In the 10 years I’ve been writing about British social housing policy, no news story has more encapsulated the unfolding crisis than the recent revelation that councils have spent millions of pounds buying back homes lost through the right-to-buy policy. Islington, in Jeremy Corbyn’s back yard, has spent £6.2m acquiring former council houses it had sold to leaseholders for less than £1.3m in total.

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At a time when councils are struggling to provide statutory services, such waste is unforgivable, but not the fault of those local authorities. When right-to-buy legislation was introduced, in 1980, councils were forbidden from using the proceeds of selling council homes to replace them directly with new ones. Yet the need for affordable housing did not diminish with this appeal to a “property-owning democracy”. Islington needed those homes back, whatever the price.

Rightly, Labour put housing near the top of its policy announcements as it launched its general election campaign yesterday. Predictably, Corbyn’s statement that a Labour government would build one million new homes in a five-year term has been greeted as utopian nonsense. Yet every prime minister since Gordon Brown has announced periodically that “the government” – referring to a combination of private developers and housing associations – will build 200,000 homes a year, a figure that has not been met for over a decade. To make good on that compounded shortfall of new housing, at least 300,000 new homes would have to be built every year for a decade.

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Corbyn is proposing that half of his million homes would be built as council housing with secure tenancies, while the private rental sector would be regulated far more stringently than it is now. This is excellent news to those people who are languishing on waiting lists for affordable housing, or living in poor-quality private housing; but it is unlikely to win votes among those who are more affluent because successive governments have allowed the needs of owner-occupiers to dominate housing policy.

A decade ago I wrote a book about the perception of council estates in society. Estates: an Intimate History, was a personal account of council housing in Britain and an attempt to square the ideals of social housing with some of the realities I had experienced on a peripheral 60s estate. While writing the afterword to a new edition, which tries to bring the story of Britain’s unfolding housing disaster up to date it has become clear to me, 10 years on, that social housing – indeed, the notion of affordable housing as a social good and necessity, or indeed continuing to exist at all, is under absolute threat. Today we are faced with losing much of the council housing that remains, however imperfect it may be in terms of location and quality, and the esteem in which it is held.

The Tories’ Housing and Planning Act has made all social housing essentially emergency housing, offered only on a temporary basis, to be withdrawn once tenants are out of dire economic circumstances. Tories believe this keeps people on their toes, and prevents them from getting “trapped in dependency”. Those who work in social housing recognise that a secure tenancy is, for most, a basis for a stable life, and a necessity for otherwise vulnerable people who cannot hope to earn enough to rent privately.

The author James Meek has noted that four decades of housing policy has worked “gradually to remove the state from the business of building houses, and now gradually to remove the state from the business of subsidising rent”. Instead, it subsidises those who own the property that is rented, many of whom bought flats and houses to let in better economic times. While the availability of social housing has receded, to 11% of the total UK welfare budget in 2016-17, around £25bn was spent on housing benefit, making the government a prime subsidiser of private landlords. Meanwhile, would-be council tenants in London have been rehoused by councils in Birmingham, where rents are less astronomical, only then to be moved by Birmingham’s council to places even further away and less expensive, such as Stoke-on-Trent, where there is a nominal surplus of housing. In other cases, private landlords let their former council homes back to desperate local authorities at market rents so that the latter can let them back to council tenants at social-housing rates.

Demand for social housing is such that there are now far fewer “hard-to-let” estates with many empty dwellings. Such places were relatively common between the 1970s and the mid-2000s.

Since 2011 the number of people renting privately has overtaken the combined number of those renting in the social sector from councils and housing associations. In 2016, for the first time since the 1960s, more people were at the mercy of private landlords than had secure social tenancies. Private renters are subject to the basic insecurity of assured shorthold tenancies, introduced by the 1988 Housing Act, which make guaranteed tenancies shorter and riskier. The symbiotic relationship between housing security and income security has led to political decisions with catastrophic effects on disadvantaged neighbourhoods and the people living in them.

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The waiting list for social housing reached 1.77 million in 2008, and in all likelihood the figure would have far exceeded 2 million by now had not many councils and housing associations simply closed their lists to all but the most urgent cases. The waiting list stood at 1.24 million this time last year. It would have been much higher had it not been for councils using legislation from the 2011 Localism Act requiring social housing applicants to have a “local connection” to the area in which they register for housing in order to be housed. This miraculously enabled the 32 London boroughs to reduce their aggregated waiting list by 125,000 between 2012 and 2014.

In 2017, as in 2007, homeowners get to decide elections, yet it’s those with no housing assets and no security of tenure who stand to lose the most from an increased Tory majority. Voter turnout is highest among those most likely to own their homes, who will be among those least affected by any of the political changes over the years that have been introduced to make renters less secure and less well-off – and, above all, less likely ever to become owner-occupiers.

The beneficiaries of policies skewed towards the already well-housed have never had it so good. If you own outright, your housing security is assured. If you own a house with a mortgage, your interest payments have been maintained at a historically low level for several years. The same can’t be said for someone without a say in how or where they will be housed, or for how long they can guarantee a roof over their heads.

Home is home: you cannot rightfully play politics with housing. Yet for the last 10 years that is precisely what has happened, and there is too little sign of real change.