 So, yeah, welcome everyone. Thank you for joining. So, this is an Open Economics Forum discussion on housing. It's the tenth, again, series. For those that don't know, Open Economics Forum is a student society out of SOAS, which is part of the Rethinking Economics network aimed at encouraging pluralism in economics. So, a little bit of housekeeping to start off with. We're going to hear a 15-minute talk from Josh and Rachel. And during this time, people can post their questions in the chat box on the far right side. And then we'll pull those questions together and put them to Josh and Rachel at the end. So, a little bit about everyone. So, Josh Ryan Collins is the head of finance and macroeconomics and senior researcher at the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose in UCL. His research takes a cross-disciplinary approach, combining economics, economic history and sociology, and has a particular focus on credit environment. He's the author of the books, Why Can't You Afford a Home, Rethinking the Economics of Land and Housing, and Where Does Money Come from? The Rethinking Economics of Land and Housing, I think, is pretty much a Bible for housing economics, and definitely one that I would encourage you to go on read. Rachel White is an organiser within London Renters Union. I'm sure she'll explain more about what London Renters Union does for those who don't know, so I won't take the time to read it here. But just in short, it's a member-led campaigning union taking action to transform the housing system. London Renters Union has, in the wake of the current pandemic and economic crisis, called for rent suspension, rent debt cancellation, and pretension of renters from the region. They just want their new campaign hashtag, can't pay, won't pay, and you can find more details of that on their website, London's Renters Union.org. Our household is actually one of the legions that have just only become paid-up members since the crisis, so there's lots of other people doing the same, I'm aware. My name's Leah Milani. I'm an economist and an active housing campaigner, mainly with a group called Greater Manchester Housing Action, who tries to connect grassroots with policy-led activism. With that much further ado, I'll move to, should I give it back out? Yeah, we're hoping to bring academics and campaigners together with this talk, so feel free to place your questions in any and every direction, and we'll go around to answering them at the end. Housing has always been touted by politicians as central to our economy, especially in the UK, but when it comes to political action, this is often forgotten. So I'll hand over to Josh, if he can make it for us, why that is. Off you go. Thank you. Thanks very much, and thanks to the Open Economics Forum at SOAS for inviting me to come and talk about housing and land. It's actually been my first opportunity to talk about probably my favourite subject, so I'm very pleased you gave me that opportunity. I've got a couple of slides I wanted to show, because I think it's quite important when we're thinking about the current situation that we have some historical perspective on what's been happening in the housing market and more broadly in the land market, which of course is the underlying economic commodity that we need to focus on when we think about house prices and rent. So I will just initially just take you through those, but just with the mind to thinking about what the current situation means for those graphics I'm going to show. But a broader point I suppose I'd like to just start with is the idea, the concept of economic rent, which is key, I think, to understanding the dynamics we're seeing and some of the contested controversial debates that we're having, including this debate about whether or not rentors should be given, private rentors should be given, should have their rent suspended as London Renters Union is campaigning for. Of course, ground rents or the rent you pay for your home is one form of economic rent, but in its broader term what economic rent refers to essentially is income due to the control over a scarce asset or the creation of and control over a scarce asset. And this concept goes back to the founding fathers of economics, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill and David Ricardo. And for them, the most important scarce asset through which people could generate income was land. And they spent much of their, many of their writings were focused on how you could get around this problem of land owners as economies developed, being able to charge higher and higher land rents or ground rents for the use of land. The demand for which was growing over time as cities expanded and roads were built and services improved and the economy grew and the danger that by charging higher and higher rents, they would absorb the economic surplus that capitalist societies naturally create and if they absorb too much of it, more and more of people's incomes would go on paying rents and there would be less and less available for consumption and less and less profits for firms and firms of course also paying land rents and eventually you would end up in a situation of economic stagnation. Now I think what we're seeing at the moment is we were in an era of very high land rents already and we've now had a massive hit to people's incomes, to household incomes and to firms incomes but we haven't had a corresponding reduction in the rents that they're being charged by landlords. So that in a sense is the key tension from an economic theory perspective that we need to be thinking about. So I'll just share a few slides with you, hopefully everybody can see these. I'm not sure that's actually working, is it? Yeah, there we go, just took a while to come through. So this just shows you the house price to income ratio