"# This is the house that Jack built, y'all." "# Remember this house." "For a good life, there are some basic needs." "# This is the land that he worked by hand." "Someone to love." "Somewhere to live." "Somewhere to work." "And something to hope for." "Love, home, work, hope." "Beliefs - expectations which have helped us define the health of British society for generations." "There's an election coming and over a series of Panorama special reports we're asking whether politics and politicians can really deliver what Britain wants." "Tonight, I'll be exploring what home means to us." "This is good enough for me." "I don't need a mansion." "I wouldn't know what to do with all the rooms." "We all want to do the best for our children." "If it means for the next five years, I'm in a bit more hardship then so be it." "As a child, I'd moved so many times, that when I left home as a teenager and came to London the entire focus of my ambition was to put down roots, to get a place of my own." "It took me six years to save enough to make it happen - here in Camden." "Hi, you must be Suzie." "Hi Mariella, how are you?" "This is so weird." "I bet." "I haven't walked up those steps for 26 years." "Oh, don't worry you'll recognise the kitchen." "It will make you feel right at home." "This was the first home of my own." "I bought the flat in 1984." "Three decades later I'm back meeting the latest owner, Suzie Ruffley who lives here with her partner Sean." "The kitchen must be, er" "Oh, it's the same!" "Yeah, not that bit yet." "The kitchen is the same." "Yeah." "Not done that bit yet." "It was the realisation of their dream too." "This is where they started a family." "Their son Con is 16 weeks' old." "Bathroom, it's not avocado still is it?" "No, that's so much chicer than it was when I was still here." "This is my bedroom." "Oh, wow - it's actually a really nice flat." "Oh, it's lovely." "I'm taking a bit of pride in my choice of first apartment." "I know what bricks and mortar mean to me, but what about you?" "We hit the road with a travelling sofa and we sat down for a chat in Glasgow, Birmingham, Belfast and Cardiff." "When I hear the word home I think of a place that's safe, a place that's comfortable." "A place where I can have my little corner." "Home will always be my parents' home until I get married and buy my own house." "Park up outside the house and I look up and I think that's mine, that's ours." "No matter where you go in the world, home is that special place." "Whenever I am at school and somebody says home, it always makes me what to go home." "My first home cost me just over ?" "40,000." "Back then I was earning ?" "10,500 a year as an assistant at a record company." "If I was starting out today doing the same sort of job there is no way I would be able to afford it." "How much did you pay for it?" "Well it was ten times what you paid for it." "So nearly ?" "400,000." "Yeah." "Or ?" "400,000." "Isn't it incredible?" "It's crazy." "And Suzie's not alone in thinking that." "Across the UK dramatic rises in house prices have put the dream of owning a home out of the reach of many." "If you look at the ratio, for example, of current earnings against current house values against those of the 1960s it's something like seven times as much." "We are seven times - if you like - less able to afford a home these days than we could in the 1960s." "And that's the problem - it's the escalation of property values beyond the affordable." "I was part of a lucky generation for whom home ownership was a possibility but for many young people today it's just a pipe dream." "Everybody under 40 has some kind of housing problem." "They're paying too much for their mortgage, they're paying too much for their rent, they're in trouble one way or another." "They've all got a problem because we have a huge shortage." "The simple truth is there aren't enough properties to go round and that pushes up prices." "Last year the average price of a home in the UK rose by 10% - while our building rate in England fell to its lowest since the 1920s." "It's estimated that we need to build 250,000 new homes every year for the foreseeable future." "Certainly, 250,000 is a sensible target." "We're just nowhere near there at the moment." "We've got a long way to go." "There's nowhere for the next generation to go and it's cutting off our noses to spite our face if we don't face up to this." "When my parents bought their house, or when my grandparents bought their house, it was next to nothing and now its extortionate for younger people and it's really, really difficult." "I think you have got to be earning really big bucks before you can earn or get a decent mortgage and that could put a lot of young folk off and bring a lot of young folk into debt." "I worry about the children and I worry if they will ever be able to afford a house." "Youngsters must feel very insecure, even if, even if professional people now are, they don't have permanent jobs, they're on contracts and I now are, they don't have permanent jobs, they're on contracts and" "I would feel very insecure taking out a very big mortgage nowadays." "Southend in Essex - home to the highest proportion of owner-occupiers in the whole of England and Wales." "But even here it's proving increasingly difficult for first-time buyers." "I just think it looks really nice outside and I love the trees." "Yeah, me too." "Lawrence and Megan have their hearts set on this three-bedroom house." "The kitchen pretty much we can leave the same, I guess." "It's on the market for ?" "195,000." "They saved hard for their first family home for them and 12-week-old son Freddie." "We've saved, I did a lot of overtime at work." "I changed my car." "Yeah, Megan sold her car, so we