and delay: the many fractures of the housing crisis
After over a decade of bad policy, perpetual underinvestment and a chronic lack of political will, Britain's social housing is on its knees. Are Labour’s proposals ambitious enough to fix it?
When Jenna* and her partner moved into her two-bedroom maisonette in north London 11 years ago they felt like they’d hit the jackpot. After years of social renting, the pair finally had a permanent social tenancy: a home to call their own.
Less than a week later, they noticed problems.
“We moved in October 2013 and by November we noticed the bedroom was wet,” Jenna says. We had redecorated and the wallpaper had been up for one day before it started peeling from the walls. The council came out to see actual droplets on the ceiling, but they said it’s condensation and it was normal. They said to run a dehumidifier, which we do, but it’s expensive and it makes no difference because it’s not condensation: we’ve got penetrating water.”
Over the decade that followed, the council has inspected the property multiple times, taken detailed notes, sent engineers, redecorated, erected and removed scaffolding, and promised to deal with the problem. All the doors in the property have been replaced due to buckling caused by a damp atmosphere; the new ones are already beginning to swell.
“We always get to around May and then we have no leaking because there’s not as much rain and the weather is drier,” she says. “So from May until the end of October we have a pretty good run, it’s dry in our room and there’s no smell of damp. But then there’s a downpour, and it returns.”
Jenna and her 11 year old daughter have both since been diagnosed with asthma, and Jenna was hospitalised with breathing problems during pregnancy. She is a school teacher, and as a result of recurrent chest infections during the winter she’s had to miss long periods of work, disrupting her classes and their learning. Her partner, who had to leave the forces due to a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis, is also suffering as a result of the damp.
The whole family’s mental health has been affected, she says: “Repairs staff laugh at us in our own home and say ‘we already got away with it for this many years’. They’ve treated us disgustingly. All we’ve ever tried to do is have a clean, safe, habitable home.”
Jenna and her 11 year old daughter have both since been diagnosed with asthma, and Jenna was hospitalised with breathing problems during pregnancy.
The family have not requested a move because they are settled in the area, and the property is adapted so that it is accessible as Jenna’s partner’s MS progresses. We cannot report Jenna’s real name as she is now in the process of taking legal action against her landlord, but her story is not isolated.
After a coroner found that two-year-old Awaab Ishak died of respiratory crisis caused by the condition of his housing association home, a nationwide housing quality crisis revealed itself. Awaab’s Law now requires social landlords, including councils and housing associations, to meet basic standards on repair and improvements designed to prevent such a tragedy from happening again - but social landlords can barely afford to implement it.
The estate we’re in
Our national housing crisis is two-pronged, and utterly interlinked. First, we simply do not have enough homes to house our growing population, leading to a high-cost, poor-quality private rented sector, and a dire shortage of social housing with around 1.3 million households now on the housing waiting list.
But we have a crisis of housing quality too: despite a huge investment in improving social housing in the early 2000s, the lack of funding for the sector since 2010 means work dried up. The government rent settlement - which rose with the consumer prices index, plus 1 per cent - was initially cut by the Tory government and then frozen for almost a decade. The plan was always that the extra money above price inflation offered by the government could be used by landlords to build new social housing. But following Brexit and the pandemic, the cost of maintenance alone soared, due to material costs, labour shortages and a struggling economy. Only emergency work could be afforded and that alone ate up most of the surplus. Few routine improvements were carried out; new development plans were mothballed.
“The government has two options over the next 15 years: either significantly increase social rents - which will hit vulnerable people - or hand over a large pot of money for improvements.”
So now we have both a housing shortage and poor quality social housing, especially when compared to our European neighbours (such as the Netherlands, Austria and Denmark, which all have high quality public housing) – and according to Matthew Warburton, a policy advisor to councils who still own their own social housing , the situation is about to get worse.
“We’ve got a net zero commitment by 2050, a new decent homes standard coming in and we’re sorting out all the building safety issues,” he says. “The reason we’re in this mess is because the previous government reduced the rents four years in… and then capped the increases below inflation. That’s where the shortfall has come from. Rents are significantly lower than they would have been when the original settlement was reached in 2012. If something isn’t done the problem isn’t that new housing won’t get built, it’s that existing council budgets will start to fall over and more councils will get slated for failing to meeting the Decent Homes Standard and so forth. The problem can’t be ignored.”
After Grenfell and Ishak’s death, housing standards are in the public eye, and the government feels a duty to fix the problem. “If it’s going to do that, it can’t walk away from the fact that it costs money,” Warburton says.
He says the government has two options over the next 15 years: either significantly increase social rents - which will hit vulnerable people - or hand over a large pot of money for improvements alongside a lower rent settlement and the investment they are already making in housebuilding.