and advanced economies have taken the average across 15 advanced economies including the larger economies in Europe and the US. And what you can see there, what's interesting about this chart, so this is essentially a widespread use of affordability because we're not that interested in absolute numbers when it comes to house prices. We're interested in actually affordability, the ratio between house prices and income. What's interesting about this chart is it sort of shows that there was some sort of equilibrium here around that. This is scaled to 100, the average is 100 is the long run average, it's an index scale. So that dotted line is the long run average. And what this shows is up until the late 1990s there was some kind of equilibrium. But then of course we had the financial crisis and a huge rise in house prices and asset prices which then collapsed with the financial when the bubble burst in 2008. But then we've had a very rapid return to relative unaffordability since about 2012. So house prices have, and actually the most recent data which isn't on this chart has seen that ratio return almost to the same level as that peak of 2008. Just before Covid hit, housing was already sort of record unaffordable levels. Actually in London I was reading before this talk, house prices have reached their record high in March of this year. So we were not in a good situation before the crisis hit. Now I need to go to the next slide. One result of this is of course that we've had a fall in home ownership in advanced economies. And in particular in Anglo-Saxon economies actually you've seen this more notably. Now what that means from the perspective of economic rent as we're saying at the start is that a smaller and smaller percentage of the population are sharing in that increase in land value that we've seen over time. And of course the ability to gain income from actually letting out a second home as a landlord. Now it was a key part of the sort of capitalist model in Anglo-Saxon economies to have very high rates of home ownership so that a broad mass of citizens could share in the gains from increasing value of their homes. You can see there in that chart that on average across Anglo-Saxon economies that sort of high of 70% home ownership in sort of 2000 has been falling since then so are now down to sort of below 65%. And of course that slack has been taken up by increases in private renting. So private renting are increasingly important. Now for me the key driver of the unaffordability of housing which is largely sort of neglected by mainstream literature on housing although there's some signs of that changing in more recent years is the role of finance. And in particular the deregulation and liberalisation of the financial sector which started in Anglo-Saxon economies in the 1980s but then picked up in European economies as part of the sort of the creation of the Eurozone and greater financial harmonisation in Europe. And financial innovation as well which this process of liberalisation encouraged. What you've seen is a shift in bank credit from the sort of 1990s onwards in particular away from the funding of traditional role of banks to fund firms for working capital or capital investment towards supporting the purchase of existing property and existing land. So sometimes we think about mortgages as a very good thing enables people to buy their first home etc. But actually very little mortgage credit supports the building of new homes. Rather the general impact in my research is demonstrated is inflate the price of existing homes because essentially it's this same point that I started with that land and housing and in particular desirable housing in the areas we want to live is inherently scarce. So if you just throw more credit, more money, asset and banks make a loan they create new money out of nothing. They don't borrow the money from elsewhere in the economy. The results more money chasing the same amount of scarce assets is going to be asset and house price inflation. But this has been rather missed by the mainstream literature which has focused much more on supply side problems which in some countries are an issue but I think in general it's the financialisation of housing it's the increasing use of housing or yeah, increasing use of housing as a financial asset rather than a place to live rather than its sort of use value that has been the problem. And governments have played a key role in that because rather than pushing back against this financialisation process they subsidise the demand side so they've seen that people can't afford homes and rather than reducing the flow of credit into this scarce asset they've actually provided all kinds of subsidies for first home buyers whether that's mortgage interest rate tax relief whether it's grants for first home buyers the various schemes that we've seen in different countries equity loans helped to buy in the UK of course. Now all this does is it further increases the amount of money flowing into a finite supply at supply of land so it doesn't really help the problem and of course the deterioration of the welfare state and people's pensions means there's even more demand for housing and this chart just shows my argument really that there's this correlation between this huge expansion in mortgage credit flowing into housing markets and real house prices so this chart shows the left hand scale is basically mortgage credit outstanding as a percentage of GDP again averaged across 14 advanced economies and the right hand scale shows real house prices the blue light there and you see from the 1990s onwards you see this very strong correlation before then there's less evidence of a correlation what all of this means actually is we've had an increase in household debt because people have been taking on more and more debt to buy