Dining across the (housing) divide with Jamie Ratcliff

Too many people disagree on the internet these days. So Jamie and I did so in person instead.

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If you pay £40 or more for an annual subscription, I will send you a signed copy of one of my books - Show Me The Bodies: How we let Grenfell Happen (which you can buy from an independent bookshop here) or Homesick: How housing broke London and how to fix it (which you can buy here). For £50, you get them both.*

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The problems of polarisation in the modern world is not so much that people who disagree with each other never communicate, it’s that when they do, they do so online. Online, our instinct is to demonise each other and move further apart. In person, our instinct is to seek common ground.

Housing is no exception. While it might not be such a culture war as other areas of popular debate, there are two clear and distinct camps in most online housing discourse.

One group tends to approach housing problems from a theory based on supply and demand, advocates for policy measures aimed at increasing house building, and opposes those which might limit it.

The other tends to argue that modern housing problems are rooted in the economics of advanced capitalism - landlordism, financialisation and generational inequality, and proposes policies to address these imbalances while being suspicious about the benefits of private-sector dominated new build.

Put people from these opposing camps on - say - a Linkedin comment thread and you quickly descend into partisan mudslinging. The first group see the latter as naive, ideological left wingers whose politics never left the junior common room. The latter see the former as unwitting shills for big business who have failed to grasp the fundamental drivers of housing inequality.

Obviously neither is true. There are good and bad points on both sides of the fence, and both critiques are actually probably closer in nature than the most entrenched in either would like to admit. If we stepped away from the keyboards and sat down in person more, this may become more apparent.

So I went for lunch with Jamie Ratcliff, co-founder of the consultancy Place Base, to disagree amicably about various aspects of housing policy over a nice plate of food.

Jamie proposed the conversation after reading and disagreeing with aspects of my book Homesick, which addresses London’s housing crisis, so the conversation was built around that. We discussed the relative importance of undersupply to London’s housing unaffordability, whether housing associations lost their purpose, rent control and whether building safety regulation has gone too far.

For those who don’t know Jamie, he currently runs his own housing consultancy (Place Base), which offers strategic advisory to businesses in and around the housing world. He has 20 years experience in housing - having held senior roles at housing association Sovereign Network Group, and having been a senior official responsible for housing delivery for the Greater London Authority.

(A note - like most news journalists, I only remember to take a photo if I have a picture desk shouting at me, so I obviously forgot.

For reference, Jamie looks like this:

I look like this:

And Obica, where we ate, looks like this:

The importance of supply

Pete on Jamie

I think my view is more nuanced than simply saying supply has nothing to do with the housing crisis. London’s population shrunk from World War II until the 1980s, and then grew rapidly from there on. The advance of people into the city, especially those who came with more money or got higher paying jobs when they arrived, obviously created competition for housing which pushed up prices. This was made worse because the population growth was far in excess of what we were building.

I think what people from Jamie’s side of the fence often miss are two further points. The first is that other forces were pushing up prices as well as a supply deficit - primarily the march of the banks into modern mortgage finance (which really kicked off in the 1990s) and the massive increase in the desirability of homes as an investment asset (particularly to buy-to-let landlords) as interest rates fell (which also really began in the 1990s).

Since then, London’s house price growth has been closer linked to investment demand and mortgage availability than supply. Prices fell sharply post 2007 and have slowed to a near standstill post-2016, despite supply being very patchy or non-existent in both those periods.

The second is that just lifting supply within a house building model dominated by volume builders is not going to do much to address affordability, and can even make it worse (Spain built millions of homes in the early 2000s and saw prices skyrocket).

Jamie sympathised with this latter argument, saying we “can’t rely on one speculative development model to build all the homes we need, and imagine that is going to drive prices down”. He does, however, believe that much higher rates of supply would have kept house price rises under control, and pointed out how far behind other western European countries we’ve been in terms of supply. We agreed that commentators who think the whole problem could be solved with the redistribution of empty or underoccupied homes fail to engage with the real world practicality of achieving this.

