Author: Steve Iafrati, University of Nottingham
Politicians’ obsession with supply-side fixes to the housing crisis could exacerbate inequalities for people at the bottom of the housing ladder. In Housing Inequality in the 21st Century, released by Policy Press this April, we show how contemporary housing policy focuses on the symptoms of housing inequality but misses its root causes.
Taking a critical view of housing inequality within a broader context of political economy, we position housing inequality as an outcome of antecedent economic inequalities, political decisions, and discrimination that are not always visible within housing policy debates. Significantly, the book argues that in order to address housing inequality, it is necessary to look at those areas beyond housing itself: to the failure of market forces and the UK’s broken social security system. There is, ultimately, more to housing inequality than just housing.
Addressing symptoms, missing the cause
This means that housing is not a space that can be abstracted from the rest of the socio-economic and political winds that shape our lives. And yet, we find ourselves in a time when housing policy is framed and formulated in just such terms, with policy seeking to develop solutions (with questionable efficacy) to the visible signs of housing inequalities without considering the causes. Problematically, this positions housing policy as a sticking plaster rather than a cure, with the danger being that unless the cause is treated, the infection will continue to fester under the sticking plaster.
Perhaps unappealingly for politicians, the causes of housing inequality are complicated, layered, and intersecting. For many people, growing levels of precarious work have gone hand in hand with a legacy of welfare reforms that have made people, and regions, poorer. For those with vulnerabilities such as mental health challenges, leaving institutional care, experiences of substance abuse, or other life challenges, years of austerity have made support and interventions harder to access. Local authorities, so often the shock absorbers of local challenges, have been stripped back and their capacity reduced. At the same time, BAME households find themselves over-represented in housing inequality statistics because of their position in the labour market, over-representation in poverty, and discrimination that is exacerbated by political rhetoric.
The myth of the housing ladder
Simultaneously, global instability following the Global Financial Crisis, Covid, war in Ukraine, geopolitical upheaval and unpredictable world leaders alongside the financial climate have made property an increasingly attractive safe asset. This, and not necessarily supply-side factors, has pushed up the price of property, which has had a knock-on effect to all housing. Rather than moving up the housing ladder, the increasing prices have created a downward market pressure, which has created crowding at the lower rungs of the housing market. For increasing numbers of households, they are unable to afford to become homeowners, unable to access social housing due to chronic under-investment and under-delivery, and are increasingly pushed into a crowded private rented sector. Consequently, the crowded lower rungs of the housing ladder have given rise to a diversity of precarious housing and economic opportunism where people risk falling off the bottom of the housing ladder. In effect, the housing crisis lies not with the supply of rungs on the ladder, but with the distribution of people across those rungs.
Increasing numbers of people, shaped by vulnerability and precarity, now find themselves in temporary accommodation, sometimes placed into other local authority areas as local authorities with few options struggle to meet statutory duties. The growth in bed and breakfast properties is often closely neighboured by private sector supported exempt accommodation that costs billions in housing benefits and frequently provides little support. The shadow rented sector, sofa-surfing, beds in sheds and property guardianship characterise an increasingly diverse PRS. For people in these tenures, the likelihood is that housing is negatively affecting their wellbeing rather than being a source of welfare that invests in people and improves lives.
Supply is not a silver bullet
However, in the face of such complexity, the policy ‘solutions’ are prosaic and fail to address the causes. The hegemonic narrative of a ‘housing crisis’ is too heavily based on an unchallenged assumption that greater supply will be a silver bullet. As an aside, the only time the UK has met the extent of housing targets wanted by the current government was in the late-1970s, when approximately half were council or social housing. The reality is that housing supply has broadly grown with the population and the crisis lies not in supply but in cost. The economic logic that greater supply will force down costs is not the case if the commodified nature of housing means that more supply will result in greater investment opportunities for those with existing assets.
Potentially, in this situation, further supply risks exacerbating inequalities if those with most assets are able to capitalise. That said, it is almost inconceivable that the government will meet their own housing targets, with the commitment to social housing already being reduced in the face of pressure from house builders. Meanwhile, in England, Awaab’s Law, the Renters’ Rights Act, and increased selective licensing codify a low-bar that your home should not kill you and that you should not be evicted without reason. None of these will address the causal factors.
After a long time in the making by successive governments of different hues, we have reached a position where the housing mix in the UK is broken. The real housing crisis includes that we have become over-dependent on the whims and vagaries of market forces to determine the nature of housing provision, which in turn determines who gets housed and who does not. As housing has become increasingly commodified, valued as an asset rather than its use-value, so market forces have shaped our housing provision. At a time when welfare reforms, austerity, precarious employment and the shadow of the Global Financial Crisis and Covid recessions have made many people poorer and less secure, the winds of market forces can be problematic. For those with the least market influence, such as the poor and the vulnerable, a lack of non-marketised housing has led to 1.3m waiting for social housing that most will never access.
Given the social benefit of housing and the importance of not just supplying sufficient housing, but supplying the correct mixture of housing, the extent of market influence has been damaging. The presence of market failure, a concept too rarely used in the study of housing, needs to be recognised, though it is strikingly absent from any government position. At a time when many MPs are landlords, it is perhaps hardly surprising that it is not more of a pressing issue. Returning to causes, it is imperative that the government addresses growing poverty and vulnerability, rather than the rhetoric of blaming migrants and mooting further welfare reforms. Instead, we need greater prosperity, a more redistributive tax/welfare system, and more council housing. It is time for UK chancellor Rachel Reeves to relax her much loved fiscal rules and invest in the future.
‘Housing Inequality in the 21st Century: Social Policy and the Political Economy of Housing in the UK’ by Steve Iafrati and Lee Gregory is published by Policy Press and released on the 9th of April 2026. The book can be ordered from: https://policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/housing-inequality-in-the-21st-century