“There’s no place like home, there is no place like home” said Dorothy (from the Wizard of OZ) and that has certainly been very clear in the national response to COVID-19. As the government instructed us to Stay at Home, both the physical space and emotional connotations of home have never felt more important.
We commonly talk about the safety and security of home. Now it really is a sanctuary from a very real threat. But what is home? Yes, a place of safety, security but also a place to relax, to dream, to connect to loved-ones to regroup. A great many don’t have such sanctuary at this time.
Which brings our nation’s current housing crisis into even sharper focus than it was just a few months ago. How do you stay at home when you have no home? Or when your housing situation is precarious at best? When the place you stay isn’t suitable? For those of us with happy, spacious, comfortable homes the weeks ahead will be a challenge; others will have to somehow live with the failures and inadequacies of our broken housing market.
Spare a thought for those living in cramped and unfit conditions. The many families confined to one room with no outside space or the many self-isolating in rooms in shared housing. How do they manage to work from home and educate their children?
We know from the National Housing Federation that around 8.4 million people in Britain are living in unaffordable or unsuitable homes. Both of those factors will be exacerbated by the impact of COVID-19, with pressures on incomes, despite government’s relief measures. Uncertainty living in the private rented sector and enforced time spent in unsatisfactory housing conditions will be the experience of many.
The crisis caused by the coronavirus will end. But our housing crisis will continue, perhaps even worse than before.
At the end of the Second World War, another moment of national crisis and trauma, a consensus emerged. We needed Homes Fit for Heroes – a positive response, a way to rebuild and create a better society through a sustained housebuilding programme for all.
Many of those working in the NHS, in social care, in supermarkets and distributors – the frontline of our battle with a global pandemic – will be impacted by the housing crisis. We know there are many individuals and families across Britain who don’t have a place that feels like home.
When we move from crisis to recovery, there is an opportunity, an important and pivotal moment, when government can turn their plea to stay at home into the creation of new homes, a promise that everyone in our country will have a home. Like Churchill, our government can say that safety, security, comfort – home – is something everyone deserves and will be able to access and afford.
With such statesmanship, the government can remove the insecurities, anxieties, disconnectedness and rootlessness associated with not having a home.
The government has already committed to 300,000 new homes a year, but we’re a long way from delivering that and ending the housing crisis.
‘You had the power all along’ was the lesson for Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz – she was in control of the way home. A national and sustained housebuilding programme, of a scale and energy not seen since post war, is in the gift of our government. There will be many competing pressures, many other calls for funding and intervention, but surely now is the moment when we all realise just how much we need a place to call home.
Group Chief Executive