No Parallel Sacrifice
Danny Dorling, All That Is Solid: The Great Housing Disaster
Allen Lane, 400pp, £20.00, ISBN 9781846147159
reviewed by Joseph Finlay
Listen to any debate about our housing crisis and within seconds you’ll hear someone proclaim that ‘we need to build more houses’. All political parties accept this as holy writ, vying with each other in their pledges to build the most homes. In All That Is Solid, Danny Dorling makes a powerful case against this assumption. There are 66 million bedrooms in England and Wales, for 55 million people. Many of these people, being married or cohabiting couples, share a room. Even in densely populated London, there are 92,000 more bedrooms than individuals. The problem is not one of supply, but of distribution. The wealthy have far too much space and the poorest not enough. Most people see only those who lack adequate accommodation as a problem; Dorling sees under and overconsumption of housing as two sides of the same coin. Nor is the housing crisis a discrete issue; All That Is Solid makes it clear that it is a symptom of the growing and catastrophic inequality of modern Britain.
The book traces a long historical arc, showing how the extreme inequality of fin de siècle Britain was deliberately attacked in the late Edwardian era by higher income and inheritance taxes, which broke up the large estates before they could be passed on to the next generation. Half the fall in income inequality that occurred between 1918 and 1978 had taken place by 1938, demonstrating the achievement of the radical liberalism of Lloyd George. The postwar Attlee government continued down this egalitarian path, with the result that inequality decreased every year until 1981. Housing allocation during the period reflects this trend. After the census of 1921 in which the richest of ten per cent of households had four times as many rooms per person as the poorest ten, the disparity underwent 60 years of reduction. From there the picture began to change. The decline in housing inequality went into reverse under the Thatcher government, as a result of higher rate tax cuts, rent deregulation, selling off (and not replenishing) council housing, and reductions in property taxation. Income and wealth inequality also increased substantially during the period, which deepened housing problems. Dorling shows how the two are tightly interlinked: the more money the wealthy have to buy housing, the less efficiently they use it, and when the poor do not have sufficient accommodation the result is increased deprivation. New Labour’s acceptance of the post-Thatcher neoliberal consensus did little to change the underlying situation, while current measures such as the ‘bedroom tax’ demonstrate our misplaced priorities, forcing the group of people who are using housing most efficiently to downsize even further. No parallel sacrifice is demanded from the wealthy, who have a far greater amount of surplus housing.
Dorling is not a man for easy solutions. Overall his call is simply to reduce inequality by whatever means possible, but in the conclusion he does lay out a series of practical proposals. These include extending council tax bands all the way to Z so that those with expensive homes pay much more, taxing second homes and empty properties, and reintroducing rent controls. Most intriguing is his suggestion of a ‘right to stay’ system, in which mortgage holders would be able to sell their home to the local authority in exchange for a secure tenancy in the same property. This would end repossessions, help the many mortgage holders likely to be hit hard when interest rates eventually rise, and allow councils to increase their stock of council housing, spread out amongst privately owned properties in a socially desirable manner. Politically this has great potential, as a way to unite the interests of renters – who, in the long term, get a greater supply of state-owned, subsidised housing – with those who have stumbled into ownership but can barely afford it, who get the bailout that they need.
Dorling, who is a Professor of Geography at the University of Oxford, clearly knows a vast amount about his subject. Yet there’s an arbitrary quality to the arrangement of All That Is Solid, as if the extent of Dorling’s knowledge – and the depth of his conviction – is such that he finds it frustrating to have to separate his material into discrete themes and chapters. The book reads like an outpouring of facts and rage from an author who cannot understand why, given the reams of evidence he is able to marshal, our housing debate is so hopelessly inadequate. All That Is Solid pushes 400 pages; had Dorling or an editor condensed it to 250, it might have had a greater impact. As it is, it sits uncomfortably between stools: not an academic book, but a little sprawling and verbose to achieve wide general readership. This is a great shame because Dorling’s message needs to be widely known: if we just can stop treating housing as a commodity for a privileged minority we might, once again, have affordable homes for everyone.
The book traces a long historical arc, showing how the extreme inequality of fin de siècle Britain was deliberately attacked in the late Edwardian era by higher income and inheritance taxes, which broke up the large estates before they could be passed on to the next generation. Half the fall in income inequality that occurred between 1918 and 1978 had taken place by 1938, demonstrating the achievement of the radical liberalism of Lloyd George. The postwar Attlee government continued down this egalitarian path, with the result that inequality decreased every year until 1981. Housing allocation during the period reflects this trend. After the census of 1921 in which the richest of ten per cent of households had four times as many rooms per person as the poorest ten, the disparity underwent 60 years of reduction. From there the picture began to change. The decline in housing inequality went into reverse under the Thatcher government, as a result of higher rate tax cuts, rent deregulation, selling off (and not replenishing) council housing, and reductions in property taxation. Income and wealth inequality also increased substantially during the period, which deepened housing problems. Dorling shows how the two are tightly interlinked: the more money the wealthy have to buy housing, the less efficiently they use it, and when the poor do not have sufficient accommodation the result is increased deprivation. New Labour’s acceptance of the post-Thatcher neoliberal consensus did little to change the underlying situation, while current measures such as the ‘bedroom tax’ demonstrate our misplaced priorities, forcing the group of people who are using housing most efficiently to downsize even further. No parallel sacrifice is demanded from the wealthy, who have a far greater amount of surplus housing.
Dorling is not a man for easy solutions. Overall his call is simply to reduce inequality by whatever means possible, but in the conclusion he does lay out a series of practical proposals. These include extending council tax bands all the way to Z so that those with expensive homes pay much more, taxing second homes and empty properties, and reintroducing rent controls. Most intriguing is his suggestion of a ‘right to stay’ system, in which mortgage holders would be able to sell their home to the local authority in exchange for a secure tenancy in the same property. This would end repossessions, help the many mortgage holders likely to be hit hard when interest rates eventually rise, and allow councils to increase their stock of council housing, spread out amongst privately owned properties in a socially desirable manner. Politically this has great potential, as a way to unite the interests of renters – who, in the long term, get a greater supply of state-owned, subsidised housing – with those who have stumbled into ownership but can barely afford it, who get the bailout that they need.
Dorling, who is a Professor of Geography at the University of Oxford, clearly knows a vast amount about his subject. Yet there’s an arbitrary quality to the arrangement of All That Is Solid, as if the extent of Dorling’s knowledge – and the depth of his conviction – is such that he finds it frustrating to have to separate his material into discrete themes and chapters. The book reads like an outpouring of facts and rage from an author who cannot understand why, given the reams of evidence he is able to marshal, our housing debate is so hopelessly inadequate. All That Is Solid pushes 400 pages; had Dorling or an editor condensed it to 250, it might have had a greater impact. As it is, it sits uncomfortably between stools: not an academic book, but a little sprawling and verbose to achieve wide general readership. This is a great shame because Dorling’s message needs to be widely known: if we just can stop treating housing as a commodity for a privileged minority we might, once again, have affordable homes for everyone.