a home particularly again in Anglo-Saxon economies and again this makes us very vulnerable to economic shocks such as the pandemic crisis and means we're very poorly adapted to dealing with it when those high rents and those high mortgages are still in place but our incomes are contracting very rapidly so this just shows some people say well you know it doesn't matter if there's more debt in the economy because of the value of our homes our assets is going up this chart shows actually that there has been a big increase in household debt relative to the housing stock so it's not like the assets and the liabilities are balancing out there now my key sort of argument I suppose is you know what's interesting to reflect on is what's going to happen going forward and as I said at the beginning what you've got is people with paying out very big mortgages renters paying a very large proportion of their incomes two landlords because of this asset this inflationary cycle I talked about is housing finance cycle now if you just cut off their incomes due to increasing unemployment the result is fairly obvious people are going to be unable to pay those mortgages or be unable to pay their rent and this chart is just shows US unemployment and mortgage delinquencies and you can see unsurprisingly a very close link between these two variables since 2000 it's Oxford Economics data and of course what we've seen in the US even more so than in the UK is a rise in unemployment on an absolutely terrifying scale great depression style increase in unemployment I think the figure is 36 million in the US at the moment and one can expect massive mortgage delinquencies as a result of that which will create financial instability problems of course now in the UK and some European countries we have this furloughing job retention type schemes in an effort I think partially although it's not really talked about by politicians to prevent mass mortgages or people not paying their rents what's interesting of course isn't that much discussion of that part of the story in the press and the media we've got to help people keep their jobs and maintain the productive capacity of the economy which of course is important but of course another function of these types of schemes is it does maintain those payments through to landlords and to the rentier sector and so I suppose for me the question is does that make sense particularly given the fact that as we know many people are not being picked up by these furlough schemes but are still paying high rents particularly in cities like London but also because I think many of these people on these job retention schemes are not going to actually be able to keep their jobs as the furlough scheme winds down we're going to see large scale unemployment in the UK as well and there is going to be this question of how people continue to pay their mortgages and their rents so for me there needs to be more thinking about how to deal with that problem and I have argued before the Covid crisis that what we need is higher taxes on the rentier sector and of course in the short term to deal with the Covid crisis I would support the suspension of rents or the reduction of rental payments for those people who out of no thought of their own have been made unemployed due to the pandemic and there just hasn't been enough focus on that issue in the policy debate so far there's been a bit more support for home builders who no longer have to obey deliver on their section 106 agreements or their community interest levy obligations these are policies that they pay councils a bit of money for the right to develop housing but much less thinking about how you reduce those rents and from an economic purely obviously there's big inequality issues here but as an economist it doesn't make sense to me for the government to be talking about large industries and other parts of the economy whilst not supporting people with these kinds of rentier demands it should be the rentier sectors that should have the broader shoulders of people who should be supporting the economy more heavily anyway I'll leave it at that because I'm sure there's lots more we can talk about and I think certainly Rachel have something interesting to put on your point about why the government chose the furlough scheme in terms of supporting people to pay their rent rather than giving rent holidays as London Renters Union have called for Rachel are you ready to fire away? Cool thank you very much for that job and I'm going to be talking about very similar topics just from the perspective of the Renters Union and our members so for those of you who don't know the London Renters Union is a union for private renters in London we have been going for about a year and a half and like all unions the idea is that if we all join forces we can fight for better conditions in the housing sector and kind of transform the housing system so that it works in favour of renters rather than landlords so I'll kind of give a picture of renting pre-COVID I know that this is a student so I guess you're all very familiar with how terrible renting is in London but I guess some of the key things to stress is that the laws that protect renters are kind of few and far between and it's really difficult to access justice for renters there's a kind of huge power imbalance between landlords and renters so for example section 21 evictions means that renters can get kicked out for anything which makes it really difficult for renters to have justice for example when they are complaining about disrepair issues or complaining about a rent increase what we see very often the first part of call for landlords is to just evict that person and get in someone new really quickly other issues that we see playing out for our members so we have a large number of members who are migrants