Owen Hatherley responds to listener questions
Politics Theory Other
Politics Theory Other
4.8 • 551 Ratings
🗓️ 16 July 2025
⏱️ 3 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | The next question, I think you've really answered the first part of it. So I'll just ask the second part. And they just say, I'd be interested in Owen's thoughts on Labour's housing policy a year in. Okay. I've paid attention to this, although I wish I hadn't. What was really obvious early on was that it had been captured. So, you know, the person nominally in charge, the person who's decided to be the press |
| 0:21.6 | got, i.e. she decided to be the kind of proletarian mascot for this extremely middle-class |
| 0:26.0 | project of London lawyers is Angela Rainer. Initially, it seemed very much that Rainer's line on |
| 0:32.5 | this was we were going to, you know, we were basically going to properly fund councils and housing |
| 0:37.1 | associations and build |
| 0:38.2 | a led of social housing because this is not supply is a factor, particularly in London, but it's not |
| 0:45.2 | really, it's not the cause. It's not, you know, the cause for this is the dismantlement of council |
| 0:51.6 | housing, the dismantlement of rent controls, the kind of apotheosis of the rentier, you know, the treatment of housing as assets. This is why we're screwed. Rain is not an idiot. She knows this. But she's been, and her department has, and also her, you know, the minister, specifically in charge of Matthew Pennycook, who is also not an idiot, he knows this too. But, you know, they've been |
| 1:11.3 | convinced, I think probably with the help of Rachel Reeves telling him they're not going to |
| 1:14.6 | get any money for anything. They've been convinced by the sort of tech bro-aligned snake oil salesmen |
| 1:20.8 | who have convinced them that it's actually a problem of supply and regulation. And that if they |
| 1:25.9 | only cut and gut a load of regulations, they can get |
| 1:30.2 | Barrett homes and Taylor Woodrow and the like to build a load of stuff and that will take a lot |
| 1:34.9 | of pressure off. And Rainer will then think, and I can probably get tens of thousands of council |
| 1:39.1 | houses built within this if I play nice. It's bollocks. It's total bollocks. The idea that developers are just |
| 1:48.4 | itching to build and that's all the housing crisis. Actually, they're land banking in a very |
| 1:54.3 | significant way. And also, where they want to build is somewhere very specific, which is between |
| 1:59.0 | London and Oxford. That's where they can make megaprofits. |
| 2:02.5 | And so what you're going to get at best is tens of thousands of new Barrett Holmes estates, |
| 2:08.8 | which are shit housing, poorly built, incredibly pokey, built with no kind of attention to climate |
| 2:15.9 | change whatsoever, their shit housing that will be |
| 2:19.1 | obsolete in five years. We shouldn't be building like that at all, let alone building |
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