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The Birmingham Literature Festival Podcast - Welcome to the very first Birmingham Literature Festival podcast, bringing writers and readers together to discuss some of 2020’s best books. Each Thursday we’ll be releasing new episodes of the podcast, including wonderful discussions about writing, poetry, big ideas and social issues. Join us each week for exciting and inspiring conversations with new, and familiar, writers from the Midlands and beyond.
Casey Bailey 0:07
Hello wonderful people. Welcome to the Birmingham Literature Festival presents podcast. I am Casey Bailey, former Birmingham Poet Laureate, and I was delighted to be one of the guest curators for the 2022 Birmingham Literature Festival. For the next few weeks, we're going to bring you some highlights from last year's festival for you to enjoy whenever you'd like, you can subscribe to this podcast feed and get the new episodes as soon as they're available. This week's episode is housing lawyer Hashi Mohamed speaking to guest curator,Otegha Uwagba. Hashi's family arrived in the UK as refugees from Somalia in the 1990s. And his book, A Home of One's Own. is the story of his family, as well as every family in the UK trying to carve out their own space in a broken housing system.
Otegha Uwagba 0:59
Hello everyone, lovely turn out. Thank you all for coming. Those of you who don't know me, my name is Otegha Uwagba, and I am a writer and journalist written a couple of books about work and money and race. And I'm really delighted to be here today in my capacity as one of the three guest curators of this year's Birmingham Literary Festival. So I'm really, really delighted to be able to dive into some topics that I find really fascinating with some authors who I find really fascinating. And that brings me on to star of the show Hashi Mohamed, who I'll just introduce you quickly who arrived in Britain as a child refugee, and is now a barrister. And number five chambers in London, a contributor to The Guardian, The Times and prospect, he has also explored class and mobility for the BBC, his first book, people like us looked at social mobility and inequality, and a home of one's own. Just up here is his second book. It's a fantastic essay, I read it in one sitting. And you know, I'm not gonna summarize what it's about, I'm gonna let you introduce the book and tell people what the book is about.
Hashi Mohamed 2:04
Yeah, thank you, um, thank you, everyone for, for coming. A home of one's own was, it's really fundamentally about what it means to have a home and what it means to have a space that you can call your own, that you can build as part of your family or as an individual, or as a person who wants that safe, secure environment to come to every day and leave from every day. And what it actually means on a personal level, not just about buying a house or renovating a house or or trying to get a mortgage, and so on, but rather, what is it about the personal aspects of the impact that our home has on somebody's mental health, physical health, their well being their ability to aspire to dream to have opportunities in life? And everything that comes with that secure environment that allows you to propel yourself into society? And what does it mean to be secure in that context, and that's what really the book was about. And interestingly, when I wrote it, you know, finished it last year, starting to sort of finesse it this year, one of the things I talked about was how much the housing market was a broken system and how it was effectively a Ponzi scheme being propped up by the banks. And now we're all having a meltdown about the housing market. So that doesn't, you know, it's a bit of a horrible time. But I have to say, it's been good sales for the book.
Otegha Uwagba 3:39
It's an awful author thing, isn't it?! It's good for the book sales...
Hashi Mohamed 3:41
Yeah, helps, even if it's in bad situation for other people.
Otegha Uwagba 3:45
I mean, it's clear to me from reading from reading the book, that it's definitely informed by some of your own personal experiences. And I was wondering if you could just kind of set the scene kind of tell us about which person experience
Hashi Mohamed 3:56
Yeah, in the book, really, I begin by telling the story of us, if you can imagine one adult with about six, seven young kids following behind that one adult, my sister at the time, and we're headed to a place called the Mahatma Ghandi house. And that journey would often be from North Wembley to the center of Wembley, and the journey would normally have taken about 10 minutes if we were on the tube. But actually, it would probably have taken us maybe an hour and a half with the kids walking because we just walked there every day. And Mahatma Gandhi house was this building that was supposedly the housing department of Brent Council. And we would go there every day and sort of remind them that there were three households living in one house that there were 18 of us sharing three bedrooms, and that we were all kind of overcrowd added squalid conditions and that we needed help. And every day, we'd go there and wait and wait and wait and be told to come back tomorrow. And every day, we would get up and think, Okay, should we go back today? Or should we give it another day, and that would carry on for about two years. And this was the sort of start of the of our journey of homelessness in terms of understanding what that meant, the overcrowding, the difficulties with dealing with council administration, and what that all meant. And so it's, it's that moment that begins the story of the book, where I kind of say, This is what I was experiencing as a child. I wasn't quite sure what it was. But it turns out that it's something called homelessness and precarious living. And this is what I've discovered since.