and the hostile environment policies mean that migrants and migrant communities really struggle to access good quality rental properties very often landlords will be checking like residency documents and for those with a regular status this pushes them into the hands of the worst landlords out there and another big issue that we see is people living in temporary accommodation so for those of you that don't know if you present as homeless to your local authority before finding permanent housing you'll be stuck in temporary accommodation temporary is a kind of euphemism we see people in there for years and years you know up to like 12-13 years I've known people to be in temporary accommodation and it's often incredibly poor quality so for example converted office blocks whole families living in one room and sharing washing and cooking facilities with the whole floor so in no way fit for human housing Renters in London I think so rents are in London is the most expensive in Europe and on average so we've got three branches in Hackney, Newham and Lewisham in Lewisham rent to spend on average about 57% have been cut their income on rent and in Hackney and Newham it's 60% so working people are spending huge amounts of money giving it to their landlords each month often for substandard quality housing and of course the people that are kind of most impacted by this are working people working class people, communities of colour and migrants too and also younger people because the conditions of when we entered into the job market have meant that it's more difficult for us to get on the housing ladder to be kind of clear the Renters Union isn't really keen that everyone becomes a homeowner but it is important to note that home ownership is one of the few ways in this country to gain a kind of stable housing situation and yeah it's kind of to put it in a kind of historical perspective I mean under capitalism housing is always a commodity but there was a kind of brief period in the post-war periods up until like the 1970s where that was less so huge house building projects and large numbers of living in council housing and in the early 2000s a system of rent controls meant that this was kind of like balanced and that renting was was an affordable way for people to live but a kind of suite of policies and laws brought in in the end of the 80s and in the 90s kind of got rid of a lot of those protections so that's when section 21 was brought in and really encouraged people to like anyone with a bit of money to get on the housing ladder and buy like 2, 3, 4, 5 properties and become landlords and kind of treat those properties as cash cows often in the place of for example good state pensions or good pensions in general so a lot of what you see now is people using the property as in place of a pension and I think what is it? One in six baby boomers own a second home so it's clear that it's kind of intergenerational kind of issue there so coronavirus hits yeah so in London as in the rest of the UK and around the world we see huge oblosses Josh talks about like the furlough schemes and the other schemes that are there to replace people with income those are pretty decent schemes it's not often that I say nice things about the Tory government but they are pretty decent but of course they don't cover everyone and what we're seeing with our members a lot of whom are young potentially in their 20s have definitely been if they're self-employed for less than three years which disqualifies them from accessing that benefit and a lot of people who are migrants don't access to public funds which means that they're disqualified from those benefits too the government also banned evictions for three months which is good in a way like it's good for three months we have still seen some illegal evictions take place landlords are on this but it's good for three months but it does just kick the problem further down the line and we're expecting to see a huge wave of evictions happening but the evictions are allowed to back up again landlords have been asked by the government to show clemency towards their terms but this obviously isn't happening landlords are still demanding full rents and what we're seeing with our members is people taking out loans to pay their rent using their savings to pay their rent entering into debt repayment plans I think like Josh I agree that it's very clear that a lot of the jobs that did exist aren't coming back and the likelihood of someone being able to repay additional on top of what they were already paying in their rent is just not going to happen and also seeing people who are having to go to work even though they don't feel safe in order to pay rent I'll give a quick example of one of our members who lives in Rochester Court which is a book of facts in Herne Hill he is a nurse working on an ICU, his partner lost her income and she was working in events and that has obviously completely dried up Aaron the nurse was paying before the crisis 60% of his income on rent and is now being asked by his landlord who is a multimillionaire and this weekend moved from number 53 to number 52 on the Sunday Times Rich List to enter into a rent repayment plan to pay their rent back once his partner starts earning again but I mean if you're already paying 60% of your wage on rent there's really not much left for you to be paying a rent repayment plan on top of that too so it's kind of a really unrealistic demand that's coming in from landlords so what should be done we have started a campaign called Can't Pay Won't Pay which is asking people to withhold parts or all of their rent particularly people who have lost income during the crisis we're hoping to build a massive people who are withholding rent in order to pressure the government to concede to our five demands which are suspending rent