We probably coalesced around the idea that zoning and development corporations and letting London expand onto the Green Belt would be good things, if done properly. I imagine we’d disagree a bit about what ‘done properly’ means, but we had the next topic to move to and my bruschetta was getting cold.

Jamie on Pete

I really enjoyed Pete’s book, which crisply and fairly sets out a story behind London’s housing failure. I agree with more of it than he might expect. The fundamental flaw for me is that it totally underplays the importance of building new homes.

It surprised me that Pete was actually much more pro-supply than I thought and we agreed the volume homebuilders could not build all the homes the city needs on their own. I referred to a brilliant book on London from 1977 (the Heartless City), which was then confronted by totally different problems. Pete pointed out that house prices have risen faster than population growth and felt that “financialisation” was the cause.

I said that as people become more prosperous they desire more housing and Pete accepted this, using some examples of friends and family. The fundamental difference – which is continued under rent control – seemed to be driven by our personal outlooks.

Pete’s priority seemed to be how to allocate existing resources between people in the fairest possible way, whereas I wanted to build and grow so there would be much more overall and therefore greater benefit.

On supply that manifested in Pete’s view that it was impossible to build enough homes, which is definitely how it feels at the moment, but I pointed out that supply got very close to the London Plan targets introduced by Boris Johnson as proof it can be done.

The current target is double that, which is obviously much more difficult, but I think we should be pulling every possible lever to try and get there including enabling institutional investment, greater planning certainty, supporting housing associations and councils, boosting support for first-time-buyers, facilitating build-to-rent and encouraging community-led housing, over a long time horizon.

Housing associations losing their purpose

Jamie on Pete

Pete talks about a golden age of housing management that got lost somewhere in the 2010s, and I think that’s a bit too neat.

He recognised that buildings age — a 1960s estate in 1992 was thirty years old; in 2022 it’s sixty and admitted that was probably one factor in the stories he heard consistently from so many tenants of deteriorating services but felt there was also more to it.

I said it was fair that this aging of stock was predictable and could have been prepared for better but also that I’ve heard many examples of poor repairs services in the 1980s and 1990s. I stressed rising complexity; central heating alone has transformed the maintenance challenge. It’s also good that tenants’ voices can be heard direct and clearly; social media has transformed how visible failure becomes.

But I wouldn’t let the housing association sector off the hook entirely. I don’t think enough housing association leaders really believe that the most important thing a social landlord does is its repairs service. I think there have been distracting transformation initiatives and too much pursuit of shiny things. I really objected to the recommendation in the National Housing Federation’s [the body representing English housing associations] Better Social Housing review that landlords should work with their tenants to “define what an outstanding maintenance and repairs process looks like”.

I think outstanding is patronising and the definition isn’t difficult, it’s the delivery. It is easy to get agreement that a reliable repairs service is what tenants want and what that looks like: you contact your landlord, they tell you when someone’s coming, that person turns up and fixes the problem. Nobody expects excellence. They expect consistency. A laser focus on that can be delivered – alongside the sector building many more affordable homes.

We agreed that previous attempts by some housing associations and the NHF to reduce nominations for people in housing need were misguided. I don’t think that is controversial.

Pete on Jamie

Jamie made several good points here - particularly the very fair one that comparing housing management between the 1980s and 2010s is unfair, because the buildings were 30 years older - and their management needs were much higher as a result.

He also made the good point that a ‘live-in caretaker’ or neighbourhood housing officer model is great if you have a good caretaker or housing officer - and potentially utterly dreadful if not. There is always a danger of nostalgia about these things.

However, I can’t get away from a very consistently shared experience of residents I interview that things did get much worse in the 2010s. This is repeated too much to be a coincidence, and does coincide with the point at which the housing sector shifted towards large outsourced contracts, centralised call centres and a sometimes ruthless focus on so-called ‘value for money’. Joe Carpenters book, Middle Ground, tells a much clearer story of this period than mine.

