> Twenty years ago the economist Kate Barker blew the whistle on Britain’s homebuilding shortage in a landmark government review. Just as she warned, the divide between the have-homes and the have-nots has widened. Indeed, her younger son lived with her until he was 30 because he could not afford his own home. But today Barker, 66, is invigorated. “It’s a very exciting time at the moment, isn’t it?” she says as we meet amid a volley of what she calls “startling” planning announcements by the new Labour government. Days later Barker is made deputy chairwoman of the task force that will spearhead the generation of new towns — billed as the “largest housebuilding programme since the postwar period”. She is now in charge of helping to end the housing crisis she had warned of all those years ago.
> By happy coincidence our interview takes place at the London hotel Barker frequented during the writing of her seminal review, and over the ten years she served on the Bank of England’s rate-setting monetary policy committee, a role she had until 2010. Thoughtful and fiercely intelligent, she is already waiting when I arrive 15 minutes early. “It’s a good corner, this,” she says, nodding approvingly. Gordon Brown, then chancellor, described Barker’s 2004 report on housing supply as the “most detailed housing review in 50 years”. Commissioned by the Treasury, it was seen as a blueprint for future governments to address affordability problems. It remains this century’s most significant review of housing supply, a Home Builders Federation (HBF) report said this year.
> In a warning that is as prescient today as it was 20 years ago, Barker wrote at the time: “I do not believe that continuing at the current rate of housebuilding is a realistic option, unless we are prepared to accept increasing problems of homelessness, affordability and social division, decline in standards of public service delivery and increasing the costs of doing business in the UK — hampering our economic success.” She did not expect people would still talk about her review two decades on. “I’m both surprised that it’s lasted so long and slightly irritated that people don’t remember what was in it.” For one, Barker is “slightly distressed” that the “steep” government target of 300,000 new homes a year has been ascribed to her review. “You won’t find it there.” Her numbers were more complicated, setting out three affordability scenarios. However, the HBF has calculated that England is two million homes short of the number that would have been built under Barker’s most ambitious scenario.
> Even in the 2010s Barker says she was reluctant to use the term “housing crisis”. But it has “got insidiously worse year by year. It now has reached a point where I’d say it is a crisis,” she says. “It’s a boiling frog, isn’t it? You go along saying, ‘Oh, it’s not quite that bad, it’s not quite that bad.’ And I think, ‘Oh no, it is really bad.’”
When did it tip over the edge? Barker says she had thought house prices were higher because interest rates were lower. When rates started to rise, she expected house prices to fall more than they did. “I hadn’t anticipated that we’d see such a big rise in rents … If the housing market hadn’t been very tight, [private landlords] wouldn’t have been able to pass the rents on because people would have had more options.”
> Since her 2004 review the backlog has almost quadrupled. Households with unmet housing needs have grown from 950,000 to 3.7 million. That includes those who are homeless; living in temporary accommodation such as hostels; in overcrowded, unsuitable or unaffordable homes; and hidden households, such as adult children still living with their parents. Barker’s son was one of them. Nine years ago I asked Barker what the housing crisis looked like for her. “My younger son is homeless,” she told me. He boomeranged back home after graduating from university, but earned too little to rent his own place. “It’s very awkward talking about my family,” Barker says when I ask about him again, but graciously expands to highlight the “intragenerational problems” of the housing shortage. “I’m afraid I helped both my sons with mortgage deposits — my younger son has finally left home.” He lived in the family’s three-bedroom house, in a large Essex village, for about ten years after university.
> She finds it striking that, in the space of a decade, from 2011 to 2021, nearly three quarters of a million more adult children are living with their parents. “Is that a social evil? It was quite nice in Covid with my youngest son there. But actually it constrains people’s job search.” It did for her son, Barker says. “When you’re setting up a family house, you don’t think of living somewhere that’s going to enable job search for your children in their twenties … It is a problem.” One of Barker’s biggest disappointments is the failure of successive governments to build enough homes for social rent. “Because of the right to buy we have not added to the stock of social rent in the last eight years. It really takes me aback.”
> She became an economist because she was choosing her A-level subjects during the OPEC crisis in the 1970s, when inflation was very high. “That was very damaging to my family’s finances and I wanted to understand why.” Barker also wanted to leave her all-girls school, which — handily for her — did not offer economics. Instead she went to a sixth form in Stoke-on-Trent. “I had a great economics teacher. I just loved it.” That decision changed her life. Now, on the New Towns task force, led by Sir Michael Lyons, she will change Britain. While some new towns will be inspired by the 32 developed after the Second World War (now home to almost three million people), most will be large urban extensions and regeneration schemes of at least 10,000 homes each.