managed to get a bit more money like that." "But they still couldn't afford it without help." "Lawrence lived with his future mother-in-law, Jackie, for a year to save money." "And Jackie took out a ?" "10,000 loan towards their deposit." "We all wanna do the best by our children - if it means for the next five years, I'm in a bit more hardship, then so be it." "The coalition government's help-to-buy scheme and changes to stamp duty have helped thousands of first time buyers." "But for Jackie, politicians still need to do more." "I don't know quite what's gone wrong, whether the Government needs to step in and try and do a little bit more, or local councils need to build more properties for these young people to move in." "Over the last 1000 years we've only ever met demand for homes" "Over the last 100 years we've only ever met demand for homes when Government has intervened." "The Boundary Estate in East London is one of the earliest social housing schemes in the world." "Opened in 1900 it was the start of a housing revolution - decent homes for everyone." "It created a new dynamic between politicians and the people." "There was a goal that everyone in the country should be well housed." "There was this accepted idea that it was the Government's job to make sure everyone had a home to live in." "Government intervened on a massive scale after the Second World War - to clear bombed-out slums and then later to cope with the baby boom." "There will be more for everybody, more houses to let and more houses to sell." "While the politics of the past built houses, it laid the foundations for a national obsession too." "As the middle class expanded after the war home ownership increasingly became the key to prosperity." "We used to live in London and very much the conversation in the nineties and noughties is really about the value of your property and very much about your value tied up in that." "At the time of the property boom I think the thing went particularly crazy and there was a lot of greedy, greedy people out there." "I think in this country we all believe that we are not fully-fledged human beings unless we own a property." "It was Margaret Thatcher's hugely popular Right to Buy policy which fuelled the idea that home was more of a nest egg than a nest." "At ?" "8,500 it's a snip." "Thousands of families could, for the first time, own their own homes." "But not everyone was happy." "In Scotland, protests met the sale of the millionth council house." "A million people had the chance to buy their own homes and we're on to the next million now." "What about the 24,000 homeless in Scotland?" "Don't try to detract from that achievement." "And we wouldn't if there was something being done for the people who don't have a house." "As council homes were sold off, only a fraction, were replaced." "As council homes were sold off, only a fraction were replaced." "One of the things that the architects of the Right to Buy policy imagined was that when they stopped councils building new council houses to replace the ones that they sold, the free market, private house builders, would step in to replace the missing homes." "That simply did not happen." "The Scottish Government is scrapping Right to Buy next year." "And the Welsh Assembly may follow suit." "Across the whole of the UK - 2.4 million council homes have been sold since 1980." "Last year in England 11,000 were sold off while just 1,180 were built." "The coalition have made it more attractive for tenants to purchase by offering bigger discounts on the price of their homes." "We've all paid for those council houses, to give them away to the people who happen to be there now, jolly nice for them." "Who could blame them accepting the offer but not very clever in the longer term." "None of my friends have got their own house, or their own apartment or flat you know." "They are never going to." "Social housing, come on!" "LAUGHS" "George Crawshaw feels he is one of the lucky ones." "The building site foreman is a tenant with Great Places, a housing association based in Manchester." "They have to be proper family homes, three, four-bedroom homes built for poor people, working class people." "There's nought profound about it." "It's an absolute necessity." "Not everybody is going to be able to afford to buy their own house." "So people shouldn't be expected to do that." "George believes our obsession with property ownership excludes people like him." "Everybody has to have aspirations and stuff but there has to be more social housing not just in Salford or the north-west but across the country, especially in London." "Last year Great Places built more than 500 new properties." "To them building homes means building unity." "To them building homes means building community." "If we get people living in affordable homes, where their fuel bills aren't mad, where they feel safe and secure, that means that they feel part of the unity." "that they feel part of a community." "It means their kids go to the local school, it means people are probably spending money in the local shops, using local services, all those things which keep society going." "Southwark in south London is doing more than any other borough in England to build new council housing." "But the crisis is so bad, their building programme barely puts a dent in their housing waiting list." "Their ambition is to build 11,000 by 2043 but with the waiting list for those homes already at 11,000 I wouldn't put money on them solving the housing crisis by what will be my 81st birthday." "Nobody pretends that our council house building programme is an answer to Southwark's housing problems or even London's housing problems." "But it is a demonstration of our ambition and that we want to play