so we want rent to be suspended throughout the duration of this crisis no rent debt which means that we don't want anyone to be building up debt to their landlords during this crisis the evictions ban to be made permanent so that would be for section 21 to be abolished Theresa May government actually agreed to do this but nothing has come of it and we'd like to see that gone for good rent controls so in order to build back a system that is much more livable for Londoners we'd like to see rent controls introduced to bring down the price of housing of rents in London and end to borders in housing so that would be ending passport checks that people face when they are renting and also an end to no recourse to public funds which is the thing that stops migrants from accessing the benefit system so it's really important that people have enough money to keep themselves healthy and so we're kind of asking people to prioritise their immediate needs ahead of that of their landlord renters shouldn't be shouldering the debt of this crisis and it's really clear that any money that renters are now giving to their landlords is just going back into the landlord's pockets it's profit and this is a time for us actually to not be just handing over profit to people especially when it comes from the government purse there's already a huge transfer of wealth to landlords through housing benefit which is housing benefit and local housing allowances which are the benefit that you get if you need support with your housing costs and that goes to your landlord so that's already a huge transfer of state money to private pockets in the UK we spend £13 billion a year on housing benefit so it's not an insignificant sum and we want to see something like the New Economics Foundation's policy they're calling for a suspension of rent for a suspension of rent and to create a special benefit for landlords if they need to cover their subsistence costs during the crisis and beyond it's not something that covers their profit other policy organisations other housing organisations like Shelter are arguing that we should increase the amount of housing benefit so that people can pay their landlords but we agree with that policy on the basis that it's again handing loads of money to landlords and it should be landlords by housing as an investment it shouldn't be the public purse propping up their personal investment so going forward who knows what this government is going to do I find it very hard to predict which way they're going to move I think that it's very possible that they'll give into these demands and I think that the pressure is likely to come from local authorities as they are facing a huge eviction crisis and it's kind of something that we'd also like to see that's been a kind of something that we've often talked about in the past is giving councils the power to repossess empty homes that can be used to house people so again building a bigger stock of housing for people to live in following the crisis so yeah I'll kind of sum up now coronavirus in the housing system with pretty much everything else has kind of laid bare how broken the system is I feel I would be hesitant to say I feel optimistic in fact I feel incredibly pessimistic I think we're walking into a massive homelessness crisis unless something has done about this and done about it quickly but one positive I think is that there is a level of political education and consciousness raising going on because lots of people are looking at their rent payment suddenly as a political thing like why do I pay my landlord so much when I'm actually not getting paid myself and it causes people to question that whole system like ask whose aim is to radically overturn the whole system is a good thing so yeah thank you very much yeah so just to remind people that they can write any questions they've got in the chat on the right we're just starting to get a few questions come through now so while we're just pulling them together and seeing how we can ask them I'll put forward some questions and I guess on these questions they'll probably fall more into one your areas of expertise but feel free to for anyone to talk on them so the first question I'd like to ask is how specifically the racial but also Josh how do you think that the atmosphere during this crisis will act as a catalyst for collective action and what things do you think could you see getting the way of such collective action so the biggest thing that's getting in the way of collective action at the moment is the fact that we can't see each other it's we organise as a union mostly in person obviously we've had to move everything online which has been a huge shift and what we get when you move everything online is that you it's very difficult to connect with go out and build those connections and reach people who don't have access to the internet or don't have access to technology and we need to join in I think there's also something about how quickly this is all happening so for example if you were going to do a rent strike you would spend years and years probably planning and organising and talking to all the people that you need to get involved and build your power we've had two months basically in a campaign which is in some ways similar to a rent strike but in many ways not because of that but on the other hand I guess the kind of the peculiarity about this situation is that everyone is going through something together obviously we're going through it in different ways and people have affected by it very differently but the fact that there are so many people right now experiencing the exact same problem with the housing creates a really interesting moment for us to try and capture and build on and collectivise and really we can be speaking to hundreds and hundreds of people at the same time about