What I will say about mine is that I made a conscious choice to use critiques of the housing association model from people who had direct experience of it, not people simply chucking rocks from the outside. The person I quote saying: “Everyone on the board and in the senior teams were so focused on the new and shiny developments that they just didn’t want to know about the estate in Peckham which was run ragged and in dire need of funding,” actually sat in these board meetings. Their views are now shared by many others who accept that there was a loss of focus in this period, with consequences for tenants.

I think I agree with Jamie that professionalism in housing management is important and that this requires a certain degree of commerciality. I’m not an ideologue with regard to any particular housing management structure - I think what most tenants care about is a decent repairs service, responsive and respectful customer service, affordable rents and fair service charges. Jamie clearly agrees with this - and doesn’t deny that the current model has problems. He comes with a good deal more scepticism that there was a prior golden age to compare it to, and this is a reasonable critique, although a hard one to definitively prove either way.

Rent control

Pete on Jamie

Jamie’s opening salvo on this was probably his most passionate. He felt that the impact of rent control on new supply (both new build and investment in existing homes) would be to “calcify the market” so that while “people who have got a home get some kind of benefit, it makes it very hard for people moving in”. He said this would hit “the most marginalised people in society” the hardest.

I can’t (and don’t) pretend that these things aren’t risks with rent control, nor that there isn’t evidence of them happening in other markets where rent control has been implemented.

Instead, my disagreement with Jamie was on two points - first that you can’t simply talk about the negative impacts of rent control in a vacuum, instead you need to compare them with the bad scenarios we face today in a market without rent control.

An absence of rent control gives you serious problems once private renting becomes a mainstream housing product for families, pensioners and other people who need long-term security. Once those in housing need are mostly housed in the private sector, and given benefits to cover the rent, it also leaves policy makers with an invidious choice: allow benefits to grow exponentially as rents rise or cap them and let homelessness soar (we’ve been on the latter path since the early 2010s).

My second disagreement was the idea that we could keep rents under control through new supply. That is not going to happen on any realistic projection of the potential future scale of the build-to-rent market, or the costs associated with building it.

I’d call for a slow, careful introduction of rent control, which includes policy measures designed to ameliorate the worst impacts (use the tax system to discourage the sale of investment properties; allow councils to buy private rented homes landlords want to sell; provide tax breaks on the more modest profits you can make by renting at Local Housing Allowance levels).

What I don’t advocate for is just pretending you’re interested in it as an idea in a last ditch attempt to take local election votes off the Greens, and then backing away again immediately once the market is already rattled. But we weren’t debating Rachel Reeves.

Jamie on Pete

I was clear that the most effective form of rent control is building many more homes and that imposing them might stop the initial problem of rising rents but creates loads more around access to homes, reducing investment and destroying supply.

We met two days after ‘sources close to Rachel Reeves’ briefed the Guardian she was considering a one-year rent freeze and I had a wealth of examples on the damage this speculation had caused. Actually doing it would be even worse.

Pete accepted that there were bad outcomes from rent control but fundamentally felt the current status quo was even worse. I don’t agree and feel actually implementing rent controls would destroy prospects of supply and investment.

We agreed quite a lot on the positives of more institutional investment in rental housing. From the service that would be provided by well-known household names and the desire for stable long-term returns. We agreed that a market dominated by large professional landlords with big portfolios, focused on occupancy, long-term income and manageable void rates would offer a structurally better deal for tenants.

We also agreed that as build-to-rent in London starts at around £2,000 a month, it’s not really serving ordinary people on ordinary salaries. I think that’s a volume problem and as the market grows it will reach further down. Rent control risks blocking that from happening at all, and a lot of that institutional capital is international and will simply go somewhere with less interference. I’d rather make this market work than regulate it into retreat.

Building safety

Jamie on Pete

Pete is an absolute expert on building safety and his first book, Show Me The Bodies, is brilliant and I recommend it to anyone interested in Grenfell (which everyone working in housing should be).

It’s informed by deep technical research and powerful personal testimony from a huge amount of time he’s spend talking to survivors and bereaved families.