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> Twenty years ago the economist Kate Barker blew the whistle on Britain’s homebuilding shortage in a landmark government review. Just as she warned, the divide between the have-homes and the have-nots has widened. Indeed, her younger son lived with her until he was 30 because he could not afford his own home. But today Barker, 66, is invigorated. “It’s a very exciting time at the moment, isn’t it?” she says as we meet amid a volley of what she calls “startling” planning announcements by the new Labour government. Days later Barker is made deputy chairwoman of the task force that will spearhead the generation of new towns — billed as the “largest housebuilding programme since the postwar period”. She is now in charge of helping to end the housing crisis she had warned of all those years ago.
> By happy coincidence our interview takes place at the London hotel Barker frequented during the writing of her seminal review, and over the ten years she served on the Bank of England’s rate-setting monetary policy committee, a role she had until 2010. Thoughtful and fiercely intelligent, she is already waiting when I arrive 15 minutes early. “It’s a good corner, this,” she says, nodding approvingly. Gordon Brown, then chancellor, described Barker’s 2004 report on housing supply as the “most detailed housing review in 50 years”. Commissioned by the Treasury, it was seen as a blueprint for future governments to address affordability problems. It remains this century’s most significant review of housing supply, a Home Builders Federation (HBF) report said this year.
> In a warning that is as prescient today as it was 20 years ago, Barker wrote at the time: “I do not believe that continuing at the current rate of housebuilding is a realistic option, unless we are prepared to accept increasing problems of homelessness, affordability and social division, decline in standards of public service delivery and increasing the costs of doing business in the UK — hampering our economic success.” She did not expect people would still talk about her review two decades on. “I’m both surprised that it’s lasted so long and slightly irritated that people don’t remember what was in it.” For one, Barker is “slightly distressed” that the “steep” government target of 300,000 new homes a year has been ascribed to her review. “You won’t find it there.” Her numbers were more complicated, setting out three affordability scenarios. However, the HBF has calculated that England is two million homes short of the number that would have been built under Barker’s most ambitious scenario.
> Even in the 2010s Barker says she was reluctant to use the term “housing crisis”. But it has “got insidiously worse year by year. It now has reached a point where I’d say it is a crisis,” she says. “It’s a boiling frog, isn’t it? You go along saying, ‘Oh, it’s not quite that bad, it’s not quite that bad.’ And I think, ‘Oh no, it is really bad.’”
When did it tip over the edge? Barker says she had thought house prices were higher because interest rates were lower. When rates started to rise, she expected house prices to fall more than they did. “I hadn’t anticipated that we’d see such a big rise in rents … If the housing market hadn’t been very tight, [private landlords] wouldn’t have been able to pass the rents on because people would have had more options.”
> Since her 2004 review the backlog has almost quadrupled. Households with unmet housing needs have grown from 950,000 to 3.7 million. That includes those who are homeless; living in temporary accommodation such as hostels; in overcrowded, unsuitable or unaffordable homes; and hidden households, such as adult children still living with their parents. Barker’s son was one of them. Nine years ago I asked Barker what the housing crisis looked like for her. “My younger son is homeless,” she told me. He boomeranged back home after graduating from university, but earned too little to rent his own place. “It’s very awkward talking about my family,” Barker says when I ask about him again, but graciously expands to highlight the “intragenerational problems” of the housing shortage. “I’m afraid I helped both my sons with mortgage deposits — my younger son has finally left home.” He lived in the family’s three-bedroom house, in a large Essex village, for about ten years after university.
> She finds it striking that, in the space of a decade, from 2011 to 2021, nearly three quarters of a million more adult children are living with their parents. “Is that a social evil? It was quite nice in Covid with my youngest son there. But actually it constrains people’s job search.” It did for her son, Barker says. “When you’re setting up a family house, you don’t think of living somewhere that’s going to enable job search for your children in their twenties … It is a problem.” One of Barker’s biggest disappointments is the failure of successive governments to build enough homes for social rent. “Because of the right to buy we have not added to the stock of social rent in the last eight years. It really takes me aback.”
> She became an economist because she was choosing her A-level subjects during the OPEC crisis in the 1970s, when inflation was very high. “That was very damaging to my family’s finances and I wanted to understand why.” Barker also wanted to leave her all-girls school, which — handily for her — did not offer economics. Instead she went to a sixth form in Stoke-on-Trent. “I had a great economics teacher. I just loved it.” That decision changed her life. Now, on the New Towns task force, led by Sir Michael Lyons, she will change Britain. While some new towns will be inspired by the 32 developed after the Second World War (now home to almost three million people), most will be large urban extensions and regeneration schemes of at least 10,000 homes each.
!ping UK&YIMBY