the exact same thing whereas in normal times you'll be speaking to one person about their heating and one person about their water but it really is something that we're all going through together collectively and hopefully that kind of emboldens or kind of increases our capacity to act collectively Geoff do you want to add anything to that or can we move on to another question well I think Rachel summed it up quite well I mean I think she's right that there is a sort of things are moving so fast I mean you kind of come up with a policy idea and then the next day it's sort of no longer relevant because the government's you know moved on and done something that means it's no longer it's sort of no longer worked I mean I'm finding it challenging in it across a range of areas I do think though that you know it sort of illustrates a rather fundamental point that these rents these rent payments are dependent on income right they are dependent on the economy functioning firms paying household money and households then paying paying their mortgages or their rents and if you simply break off the start of that flow of income by virtue of closing down the firm or unemployment it's just completely unreasonable to then expect that rent payment to still be made that rent payment is in a sense the form of wealth extraction rather than wealth creation the wealth creation is the first part of the cycle so I do think this is a critical moment for us to sort of sit down and sort of face that reality because what we've seen over the last 30 years is the rent payment getting larger and larger whilst incomes have been stagnating essentially I mean real median incomes have stagnated not only in the UK but in advanced economies so in a sense that tension between larger and larger rents whether it's mortgages or it's private ground rent and income we've now reached breaking point essentially with this crisis so the opportunity for more radical interventions is definitely there Nice, I think we can use that segue quite nicely into the next question because you know when we talk about that most people can see that if you're asking for people to continue their rent payments they're not getting extra income that's an odd policy but I think that comes down to the political economy of how our government makes policy so we've got a couple of questions along those lines here One says how can the government reverse the housing credit feedback dynamic considering the large percentage of home ownership in the UK and the reliance on equity withdrawal to prop up stagnating wages and I thought this like this links into Josh what you talked about in your book about how over the sort of the thatch years and then even moving forward into sort of the current conservatives government's approach to social housing you talked about a political economy shift towards home ownership I noticed though that home ownership in the UK as a percentage is actually quite low I mean you said on the graph you showed that it's declined but of the euros that countries I looked at it was ranked 31 out of 35 and the profit economy still so dominated by home ownership even despite actually not such a high level of home ownership Yeah that's a good question and I'll try and address the question from the audience as well I think part of the reason is that vested interests the people that make decisions in parliament the development sector, the banking sector which makes a lot of money out of a sort of policy arrangement that favours home ownership over other forms of tenure are all invested in this model essentially and they're invested in the what I call the housing finance feedback cycle whereby an increased flow of credit raises house prices increases developer profits increases the size of mortgages people need to borrow increases the rents they have to pay and then increases incomes at the top of the socioeconomic distribution and unfortunately I think there's been some research that shows something like 80% of MPs have second homes they're part of the sector that are invested in this problem so from a political economy perspective there is just a power problem here where those people making decisions have got vested interests however having said all of that I do think we are gradually particularly in a city like London nearing a tipping point where you will get a majority of people not home owners either or potentially are home owners but have such huge mortgages that they are essentially on the bread line struggling to make payments having to cut their expenditure on other sort of vital goods and services and there may be a constituency a political constituency which clearly Rachel is trying to mould the work at London's renters union to mobilize for more radical interventions and I think you see that dynamic happening in other cities in the UK as well perhaps and in other countries whereby we have had this fall in home ownership and even for the people who own their own homes older wealthier people they are worried about how their children have to be able to afford to buy a home in the nice area where they are living and to have the same quality of home life and space that they have got used to so I think even home owners are starting to question the current arrangement just to answer the question about breaking this cycle I have made a number of proposals I do think the taxation system is key I think we need to be taxing those rents, those land rents I would propose a annual land value tax sort of Henry George solution so that would be a tax that just taxes the increase in the value of the land it doesn't tax the structure of the property on top of the land so if you put in a new kitchen you are not going to be taxed more money just because you have made an improvement to your home but if you live in an area where the new railway