From leaked messages suggesting that Matt Hancock thought his job as health secretary was to “frighten the pants” off the public to Boris Johnson’s latest Trumpian contortions, our current political pantomime shows no signs of letting up. But underneath it all, something much more era-defining seems to be afoot: the British public’s two secular gods are taking a battering. The NHS is not in quite the mess it was a couple of months ago, but its deep problems grind on. Meanwhile, a slightly more overlooked story is becoming hard to ignore: a crisis in our national faith in property ownership, and the decline of that strange British belief that in any normal universe, house prices will only go up.

Figures released last week showed UK house prices were falling at the fastest annual rate since 2012, with warnings from the financial sector that “economic headwinds look set to remain relatively strong” and property owners reportedly having to cut their asking prices by an average of £14,000. To state the blindingly obvious, high interest rates are sucking demand out of the market by restricting access to mortgages. Houses and flats, therefore, sit unsold, and hundreds of thousands of people remain stranded in the purgatory between wanting – or, as politicians say, “aspiring” – to own a home, and being able to do so.1

The average British home now costs about nine times average earnings: one estimate I recently read reckoned that the last time UK houses were this expensive was in 1876. 

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Where to find hope? There are signs that Labour has at least the beginnings of an answer. Lisa Nandy insists that she will be the first housing minister in decades to ensure that social housing provides for more people than the private rented sector; her mantra, she says, will be “council housing, council housing, council housing”. In the midst of impossible local authority budgets, she and her colleagues believe one quick solution to the housing crisis could lie in relationships between councils and pension funds. The idea would be for the funds to buy up discarded private rented property and then lease it back to local housing departments to renovate and convert into social homes. More thoroughgoing plans for building new social housing seem to be on the way, along with a new private renters’ charter.2

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• 1. There is also a mind-boggling housing story rooted in the mad politics of the Conservative party. Late last year, as Tory backbenchers reached new heights of anxiety about losing their seats, the government was hit by the huge rebellion over local housebuilding targets, which became advisory rather than mandatory. The result is not exactly surprising: the Home Builders Federation is now predicting that rates of construction in England could soon fall to a low unseen since the second world war. Basic economics would suggest that this might send prices back up and make home ownership even more unattainable, but its impact threatens to be even more fundamental than that: as one Labour politician told me last week, one of the most absurd features of modern Britain is that “we’re not building houses in a housing crisis”.
• 2. The foreground of Labour policy, however, is all about home ownership. Not unreasonably, Keir Starmer sees buying a house as “the bedrock of security and aspiration”, and often makes glowing references to the pebble-dashed semi in which he grew up. Given the chance, he will apparently lead a government set on pursuing a 70% target for home ownership, up from England’s current figure of 64%. There is talk of a new mortgage guarantee scheme; the party’s first actions in government will include “helping first-time buyers on to the housing ladder and building more affordable homes by reforming planning rules”. Labour, we are told, “is the party of home ownership in Britain today”.