Report: Building Our Way Out

Our housing emergency has haunted people living right across the country during the pandemic. Tens of thousands of homeless families have been forced to lockdown in temporary accommodation; told to ‘stay at home’ when they don’t have one. Many more have struggled with paying high private rents for squalid homes; told to work from home when they’ve nowhere fit to do it or home school when they’ve not got the space.

Never has it been clearer that so many have been left behind by our housing emergency, and that as we build back from the pandemic we need to level-up housing.

But now a third emergency – a deep recession – not only threatens to make it even harder for people on low incomes to keep up with the rent and a new wave of evictions and repossessions. It threatens our housebuilding capacity too, through construction job losses and failed businesses. In doing so it stands to make it harder for us to end the housing emergency.

This report sets how we can boost the economy and level up by building our way out of the housing emergency. The answer to it has always been to build more decent social rented homes that people on low incomes can afford. With a rescue package of investment in the coming comprehensive spending review, in just two years we can:

• Save jobs

• Build 50,000 new social rented homes

• And 145,000 new affordable homes in total

Putting the investment in now will boost our housebuilding capacity and boost the economy whilst delivering urgently needed social rent homes. This is how we build our way out of this crisis. And investment is essential if we are to build back to a better place than before the pandemic.