our part in solving the crisis." "But it is down to others, it's down to other councils, it's down to the Government to help play a part in ensuring there is sufficient housing going forward." "If you can't get a council house or afford to buy a home, the only other alternative is renting." "In England, the number of households rented privately has almost doubled over the last ten years to nearly four million." "Each month I am paying ?" "600." "I don't know where is it going and each year I am getting another loan and it's just going on renting again." "Obviously renting sometimes feels like throwaway money." "I didn't want to rent a property if I am being perfectly honest." "I wanted to try and avoid it which did mean me having to stay at my mum and dad's a wee bit longer than I had hoped but it is part and parcel." "Two years ago, for the first time, there were more people renting from a private landlord than living in social housing." "It's left some of the most vulnerable open to exploitation." "You've got a map, haven't you?" "You've got a map of this area." "Lovely." "Newham in East London is one of the poorest boroughs in the UK and has some of the worst landlords." "The council hopes a new licensing scheme will drive out the rogues." "Its enforcement team, supported by police, are carrying out an early morning inspection." "We're just here from property licensing." "OK." "We just need to check out who is living here." "At this address, the landlord has failed to register his property." "It doesn't take long to see why." "There are four of you living in this one room here?" "No, we have for the other rooms we can live in for the night time." "We can sleeping over there." "And my wife and two child, she living for there." "She sleeps in here and you sleep in another room." "The house is cold, damp and decrepit, but the landlord is earning nearly ?" "3000 a month in total from it." "Here you've got a plug socket, right under a pipe, with the wire going out." "And that's the power for the room next door to the family I just spoke to." "Eleven people are living in this three-bedroom house." "There's bare wires hanging out." "This is the only place where you can come and wash and shower." "For 11 people including children." "But what they discover in the back garden beggars belief." "A woman living in a breeze-block extension, its entrance to the main house bricked up." "There's no toilet, no water and, on this bitterly cold morning, no heating." "That's one of the worst." "Well, it's the..." "It's the shoddiest extension you've ever seen." "You know, you really wouldn't put, you know, an animal in there really so to rent it to humans is disgraceful." "The really horrific thing is that someone's actually charging rent for this, ?" "350 a month to live in a, a shed with no water supply or anything, in the back garden." "Reeta has an office job but says she simply can't save enough for a deposit for a decent room to rent." "I had to take it up because I tried a lot outside and they were asking for like ?" "500, ?" "600 a month for a room, the similar size of the room, but inside the house." "So if I basically take a room which is like ?" "600 a month then, like, I just lose 70% of my monthly wages on that rent." "So you're a, a professional person?" "Yeah." "And you're forced to live in accommodation like this?" "Four, three, four days back I had another heater which went off in the night at 11 o'clock." "So literally I was just sleeping with jackets and coats and everything on." "The Newham team have prosecuted more bad landlords than in all the other" "London boroughs combined, a total of 472 in the last two years." "This is not what we want in London in the 21st century, no way." "It's not what we want, but it's what we've got." "And successive governments have failed to solve the housing crisis." "Something they are now acknowledging." "Britain has been chronically underbuilding for decades." "We haven't done enough as a country on housing." "By taking themselves out of housing, they have broken this tie between government and the people who look to them for support." "That loss of patronage then means people ask themselves what do we have politicians for." "Last week, our politicians made promises with echoes of the past." "We will build more homes that people can afford, including starter homes." "There is no bigger priority for the next Labour government than building homes again in our country." "The main political parties and some of the minor ones are now promising mass house-building programmes." "If it looks like a lot of billions, good, that's fine, spend it." "It helps the economy and we'll get it all back again." "Don't treat it like just spending money, national debt, increasing the deficit." "It is not that kind of money, it is investment." "It's prudential investment." "Housing is always that." "While the auction for our votes hots up, here in Lancaster a new movement is taking shape." "It's called custom build." "Kitchen down here." "Extends down to the dining room area." "The idea is that small scale developers buy land, secure planning permission and then sell plots to home hunters looking to design their own property." "If we can repeat that in our towns and cities across the UK, you know, housing delivery can really, really go up." "We're having a breakfast bar put over here rather than have the wall." "We're taking the walls down." "Jim Coombe hopes to move in this summer." "It was nice here that we could have absolute blank canvas, do your own thing." "We moved walls, we've taken walls away, we've moved doors, we've moved the whole thing, so the advantage there was the fact that we could start where we wanted on the property." "For decades, major UK