In a few years’ time, what will be left of Grenfell? Beyond whatever memorial local people choose, there should be something more.
A year ago many said the Grenfell fire would change politics – and it did rouse the conscience of the nation with its imagery of grotesque inequality within one borough. Look how long it has taken to find housing for all its occupants, where Kensington’s extreme wealth drives astronomical prices: to keep people nearby, the council is buying 307 homes at an average £765,500 each. At the same time, the borough’s voting roll has fallen due to so many mothballed properties being left empty by zillionaire foreign investors.
Of all the many meanings of Grenfell, the strong political message is the calamitous state of Britain’s housing. If Theresa May’s second and better attempt to articulate her own feelings has any substance, then fulfilling her promises on the housing crisis should be Grenfell’s real memorial. A housing green paper is due shortly: let it be dedicated to Grenfell victims, with a pledge to build a surge of new social housing dubbed the Grenfell project. The poignancy of attaching that name would make it harder to escape.
In 1974, Grenfell was a new hope for the future, built on the bulldozed remains of acres of squalid north London terraces let by slum landlords: read Alan Johnson’s autobiography for the most graphic descriptions of living there in the 1950s. Those moving into new Grenfell homes called it luxury. In past times a less wealthy country built social housing – none more than Harold Macmillan, reaching a peak of 350,000 homes a year. May called house-building her “personal mission”, setting a target of 300,000 a year. That is remarkably ambitious when the Resolution Foundation finds that there have only been six years since the second world war when so many were built. And it was only ever achieved by massive government direct investment. There is no chance whatever that private developers, with dwindling “affordable” quotas, can begin to approach these numbers. The last time 250,000 were built in a year, 40% were council homes. In his recent review, Oliver Letwin, by nature an Ayn Rand small-stater, warns that private developers will never build the necessary volume, as that lowers prices, so they sit on their land banks.
Twisting language was a George Osborne speciality – above all his “affordable” rents and prices, set at 80% of market rates, that were utterly unaffordable to most who could have bought or rented in the past. The madness of housing finance sees us spend £24bn a year on housing benefit that flows mainly to private landlords, instead of building more housing for genuinely social rents.
Councils and housing associations borrowing to build get the money back from social rents within the timescale of a normal mortgage – so May must let them build as many as they can borrow for, on that rock-solid security. Only Treasury dogma stops them investing in the same way that any family does if they can raise the deposit. To do that, right-to-buy would have to stop: Osborne’s £100,000 discount designed to end council ownership by bribing tenants to buy destroys lenders’ security. Only 1,102 homes were built for social rent in the entire country last year.
Dominic Raab is the seventh housing minister since 2010. It augers badly that he blames immigration for the housing shortage: he’s right that immigrants are responsible for a 20% rise in prices in the past 25 years, says the Resolution Foundation – but that’s a mighty small fraction of the 320% price rise in that time. Ambitious for the highest office, this populist rabble-rousing suggests housing will just be a brief stepping stone for him too.
But let’s hope house-building really is May’s “personal mission”. The good news is that it has shot up to near the top of public concerns. The housing green paper will indicate where May and the Treasury really put it as a priority. But attaching the Grenfell name to whatever it promises would push it up the Treasury’s long list of urgent needs for public spending. A Grenfell promise would be a fitting bricks and mortar memorial to help the bereaved feel something good came out of such horror.
• Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist