How the housing crisis turned into a political football 

In Madrid, Malaga and Barcelona, and all across Spain, the crowds came out for one woman. Protesters camped in squares and called for change. Usually, it’s spiralling debt, ill-received parties in a pandemic, or the slow bleed-out of credibility that bring down governments. But in Spain it is the housing crisis that has pushed politics to the brink this autumn. 

The eviction and subsequent death of 87-year-old Maricarmen Abascal proved the tipping point. Prime minister Pedro Sánchez, who has ruled since 2018, called a snap general election and unions have announced a general strike. 

History is often full of warnings which, in hindsight, were written in neon. So what of the UK? “I think the same thing could happen here,” says Grace Brown, an affordable housing expert at the New Economics Foundation. The UK’s own housing crisis – sky-high rents, financialised housing in which a shelter is turned into an asset, coupled with an ascendant tenants’ movement – isn’t all that different to Spain’s.

Brown says: “What’s happened in Spain really shows the obvious scale of the crisis that we’re in, and the need for swift government intervention.” 

In truth, however, an observer does not need to look too hard to see that our own housing crisis has sunk its nails into British politics, twisting and warping it in ever-clearer ways. 

From who gets social housing to debates about the defence of the nation, this is how the housing crisis became a political football – and where we go from here.

The property-owing democracy

Perhaps our journey to this point is best traced through a phrase: the property-owning democracy. In the first half of the 20th century, says Nick Gallent, professor of housing and planning at University College London, council housing was the government’s way of providing shelter.

“There was no expectation that teachers or university lecturers or doctors or postmen, or people like that, would be able to muster the funds to buy their own home. So the state took responsibility for that,” he explains. 

But after the Second World War, with the public finances peaky, that responsibility started to seem costly. From this pragmatism, rather than ideology, came an idea thrust into the mainstream in 1946 by future prime minister Anthony Eden: The property-owning democracy. As the country rebuilt, a mortgage market was born in earnest, and the government directed tax subsidies to private housing. 

Then came Margaret Thatcher. She used her first conference speech as leader of the Conservative Party in 1975 to become the new champion for the property-owning democracy. When she became prime minister, Right to Buy was supercharged, based around a desire for the state to have less of a role in providing housing. House prices shot up. Economics was the method – but the heart and soul of the country was changed. 

Gallent says: “Housing from the 1970s became a personal asset, a sort of private means of driving the economy. It became something very, very different to what it had been in the interwar period and the postwar period.” 

The country’s politics, and perhaps its social contract, was rewired: a politician who messed with house prices, or increased mortgage costs by carelessly causing interest rates to rise, was a brave one. But now, says Gallent, something seems to have broken with the model. 

In real terms, house prices have stagnated for two decades, after roughly doubling over the previous decade. And persistent inflation has made mortgages ever more expensive. 

Not long after the 2008 financial crisis, the proportion of households privately renting overtook the proportion socially renting. We now spend £39 billion a year on housing benefit – and insecurity has become a defining feature for many. 

Brown adds: “I do think now that we’re not a homeowning democracy any more. For millions of people, that’s not an option.” 

Along with the change in material reality, there has been a change in mentality. The housing crisis became something people, politically, had in common. Precarious renters have become a solid voter base for progressive parties. Rachael Williamson, head of policy, communications and external affairs at the Chartered Institute of Housing, adds: “Whereas people used to think this is a slightly more peripheral issue, now pretty much everyone you meet either directly has experienced, is experiencing, or knows someone close to them who is experiencing what we would call a housing crisis.” 

Read more:

• What Mr Skelly can teach us about the housing crisis
• Andy Burnham: ‘I’m not naive. You can’t say there will be nobody sleeping rough after Christmas’
• Everyone agrees we need more homes. So why aren’t they being built?

What comes next?

When a strained two-party system meets the UK’s housing crisis, there is no shortage of offers to voters. Take Reform UK’s policy announcement this summer that the party would ban foreign nationals from social housing, put UK citizens born abroad lower down waiting lists, and prioritise under-35 married couples with children. It came against a backdrop of record social housing waiting lists – 1.34 million households in England, the highest level since 2014. Just 263,000 households received a new social tenancy in 2025. 

Yet the idea was not met warmly by those providing housing, who cited statistics showing the vast majority of social housing residents were UK citizens – the most recent figures showing 10.4% of households in England had a non-UK national as the lead tenant. Francesca Albanese of the charity Crisis said in a statement in August: “The idea that people can simply come to this country and be given a social home is untrue.” 

Alistair Smyth, director of policy and research at the National Housing Federation, the country’s membership body for housing associations, says: “People are more than willing to entertain different viewpoints on why there’s a housing crisis and who might be to blame.” 

Warning of the impact the policy could have, Smyth adds: “It’s a challenging proposal because it has, of course, a detrimental impact on the people living in those homes, but also a detrimental knock-on impact on other people who would be barred from living in social housing. 

“Because of that, it could drive up homelessness. It certainly could drive greater hardship within communities. The way to tackle the issue of people not getting access to social housing is to build a lot more of it to make sure that homes are available at a price people can afford.” 

The policy also held a mirror to something broader: the political football which the housing crisis has mutated into. 

Maurice Lange, a senior analyst at the Centre For Cities, says: “I think it’s finding a thing [around] which a sense of unfairness can be manufactured, maybe not particularly related to the way that the system works. There’s a reason that social housing can be turned into a political object. There’s the failure of the system, which is much broader than just a question of which person should be prioritised.” 

Guns vs butter

Faced with a choice between guns and butter – the Vietnam war and a war on poverty, in 1960s America – president Lyndon B Johnson found to his peril he could not do both. “That bitch of a war,” he later said, “killed the lady I really loved – the Great Society.” 

The choices facing Andy Burnham in 2026 are painted in a similar light. Looking to solve Burnham’s headache over a multibillion-pound defence spending gap and mounting fears over a return to conflict, the Conservatives put forward a plan to find £4bn for defence through changes to housing benefit. 

The prime minister rejected “crude cuts” that may “put people into crisis.” Guns, Burnham tried to argue, could not come at the expense of butter. Yet the fact our butter is so house-shaped is a symbol of how high housing has risen up the priority list. Housing benefit accounts for 12% of the government’s total welfare spending. It is, experts say, a problem coming home to roost – and even a false choice. 

Williamson of the CIH says: “The idea that we say ‘do you invest in housing or do you invest in defence’, I think is not a sensible conversation. I think it’s a really unfair comparison. We don’t say should we spend money on defence or should we spend some money on schools and health? 

“We accept that we need to invest in health, we need to invest in our transport infrastructure. We need to see housing as infrastructure.” 

How we get out of here

Though it ends up in national debates, with billions of pounds quoted and spent, the housing crisis has its grip on politics at all levels. Earlier this year, Enfield’s Conservative Party based its local election around one central idea: saying no to a proposed New Town being built nearby. It was, in effect, a borough’s leadership decided via a referendum on housing. When the party won, Enfield’s new leaders promptly withdrew from the New Towns programme. 

Yet there is some consensus. Both leasehold reform and renters’ rights bills saw backing across changes in government from Conservative to Labour. Given the nature of the housing crisis, this consensus is a sign of how to tackle the core issue and defuse the politics, experts say. 

Williamson says: “The reality is that when people really feel like there’s nothing else they can do, they will hit the streets, like we’ve seen in Spain. 

“If the government of the day, of whichever party, doesn’t tackle the housing crisis, if people feel they’ve got no hope for the future, then people get cross and they go to extremes, and then one way or another, you have quite radical politics kicking in.” 

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