The government has already indicated that it will act to protect the investment that it does make in housing. The Right to Buy discount has been dramatically reduced and the qualification period lengthened, meaning fewer social tenants will be able to buy their home. But these measures may not be enough to meet housing demand.
Homelessness is at record levels. In London, one in every 21 children is growing up in temporary accommodation, and the cost of providing emergency housing provision to homeless households is bankrupting councils across the country.
As the housing waiting list grows, the unfit private rented sector is filling the gap, leaving people living in limbo. Sharon Walter has never qualified for social housing. As a single woman, she worked for decades as a legal administrator and moved around for jobs, missing out on a stable home because she did not meet the requirement for a ‘local connection’ to the area where she lived. In the past, she has even found herself living in a hotel when she had to leave her private tenancy after fleeing severe antisocial behaviour from her neighbours.
Now in her mid-fifties, she moved to Skegness in 2023 for a new job and took a room in a shared house while she looked for somewhere more appropriate. But in January 2024 she contracted Covid and has never recovered. She now lives on disability benefits and a personal independence payment to manage her multiple health conditions including diabetes, arthritis, asthma and incontinence issues.
Walter lives in a single room, managing to cook most of her meals in a microwave and using a mobile toilet when she cannot manage the journey to the bathroom. She also uses a mobility scooter to get around. “It’s not just one staircase, it’s one and a half up to my room, and it’s two staircases and two corridors to the kitchen, so I don’t use the kitchen very much,” she says. I fill up my kettle and a few litre bottles of water, but I also buy water. I do washing up in my room in a bowl,” she says.
Walter has registered herself for social housing but has no idea how many years she may have to wait. “Most of the other tenants are also in their fifties but some have alcohol issues and some are very noisy. It can be a bit aggressive and difficult. I’m just trying to tolerate everything because based on what I now know about social housing, if you voluntarily surrender a lease during the past 12 months they may not house you at all,” she says. “I don’t have children and I’m not in the position that young mothers are in. But if it becomes much longer than five years, I don’t know… if I get to 65 and I’m still renting a room I will be going stir crazy.”
“What we don’t want is more affordable housing without it being truly affordable”
Improving life for tenants like Walter means building a large number of new homes rapidly. Anna Clarke, Director of Policy and Public Affairs at the Housing Forum, says the government’s target of building 1.5 million homes in this parliament (it is yet to state how many will be social homes) is unrealistic, but that setting an ambitious goal is essential if anything is going to change. “I think it’s a really positive aspiration, so if they can ramp it up so we’re building at that rate by the end of five years, that would be considered a big achievement,” Clarke says.
Clarke too points to supply chain issues, rising costs of materials and labour shortages - all of which she expects to hamper the government’s ambitions to build fast and cheaply. “There’s a real gulf between the think tanks and the ‘yimbys’, who are on a high, and the housing sector itself, which is depressed by companies still going out of business and planning applications going down,” she says. “I’m hearing again and again that they can't make things stack up.”
In public the social housing sector has welcomed the government's pledges but privately it is anxious about how many new social homes will actually be built in the next five years. “What we don’t want is more affordable housing without it being truly affordable,” says Rachael Williamson of the Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH). “But what’s better? To get more homes done with degrees of affordability, compared with pursuit of pure social housing which will build less? We’re really keen to say we have to talk about housing in the wider context: how big do we want our private rented sector to be? Who do we want landlords to be? What do we want social housing to be?”
These are big questions for the government to answer. While those philosophical debates go on, the CIH is asking for longer term clarity on social rent rises - ideally up to 20 years ahead, so it can plan for both improvements and new development.
Meanwhile there are millions of families living in unsuitable homes waiting for the cabinet to make a difference to their lives. Williamson sounds a cautionary note about the pace of development: “A lot of these new homes being built might not kick in until year four. Children in temporary accommodation are going to continue to be there for the foreseeable time. If you’re someone living in awful housing now, or very temporary accommodation, that’s an awful long time to wait,” she says.
In north London, Jenna, now 37, is just waiting for her landlord to finally fix the problems she’s spent years of her life dealing with. “I think it’s probably taken up four years of my time in emails and phone calls,” she says. “It shouldn’t be too much to ask for in 21st century Britain to have a home that is dry and warm.”
*Names have been changed
This story is a part of ’s Brick by Brick series - our campaign for Labour to scale up its housing ambitions. Read the rest of the series here.
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It’s a nationwide disgrace, is it privatisation of “council” stock - I don’t know, but the British public is being failed on so many levels, from the Government to the Local Councils - the system is systemically broken and needs a major reset.