developers have kept a grip on the number of homes we can buy by holding onto land, waiting for house prices to go up before they build." "So, could custom build, in a small way, break the monopoly of the so-called "land bankers" and help us to chip away at the housing crisis?" "We want more people doing more things, that's the only way we're going to get the numbers up after so many decades of not building enough homes." "Already in France, Germany and Austria, more than 60% of homes are custom built." "We feel there's potentially huge amounts of growth." "I mean, currently self build accounts for about, on average, between 10 and 20,000 plots per year." "We believe custom build could double that." "Custom build has cross party support and will be backed by legislation before the end of this Parliament." "But is it all just a numbers game?" "Developers can't magic a sense of place out of nowhere, they can't create community." "What they can do is put all that fertile stuff there." "If that place is high quality then there's, in my view, a chance to build something." "And it's only then that you start creating the real capitol of any worth which is the social capitol in a place where people feel proud of where they live." "That's exactly what's happening where George Crawshaw lives." "He's been given a home and helped into a job by Manchester-based housing association Great Places." "Today, it's mopping floors, tomorrow, it's fixing the door or fixing a toilet or a bit of plastering or, you know, fixing a door frame, you know." "It's something different every day." "When Great Places commission contractors to develop sites, they encourage them to offer apprenticeships and even jobs to tenants, which helps to pay the rent." "You get to work, you get involved, you meet nice lads like everybody on the site, lovely people, we're all in it together." "You got camaraderie, you know, and also if you walk down the street you can get a cup of coffee." "You can get a car, you can afford petrol, you can put food in your belly." "Can you start looking at plots 13." "Employed for the last three years, it has totally turned his life around." "Where would he be without Great Places?" "On me cars." "I'd still be on the dole." "To work, to have a job, it makes you feel like a man." "George is a great example of the journey and that's what we like to tell a lot of our tenants." "It's not going to change overnight, you are on a journey and each step is moving you towards your destiny." "But where are the rest of us heading?" "If we build more, that means development, a word that conjures progress in large swathes of the world but in this country, when it comes to property, it invariably raises hackles." "Over the past 50 years, we've shifted from a position where now, people won't even mention the word development." "It throws them into absolute a recoil, default position of terror and opposition." "There is particular recoil, terror and opposition when building on green belt land is proposed but there are those who believe that time has come." "I think the reality of much of the green belt is that it's not very beautiful and it's, you know, whether you class it as countryside or not I think is a moot point but I think the point here is we do need" "to build on our green belt." "This sense that we are already at the max of building, concreting over the countryside is simply not true." "Do we have to arrive at a situation where green field, green belt are no longer considered to be the totems that can't be touched?" "I think those aspects of the national character are going to be very hard to change." "What I do know is that there's an enormous amount still of brown field land, old airfields, disused railway sidings, all over our towns and cities and indeed, certainly in the more rural, outlying communities," "that can be built on and should be built on." "Kevin McCloud believes it'll take an enormous political and cultural shift to fix the bigger picture." "The system we have, the structure we have is dysfunctional, it's broken." "But all of this basically needs to come from Westminster." "You need central government commitment to housing policy, to design and to the idea that housing and design are expressions of our culture, of who we are." "Do you see any big vision?" "You need to aim there because you are going to end up there." "At the moment, we are kind of aiming there and we are delivering right down there." "Or not delivering at all." "But what could the impact of building more be on those of us who are sitting pretty?" "That is going to hurt the assets, the property, the accounts of most people in this country." "All those of us who own our own houses have to ask ourselves, do we want the price of our houses to fall, because that is what could, and I would argue should happen if a kind of justice and fairness is to" "be restored to the housing situation in this country." "It seems that nothing short of a total revolution in how we and politians view housing is required." "We've really got to start again and have leadership that says, quality housing for a quality of life." "Those of us who've been part of the ever escalating boom in house prices may consider ourselves lucky but our children are paying a high price." "I know the economic situation hasn't been great for a long time but, you know, these people are our future at the end of the day and they do need somewhere to live." "Just give people a chance, that would be really good." "I think they could do more." "How is it possible for us to feel confident and secure as a nation when so many of us face insecurity about such a fundamental part of our lives?" "And next week, Clive Myrie reports on how our working lives are changing."