Our discussion today focused on the Building Safety Regulator and second staircases (a subject I’ve published research on). We largely agreed that there was a clear failure in the construction industry and the solution of a Building Safety Regulator makes sense. We also agreed that the current approach is not working and that the impact on existing buildings – where urgently needed safety works are being delayed - is the biggest problem.

Going back to our views on supply Pete was more relaxed on new build being slowed down than I was but we both felt that too much attention is being placed on the gateway approval stages when the building safety case will be more important in terms of safety in the long-run.

Our views on second staircases differed but Pete was clear the policy is not effective, describing it as “a piece of the puzzle we’re not building the rest of”, without clearer requirements on evacuation strategies.

We agreed that they are at best a fifth order priority (after sprinklers, compartmentation, recladding and better building management) but Pete did not buy my research that the policy is preventing a city the size of Milton Keynes from being built every year and this is causing many more deaths (including of children living in Temporary Accommodation).

Pete on Jamie

Once more, we were probably closer in opinion than we both might have expected. My view on the Building Safety Regulator’s Gateway process is that the fundamental objective is not only sound, but an inevitable conclusion for policy makers after the scale of the building safety crisis came to light (4,300 buildings and counting). Something which fixed liability and forced builders to prove compliance through the design and construction phase was always going to result from that - it’s the implementation that has gone wrong.

I felt like Jamie and I basically agreed on this, and then further agreed that the use of the Gateway process to police things like the fitting of fire doors is the wrong policy solution, and is causing pretty perverse effects for safety. The BSR is on the record about the need to change this, but the government is dragging its feet in allowing it to (and designing something else to replace it).

We were further apart on second staircases. As I’ve written a few times, I think the debate about this gets the position wrong. The question I have always had to those who oppose a second staircase is how they expect firefighters to tackle a high rise fire in a single staircase building - because firefighting operations will always compromise the escape stair.

Once you accept this, you move inevitably towards either a second staircase or total reliance on stay put. Post-Grenfell no one should accept the latter, which means we need a second stair. My comment about the policy being a “piece of the puzzle we’re not building the rest of” reflects this - you need to distinguish the escape stair from the firefighting stair to get the benefit of the policy, and also have clearer policies about the evacuation of buildings in general. We’re implementing second staircases without doing this, which is frustrating and gives rise to the crazy cost-benefit figures which are regularly quoted. I also think sprinklers and evacuation lifts should be more immediate priorities, because they might also save lives in smaller fires.

I disagree with the most dramatic takes on the impact on new build, however. The majority of building codes around the developed world have a second staircase requirement, and (as Jamie pointed out earlier) do better than us at new home building. The problems with this policy is that our designers and land markets have not yet adapted to it, but given time there is no reason why they can’t.

Overall takeaways

Jamie on Pete

Pete asked me if he’d changed my mind on anything and the thing I picked was the wealth of evidence he had from tenants who felt repairs services had got worse in the last twenty years. I couldn’t dismiss that.

Beyond that I found it incredibly valuable to explore in so much detail a range of topics on which we disagreed. I definitely learned a lot from the exchange and I’ll reflect deeply on much of it – whilst also looking forward to Pete’s next book!

Pete on Jamie

I’ve always appreciated Jamie’s willingness to disagree in good faith (a rare attribute in today’s world). I’m also conscious that his experience comes from the real world difficulty of policy trade-offs, while mine is more theoretical. He’s been kind about my writing, so it’s fair to say that his efforts (which have resulted by hook or by crook in the construction of 150,000 new affordable homes) are a much more substantive contribution to helping people struggling with housing than writing magazine articles or books.

A lot of our discussion came down to a basic disagreement about the first topic (the relative importance of supply). If you sit with Jamie on that one, you’ll agree more with him. If not, you’ll probably lean more my way. He made good points in particular on housing management and reminded me (again) that anyone advocating for rent control at least needs to seriously engage with the difficulties and trade offs a real world implementation would involve.

Overall, it was refreshing to be pushed on my views by someone who has committed a lot of time to thinking through their own - an experience which generally leaves everyone a little humbler and wiser. And the focaccia was delicious.

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