Introduction: It’s Not All About Bricks and Mortar: Experiences and Barriers in the Housing Crisis

One of the most enduring themes within post-war social policy has been that of housing.From the recognition of the five giants to the language of housing crises, via concrete jungles and the right to buy, housing has been a mainstay of political rhetoric.More recently, the growth in precarious housing (Hodkinson and Robbins, 2013), the tragedy of Grenfell Tower (Shildrick, 2018), and increasing numbers of children in temporary accommodation (Wilson and Barton, 2023a) has brought a renewed focus to the debate.And yet, one of the interesting aspects of the language of the housing crisis is that it spans both sides of the political divide and is sufficiently nebulous as to mean different things to different voices.In policy terms, the crisis has been, since the turn of the millennium, littered with interventions to mitigate and manage some of the most egregious outcomes without really tackling root causes.The decent homes programme (National Audit Office, 2010), helpto-buy schemes (Meeks and Meeks, 2018), Teresa May's white paper to 'fix our broken housing market' (DCLG, 2017), and the potentially imminent 'renters reform bill' (Wilson et al., 2023) all aim to resolve some of the symptoms without really tackling the underlying problems, as evidenced by the ubiquitous and persistent language of the housing crisis.Where solutions to the housing crisis are proposed, they have overwhelmingly focused on a relatively simplistic understanding of the need to increase supply.The 2019 Conservative manifesto pledged to see 300,000 houses built per year by the mid-2020s and one million homes during the course of the 2019 parliament (Wilson and Barton, 2023b).In countenance, research commissioned by the Housing Federation and Shelter suggests a target of 340,000 houses need to be built per year, with 145,000 being affordable (Cast Consultancy and Harlow Consulting, 2020).One of the significant similarities about such targets is the fact that they have all been routinely missed and the UK has not seen 300,000 completions in a year since 1977 (Statista, 2023).This does not seem to bode well for the ongoing mantra of increasing supply and the new Labour government's commitment to increased supply.And here lies a fundamental nub of the problem.The hegemony of the housing crisis maintains a focus on increasing supply and house building targets.This is not to say that there are some limited nods to encouraging people to buy houses and a vision of a homeowning democracy.But, in general terms, the predominant solution to the housing crisis in political rhetoric has been a tunnel vision focused on supply.One of the reasons that these targets are not met is because the housing supply in the UK is overwhelmingly delivered