It’s easy to understand why so many people are furious with Fergus and Judith Wilson. Britain’s largest landlords have made vast profits on the back of the urgent housing needs of others, which alone could be enough to raise eyebrows. But they also have the habit of saying controversial and inflammatory things. First they announced that they would refuse to let to housing benefit tenants. Now they confirm that prospective tenants on zero-hours contracts will be turned away too.

But save your vitriol because they are not alone. As the Guardian reported last week, many private landlords are taking the same decision. Major lettings agencies are refusing to take earnings from zero-hours employment into account in the referencing process. A quick web search reveals that, on the most popular landlord forums, the growth in zero-hours contracts is causing a huge problem for the (also fast expanding) private rented sector.



As one landlord puts it: “The zero-hours employee may be the victim but that is no reason to inflict the resultant misfortune on the landlord.”



Another, more sympathetic, individual admits: “I don’t have spare pots of money to subsidise a tenant just because they couldn’t work enough hours. These zero-hours contracts are a disgrace and should be banned immediately.”



The problem isn’t these individual landlords’ business decisions (after all, they need to make a profit and have a reliable income stream if they are to continue to provide much-needed rented housing at all – especially if they are heavily saddled with the buy-to-let mortgage deals of the past). It is that the government appears to write housing policy in a vacuum.



First we saw the foolhardy decision to cap benefit levels, with the aim of reducing the high rents in the private sector which were driving housing benefit spending up. If it was tried at a time of housing surplus, this may have worked. But introduced when wages were flat but house prices still rose, there was only ever going to be one outcome: landlords previously happy to house people receiving benefits realised they no longer needed to bother getting involved the bureaucracy of the welfare state. There was now more than enough demand in the private, self-funded rental market from those forced to delay the aspiration of home ownership. Why wasn’t this predicted?



Now we have an economy that is encouraging the use of zero-hours contracts and self-employment to mask unemployment figures. It might look like we’re all back at work and business is booming, but cast your eyes sideways and there are devastating consequences for the housing market. With 1.4 million people now on zero-hours contracts, that’s 1.4 million precariously housed unless they manage to obtain an increasingly scarce social housing tenancy.



As Charted Institute of Housing chief executive Grainia Long has pointed out, it appears that policymakers don’t understand how the housing market and the labour market fit together. Let’s add into that confusion over how the labour market, welfare system, housing market and industrial and enterprise policies all fit together.



So why this disconnect? Is it simply that the Treasury cares little about housing policy? That’s unlikely: the Treasury is still happy to keep a dead duck like Help to Buy alive. It’s failing to solve problem of lack of housing by forcing new development at anywhere like the numbers we need – but it is keeping purchase numbers churning over which appear to show the housing market picking up.



A cynic would argue that government policy on housing is all about how it looks and very little about what it actually does. We’ll have to wait five years or more to see the true impact of this piecemeal approach to social policy. By then, we’ll have a different government available to assess the result and then wash it hands of responsibility.



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