‘Cathy come home’, a BBC television drama first screened in 1966, told the story of Cathy, whose life hit a downward spiral after her husband lost his job. Eventually, Cathy’s young family were forced apart by their inability to find decent accommodation. Shelter, the housing and homelessness charity, was founded at around the same time as the film was broadcast. The story sparked a wave of public sympathy for families with housing problems, and Shelter’s homelessness campaign reflected this mood.

The housing report edition 3, November 2012: the coalition’s mid-term review, published in November last year by the Chartered Institute of Housing, the National Housing Federation and Shelter, showed that, in the delivery of its objectives under ten key areas of housing policy, the coalition government is going forward in two areas and making no progress in four other areas. Things are getting worse in the remaining four areas. The government’s poor performance leads LAG to ask if the coalition’s housing policies are in danger of returning the country to a 1960s-style housing crisis or similar.

Homelessness applications have been increasing steadily since May 2010, when the coalition government came to power, though the second quarter of 2012 showed a small decrease. The Labour administration succeeded in reducing the number of families in temporary accommodation from a peak of just over 100,000 in 2006. However, The housing report reveals that this progress has been reversed: in the second quarter of 2012, the number of families with children in temporary accommodation was 51,640, an increase of 2.4 per cent on the first quarter of 2012.

Chancellor George Osborne has described government expenditure on housing benefit (HB) as being ‘completely out of control’. He has made much political capital of the small number of families who have made HB claims in excess of £100,000 per year. The housing report states that under the current government the HB bill has been increasing steadily: up from just under £400m per week in April 2010 to £448m per week in April 2012. However, the report points out that most of the government’s cuts aimed at reducing benefits’ expenditure, such as the introduction of a cap on benefits, have yet to come into effect. LAG fears that such a change will only feed into the growing number of homelessness cases.

The large regional variations in England in mortgage repossession rates were highlighted in a Shelter research report, which was published in June 2012. For example, in local authority areas with higher unemployment rates, such as the West Midlands, Durham and Tyneside, and Merseyside, the research found a higher than average repossession rate.

The one bright spot in an otherwise damning assessment of government housing policy concerns repossession actions. A total of 26,300 properties were taken into possession in the first three quarters of 2012, eight per cent fewer than in the first three quarters of 2011 and well below the Council of Mortgage Lenders forecast of 45,000 repossessions for the whole of 2012. The housing report concludes that prevention schemes such as court help desks have had a positive effect on repossession rates. However, the report warns that lower than expected repossession rates can be accounted for by low interest rates and that a rise in interest rates (which it says is expected before the 2015 general election) could lead to an increase in repossessions.

A major change since the ‘Cathy come home’ era is that, in the housing policy debate at that time, discussions about mortgage possession probably did not feature as highly as they do now. For most of the 20th century, UK governments expanded the stock of social housing in response to housing need caused by the two World Wars and an increasing population. However, from 1980, government policy encouraged home ownership and the stock of social housing declined rapidly with the sale to tenants between 1981 and 2004 of 2.2 million council houses. The direction of government housing policy was towards a ‘property-owning democracy’.

Yet one of the trends of recent years has been an increase in the private rented sector in the UK. In contrast with the rest of Europe, here this sector has grown from 11 per cent in the 1980s to 17 per cent at present. A report from the University of Cambridge states that the growth in the private sector has been driven by the availability, from the late 1990s, of buy-to-let mortgages rather than the deregulation of rent controls and other laws which protect tenants.

LAG believes that the trend towards a larger private rented sector with little protection for tenants and the decline in social housing, combined with the squeeze on HB in April this year, will lead to an increase in the sort of family crisis depicted in ‘Cathy come home’. In the coming months, a growing concern for many people will become keeping the roof over their head. The government must recognise this and have a fundamental rethink about its housing policy.