PROFITING FROM CHESTER’S DWINDLING HOUSING STOCKS

BY PHILLIP E JONES

Although today Chester is primarily known as both a tourism and retail shopping centre, beyond its historic world famous Rows and its circuit of recreated city walls, along with numerous other British towns and cities it is desperately trying to cope with a growing local population and a declining public sector housing stock. 

As elsewhere Chester now has a situation where the general housing sector is primarily led and dominated by the ever increasing ranks of buy-to-let investors cum speculators, who are effectively ‘cherry picking’ the most financially attractive tenants and offering little if any social provision for the city’s poorest, most vulnerable residents.

Because so little publicly owned housing stock remains in Council hands, thanks entirely to the ‘Right to Buy’ legislation introduced by Margaret Thatcher and continued by successive administrations of both political persuasions, the private housing sector in Britain has become little more than a financial opportunity for anyone that can afford the cost of a mortgage. The rapid expansion of privately owned rented accommodation in and around Chester over the past 20 years is typical of and testimony to the obvious earnings potential which is actively being exploited by a large number of developers and property speculators throughout the UK today, often at some expense to the public purse.

Although it might be assumed that all modernisation and development is good for a city like Chester, other related housing strategies, policies and legislation which are applied and enacted by government, local authorities and housing trusts simply serve to compound the underlying problems which are a hidden and long-term feature of the current private rented housing sector in Britain.

Although families, the elderly and the infirm who require affordable social housing are fundamentally protected by statute nowadays, those that fall outside of these categories are not so lucky. These people are generally abandoned to the rigours of the private rented sector and forced to bear the ever increasing costs of administration fees, office costs, rent deposits, etc, as well as the relative insecurity of indeterminate tenancies, from landlords who regard their properties purely as an investment, rather than as somebody’s potential home.

Even in a city like Chester, these changes have seemingly become more evident over the past 3 decades, with a glaring shortage of publicly owned general housing stocks and an apparent ring-fencing of certain properties which are exclusively assigned to family units, the elderly and or the infirm. Consequently, single people that fall outside of these groups are then compelled to go into the private sector to meet their housing needs and in doing so incurring the additional financial and personal costs that such an option brings with it.

It really is nothing short of a national disgrace that the vast revenues raised from Council house sales over the past 30 years were not immediately allocated to the construction of new publicly owned replacement properties which would replenish the stocks depleted by the Right to Buy. The apparent lack of imagination, foresight and political will exhibited by both of the main political parties with regard to the country’s obvious lack of affordable social housing is not only staggering, but unforgivable.  It is surely about time that people began to see the availability and provision of such accommodation as a right for all UK citizens and only actually vote for those political representatives who are prepared to provide it.

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