line has gone in or where there is more general economic development and the value of your wealth has gone up through no effort of your own that is a very efficient tax because you are not constraining anyone's income or any form of investment by industry and actually I think we need to see a broader shift away from taxing incomes and on to taxing rents which actually all economists agree on whether you are left-wing or right-wing I do think the key issue here is to separate the land value from the property price and another proposal that we might want to be thinking about is some sort of national housing bank of some sort or even on a more regional level adding local authorities with the capacity to purchase land or purchase property under circumstances where maybe house prices are falling rapidly people can't afford to repay their mortgages they are in negative equity or they can't pay their rents as we have now the state could come in and essentially take some equity or even buy the house and the land in full and the owner of that house who is in negative equity or can't pay their rent then pays the local authority or the state according to their need without them being thrown out of their house basically so there are various different ways you might do this and obviously it costs a lot of money but we are now in a world of essentially negative interest rates the UK government that is Germany has been doing it for a while so it is kind of crazy not to be investing in our housing stock and infrastructure when it is essentially free to borrow and we need to see much more ambition from the national government and local government to deal with this crisis I mean house prices are projected to fall by 16% according to the Bank of England it is hard to know exactly what will happen but should that happen then we do need to think seriously about how we prevent evictions and negative equity and a more serious collapse in the housing market Thanks We have a question here How would you respond to Shadow Housing Secretary Thangdom Debenair who suggested that the rent suspensions are a regressive policy as they would also benefit those who don't need it What conditions could be put in place to ensure that only those who need help are covered? Rachel do you want to comment on that? Yeah I would come in and say that I think it should apply to all rents not just to those who have lost income My reason for that is that when you make things conditional you would never be able to go out as we've seen with the furlough schemes and the self-employment scheme as well and for me I just think it's really important that everyone is covered by a suspension of rent I also think it's important to think about how this crisis is affecting people so even if maybe I haven't lost my job that doesn't mean that there's still a level of uncertainty around what my future is and for me to be still adding to my landlord's profit is not my priority I accept that that's maybe a lot of a rather position and the rents and positions in opposition to landlords I agree that that's maybe not the most a policy that can sit well with everyone but yeah, just to ensure that no one falls through the net I would make it universal and also just to point out there are lots of things that are universal like our healthcare that people could pay for I could probably afford private healthcare but it's a regressive policy because it's universal okay cool we've got a couple of questions regarding home office and working from home obviously this has become one of the surprising things that have been surprising a lot of people found able to do their jobs at home Hannah asks I wonder if you had any thoughts on how if this might be relevant to housing and land values for the medium to longer term and then I think there's LinkedIn to join us question which asks what are your views on committed development rights for the quality of homes especially for those on low incomes in light of the new COVID-19 sorry I didn't quite catch that first question could you repeat that yeah sure they're essentially asking whether the increasing amount of home office work that's being done is going to affect urban development and what this means in terms of house prices and housing and land situation in terms of reconfiguration of people cities I guess I can have a brief go at that although Rachel may have a better idea of what's going on I mean so I think what you've seen with this crisis particularly in cities like London is a lot of people have suddenly realised that they can do their job from any part of the country they don't need to be actually living in London and so as a result many of them have left their stop paying high rents and gone and lived either with their parents or with friends in another part of the country where their rents are significantly lower because they can do their job just as well and perhaps there's you know not much indication that there will be a return to work in the near future I mean that seems to be changing perhaps with government policy but I mean I don't know the data on this Rachel may know better than me but anecdotally that's what I've heard that a lot of people are I mean I've had a builder who I know who's told me that workers have returned to Eastern Europe because they simply don't have any work but they're paying his very high rents here in London there's more work in Eastern Europe for them and that means for him that he simply has no labour to carry on so with regard to urban I mean if that dynamic is quite large that would one would expect to come with pressure on house prices and on rents in a city like London even if there is a sort of medium term recovery in particular I suppose if employees become more relaxed about people working at home on a permanent basis and of course this is a great experiment