{"id":736662,"date":"2026-02-02T05:23:20","date_gmt":"2026-02-02T05:23:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/736662\/"},"modified":"2026-02-02T05:23:20","modified_gmt":"2026-02-02T05:23:20","slug":"what-did-tony-blair-and-new-labour-really-do-for-housing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/736662\/","title":{"rendered":"What did Tony Blair and New Labour really do for housing?"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s become clearer and clearer that Britain in the early 21st century faces a housing emergency<\/a>.\u00a0In response,\u00a0a housing drive\u00a0is required on\u00a0something akin to an emergency basis, and one that covers all bases. We need more council housing and more build-to-rent \u2013 and more construction for owner-occupation. We need everything.<\/p>\n

New Labour\u00a0just didn\u2019t build nearly fast enough, and that stored up a whole load of trouble for the future. Those hard times are measured not in numbers but in children growing up in mould-infested flats<\/a> and B&Bs<\/a> or crushed in with their grandparents; young people who can\u2019t afford to buy a shoebox; a new surge in sleeping on the streets.<\/p>\n

Read more:<\/strong><\/p>\n

But\u00a0in the 1990s and early 2000s ministers\u00a0didn\u2019t know, couldn\u2019t know, how much the population would surge by the 2020s and 2030s. They were trying also to push economic growth and opportunity out from the overheated and crowded South-East of England too, and had some high hopes of doing so that\u00a0often weren\u2019t\u00a0met in practice.<\/p>\n

The economy of London and its surrounds started to boom uncontrollably\u00a0instead, a new phenomenon alien to those of us who grew up thinking of a London in decline. The same financialisation that filled the Treasury\u2019s coffers brought buyers aplenty into the\u00a0London housing market, eventually crowding out anyone ordinary enough, young enough or without rich parents\u00a0across the whole region. That wasn\u2019t quite expected either.<\/p>\n

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Can we learn anything from the Tony Blair years?\u00a0Undoubtedly we can. The first important lesson is that housing is key to everything: moving to get a job; the ambition to have children and give them a good start in life; people\u2019s sense of place; saving and \u2018getting on\u2019. Without fixing the housing market<\/a>, and that means building just as much as we can for as long as we can, any ambitions the Starmer government retains<\/a> on those fronts will be frustrated.<\/p>\n

Advertising helps fund Big Issue\u2019s mission to end poverty<\/p>\n

A second insight is that Britain has for far too long talked about ownership and management, not either building enough dwellings for everyone or getting different sectors to work together. We\u2019ve been stuck arguing about \u2018social housing\u2019, \u2018renters\u2019 and \u2018buying\u2019 since probably the late 1960s \u2013 to no-one\u2019s particular benefit, and to the profit of class prejudice and snobbery. That should have been a New Labour discovery, but their focus on owner-occupation and replacing councils with housing associations blurred their vision. What we need now is building of all sorts, all the time.<\/p>\n

Third and last, we need to expect the unexpected. The birth rate rose at the turn of the century, and immigration went up, making even the increase in housebuilding New Labour managed inadequate. The economy surged ahead,\u00a0especially in London,\u00a0making housing a great investment rather than somewhere to live. Together those factors meant that\u00a0New Labour\u00a0raced and raced to meet demand, but\u00a0was\u00a0always somehow falling short.<\/p>\n

So: housing is at the root of poverty<\/a> and wealth, advantage and disadvantage; we should stop talking about who owns things, and start a conversation about who needs things; and last of all we must give up the idea that we can look in any sort of crystal ball.<\/p>\n

If this government\u2019s motto really is \u2018build, baby, build\u2019 that will give it a margin of safety on all those fronts: but they also have to look further ahead than just this housing crisis. That will mean good\u00a0design, as well as rapid building.<\/p>\n

All in all, New Labour tried hard to do all that, but two or three steps forward were often matched by one or two steps back.\u00a0We cannot afford\u00a0yet\u00a0another era of mixed messages and patchy progress.<\/p>\n

Glen O\u2019Hara is professor of modern and contemporary history at Oxford Brookes University. <\/strong><\/p>\n

Advertising helps fund Big Issue\u2019s mission to end poverty<\/p>\n

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His new book,\u00a0<\/strong>New Labour, New Britain? How the Blair Governments Transformed the Country<\/strong><\/a>, is out on 10 February (Manchester University Press, \u00a320. You can buy it from the\u00a0<\/strong>Big Issue shop<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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You can also support online with a\u00a0<\/strong>vendor support kit<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0or a\u00a0<\/strong>magazine subscription<\/strong><\/a>. Thank you for standing with Big Issue vendors.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s become clearer and clearer that Britain in the early 21st century faces a housing emergency.\u00a0In response,\u00a0a housing…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":736663,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5018,3,4],"tags":[11246,748,393,4884,6332,6333,8414,1144,285,712,13977,24850,27005,16,15,1764],"class_list":["post-736662","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-britain","category-uk","category-united-kingdom","tag-analysis","tag-britain","tag-england","tag-great-britain","tag-homelessness","tag-housing","tag-labour","tag-northern-ireland","tag-politics","tag-scotland","tag-social-housing","tag-temporary-accommodation","tag-tony-blair","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-wales"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115999369129481560","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/736662","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=736662"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/736662\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/736663"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=736662"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=736662"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=736662"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}