The fall of Angela Rayner emphasises the rise in power of property ownership

The fall of Angela Rayner took me by surprise. Over such a thing as tax on a second home. Isn’t it interesting that if most of the middle classes, and those who have joined them from the working class, ever get their hands on serious dosh it is because of the buying and selling of property.  

The UK’s family silver is property. It lifts people who could work all their lives and never accumulate any wealth beyond the property they purchased. For a considerable period of time people bought buy-to lets, let their tenants pay their mortgage, and could then use the money accrued through the increase in house prices to play at the Bank of Mum and Dad. Perhaps getting their kids on the property ladder, or paying for them through university.  

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Working class Right to Buy social housing tenants could therefore propel their children and even grandchildren into the middle classes and broaden that class preferred by Thatcher: the nouveau middle classes. Eighty per cent of bank transactions by high street banks involve the buying and selling of private property, with only 20% going to the creation and support of new businesses.  

So you can see that property is the lifeblood of the British economy. It’s the driving force of wealth in the UK and therefore a major source of concern for all people who are either trying to join in the property-owning democracy or trying to get rented accommodation that is affordable. Hence if a cabinet minister gets caught up in avoidance, even if legally framed, if it’s about property then it raises the hackles of the many. For property is where’s it’s at.  

When did we become a de-industrialised, post-investment-in-business country? Where the economic heat is nearly all about property? An investor would rather invest in property than in some more risky investment like building a business. That seems to be the reality behind the British system of getting your hands on wealth. Our current housing crisis is down to this enormous concentration on wealth creation, not in businesses that provide work but in buying and selling property. Compare that with Germany where 80% of bank business is about businesses and only 20% about property. In spite of the many problems of the German economy they don’t have our acute housing crisis.  

Angela Rayner was intent on addressing the housing crisis by building a million houses for social use during the life of this parliament. Will there be someone as determined to keep that target real? Or will it be one of those vacuous promises that governments of all complexions have failed to realise.  

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The redistribution of wealth has been one of the pluses created by the housing crisis – that is, the spread of wealth created for an earlier generation through property ownership. So there has been a plus mixed in with the negative of the inability to provide adequately for all those desirous of accommodation.  

Of course if it were not for the enormous crisis of working-class housing at the end of the Second World War the opportunities of the 1980s onwards would not have arisen. Ninety per cent of all working-class housing at the war’s end was sub-standard, one stage away from derelict. But the housing crisis was not due to a shortage of housing and therefore expensive rents, but to cheap rents and a plenteous supply of housing stock. As Thatcher freed up the mortgage market by allowing people to borrow more, a lot of poor housing could be bought cheaply and renovated.  

Allowing the Right to Buy enabled under-privileged social housing tenants to become the privileged house owners. But Thatcher didn’t allow the councils and housing associations who sold to build replacement housing, which was why in the region of two million social housing properties have been removed through the years.  

When will a government start addressing the low investment in businesses and support the creation of a higher level of quality jobs in the marketplace? Why is it that most of the big businesses created out in web world have led to the creation of poorly paid jobs that lead nowhere? And when is the government going to address the high cost of housing?  

Land is the most important element in the creation of new housing. Why not use the vast land holdings held by public bodies, including the royal family, to reduce the cost of land? Offer that land at a reduced price to house builders, thereby undermining the high cost of land. Why build on expensive land when you can build on publicly owned land that’s been sold at a reduced cost? Just an idea. Reduce the cost of land. Create more social housing for everyone so that you take the steam out of the need to own.  

Often people own because it’s the only way of ensuring you have a place to grow your family. Angela Rayner rose from single mother council house life to cabinet office. Her trajectory will be sorely missed. She became a trade union official, a sure way of getting onto the owning of property and a royal road to the middle classes.  

There are such few routes out of poverty it’s not surprising that many jumped at the Right to Buy. But now the mess thrown up by that opportunity for some needs to be sorted. Angela Rayner’s resignation over a property tax issue shows how raw the crisis over property is. And the idea that someone trying to bring housing justice might not have got it right shows how raw home ownership is. 

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