in doing that and I think a lot of employees are probably realising that they can trust workers to you know to work at home permanently and they don't need to be paying sky high rents in London in order to do their work yeah just adds a little bit to that so that's exactly what we're seeing anecdotally as well people often just you know they've lost their job you know why pay London rent then you could move back and middle parents as well I mean that's a little choice but moving back to parents or friends in places that are outside London because it's just not worth paying the rent especially when you don't have any of the benefits of London living like everything flows I would hope that this sees as a decline of the city centre just being used for kind of work purposes and that's my personal point of view I find central London very depressing and that is the kind of huge increase in just like a decrease in people actually living there increase in both office space and like luxury apartments that no one can afford or most people can't afford on the question of the mix development right so am I right in thinking that this is the like thing that allows me to turn an office into a dwelling without any planning commission or would like far be any funding commission I am not against that in airy but I do think that it's really well it's really important when you're building any housing that it's like good quality and like it's a human habitation and beyond that like a nice space for people to live in if it's possible to convert all those you know empty office that are sitting in central London right now into housing like fantastic you know theoretically I'm not against that but you know whether that's possible is a different question and yeah if it is going to happen then it should be done properly and with residents in mind rather than just like landlords and property developers Excellent yeah we'll just I think we'll just in one last question before I ask for some closing statements from you guys is there any models for radical social housing policy that you feel could be transferable at least partially to the UK context and he says the programs in Vienna and in Kerala come to my mind well I mean I'm not yeah I'm not that familiar with the Austrian or Kerala housing programs but I mean my understanding in Austria is that much of the land in the city is still publicly owned and they've resisted quite effectively the sort of privatisation of that land and as a result they have managed to maintain relatively lower prices and they have quite a sophisticated social renting provision although they have had and I gave a talk just about six months ago they have had a spike in house prices recently so they haven't been immune to the housing finance cycle I think and there's pressure on that model as far as I understand but as we were saying earlier I think now is the time for a broader re-evaluation of how we treat land in the economy how should we tax it should we lend against it to the degree we currently do should the primary purpose of land and the way it's the land market be the provision of affordable secure decent quality housing and space for business as well to operate or should we continue with a system which essentially supports rent extraction and essentially continue with it as a financial asset that's the big question if we're not asking that question now in the middle of essentially I think the worst recession in our lifetimes that we're now facing then we're sort of really missing a trick again I don't know enough about either of the systems to see which would be better transported to the UK but the Renters Union our dream utopian city or city or country is one in which landlordism is abolished and that housing is either potentially through home ownership but also by local authorities and by co-ops too we'd like to see a high level of democracy in these housing so people who are going to live in that housing deciding how it's built and where it's built and what decisions are made over the building use I think it's important to note that whilst social housing is kind of seen as this amazing thing and in many ways it was when it existed properly it wasn't perfect it's not perfect, you know, local authority controlled housing isn't perfect and it would be great to bring a kind of collective democracy to our housing and to our cities and to our early spaces Excellent London Renters Union actually did a May Day online zoom rally where they had some different people from around the world talking about their approaches to the crisis so you can find that on their Facebook page it was reported and you can check that out Any final remarks from you guys? Rachel first Not really, thanks everyone If you're renting in London, please do join Renters Union as taking a look at our campaign we're planning to get involved if you are struggling with your rent or if you want to show us all the data on the place you are No, I really enjoyed the session thanks everyone for listening in I would just probably promote my latest book Why Can't You Afford A Home If you want a fairly concise summary of my ideas hopefully some of those ideas are still useful in today's post-COVID recovery sphere Thanks Bersford genuinely inspiring words to see us through the next coming times up ahead Thank you to Marie and Ollie who are the organisers behind this webinar and also Yasta Firmas and Sara Stevenham on the faculty side helping out The next webinar in the series will be number 11 where we'll be discussing the COVID-19 healthcare crisis groups and the EU with Oranya and Dimakou However, it's been the event has been changed so it's now on Monday the 26th coming up but still at the same time 3-4 Thank you again for everyone involved and for everyone who tuned in Stay safe, take care, join a union Thank you