Otegha Uwagba 5:46
Yeah, I mean, something that I really appreciated about the book, and that I feel kind of deviates from a lot of the conversations around housing and the housing crisis in general, the moment is that often those are framed purely in terms of the largely in terms of the kind of economic ramifications, and here is how much people are spending on rent over the course of life and all these things, which are very, very important. Don't get me wrong, but your book touches on that. But it really talks more, as you said earlier about the kind of emotional and psychological impact. So just a quote from the book you say about that child at home, the cramped flat, we were stuffed into, seem to limit our horizons, not just physically but mentally. And then you like to say, a home decor one's own is one of the most important foundations for anyone seeking personal advancement, security, and a stable future. Why was it so important for you to focus on that element of it, as opposed to the more kind of I guess, macro economic? Yeah,
Hashi Mohamed 6:41
I suppose when I, if we go back one step, which is when I wrote my first book, people like us, which was about social mobility, I could easily have written a very academic book about the statistics of getting a job. And you know how certain ways in which you were behaving or the education system would make it kind of difficult for you and the kind of stats and data. But I find that when you tell effectively the same thing, but through a personal story, or a story that or a narrative that people can relate to, it brings the issue that you're facing to the surface. And so when I embarked on this book, I thought to myself, I'm a, I'm a planning lawyer, I could really bore people about planning legislation, and you know, all of the crap that I've had to learn at law school, or I could tell them the exact same thing, but through another means, which is through the stories because people, if you think about the earliest known paintings in caves, people were telling stories in those caves, about journeys about figurines of human beings on camels are still in those sort of pre historic caves, because we as human beings instantly react to stories. And so when I was writing this, it was really important that I just didn't bombard people with the statistics behind Help to Buy or write to buy or mortgage statistics, or affordability ratios and mortgage markets. And I could have done that. And a lot of it is in the book, if you go to the bibliography, you'll see all the stats and the data and the information that underpins the story. But I wanted to tell a different angle to this, which was, look, if as a society, we want people to feel secure, to have ambition, to dream, to fulfill their dreams, to think about where they are in society, to think about what they might want to contribute as a society to think about what kind of home they want to provide for their children, what kind of home they want to provide for their families, what kind of environment they can sit around a table and eat go to bed unmolested by, you know, stupid counsel letters and letters from the courts, and you're waking up every morning with damp and mold all around you. Fundamentally, all that comes down to where you lay your head. And if that basic foundation is so difficult for so many people in society, well, then we are stifling the progress from everything that flows from that. And that's what I wanted to portray and put across.
Otegha Uwagba 9:27
Definitely in the amount of, I guess, mental space that housing insecurity occupies anyone who's you know, rented, or you know, had that thing of, Oh, my God is my landlord can evict me so you're going to put the rent up? You know, it's been a few years at the mercy of the London rental market, which I think is probably one of the most brutal in the country just because of the nature of how expensive London is. And I would say that those were the most anxious years of my adult life just kind of constantly thinking anytime something happened if my housemate got a new boyfriend, I was counting down until how long maybe you're gonna decide to move in with him or move and then move out of your place. Yeah, exactly. And then what that means to me, you know all this. So instead of being looking, we got exciting, you're thinking, how is this going to affect my housing security, which is a terrible thing. But before we kind of really dive into things, I think it's probably useful to do a bit of setup and to frame this conversation. And it'd be great. If you could summarize, you know, quite briefly, why is there a housing crisis in the UK? What are the kind of historical?
Hashi Mohamed 10:28
Yeah, well, it's all in the book, but I don't....
Otegha Uwagba 10:29
Yeah, exactly. What are the historical and the kind of ongoing factors that have led to this...?
Hashi Mohamed 10:34
Very good question, in a in a sort of, in a nutshell for you, in the post war period, this country embarked upon one of the largest scale of house building exercises known in the western world for a long time, such an extent that we were building close to 300,000 or 400,000 houses a year. And in that period, in that post war period, when Churchill gave a job to a guy called Harold Macmillan, who would later go on to become prime minister himself, they really believed that this was a moment to transform people's lives. Interestingly, at that time, the housing ministry was actually under public health. So housing was considered a public health issue. So it wasn't in a sort of housing department technocratic department that is dealing with the housing market, it was seen as a public health issue. And so it's well worth watching a documentary called Cathy come home, which is about that kind of period where families were really living in a really precarious situation, and officials from the Public Health Department would come along and think, Okay, you as a parent, with this child, and so on need a place because otherwise you're going to get sick, you're then going to be a burden on the healthcare system. And then we're going to have to deal with that. And then your child will have to be taken away into a foster environment, we don't want that that's another public health issue. So actually, housing you means that we avoid a number of other knock on effects. That's the mentality that was taking place in that sort of post war period. Fast forward to sort of the 1970s A lot of the council houses were very poor, very badly maintained, not properly financed, post war period. And then the 1970s really difficult periods where not much was being built. The miners issues, a huge amount of you know, three day week console on and then of course, 1979, Margaret Thatcher comes to power. And in 1984, an Act is passed in Parliament, which then essentially was wishes to transfer a lot of the housing stock to people. Now the way she'll housing social housing, otherwise known as the right to buy, and the right to buy, let's not be under any illusions. In hindsight, it was a catastrophic mistake. But at the time, it was hugely popular, hugely popular, for two reasons. Councillors were thinking, if we just give it to the people, we don't have to worry about maintaining these properties anymore. And we're not going to get in trouble. Notting Hill, full of very squalor properties back then. Second reason Margaret Thatcher thought, if you give people the houses, then you automatically mean that they become householders. They own their own homes, they get invested in the status quo, because they want the status quo to work. They wish to conserve the status quo, and they become conservatives, which was the strategic decision of why she did a lot of that, funnily enough. As a side note, when the coalition government came in, and David Cameron and Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrats, were saying we need to have a major program of social housing. Apparently, David Cameron and George Osborne said if you build more social housing, you're only going to create labour constituencies. Why would you want to do that? So then Margaret Thatcher's decision then takes a huge amount of housing stock out without replacing it get to the early 1990s, massive liberalisation of the financial markets, the landlord world begins. A lot of the houses that were sold to people essentially came back as landlords. And then a lot of those houses were now being given to councils to house homeless people. But this time they were paying for the same houses they gave away. They were now paying a landlord to house somebody who's homeless. Again, what continues is we're not building enough houses, but the demand is going up. A lot of the stock has been taken out, demand continues to go up. And a lot of people needing immigration has a big part to play in some of that of course, and then so on and so on and so on. And then we get to the modern day era where a lot of local authorities don't even have social housing on their stock. Most of central London prime real estate has been bought by Arabs or Russians and most of the People who might have lived in these kinds of zone one zone, two areas of London have moved out to places like zone four Walthamstow and so on. And those people now can't afford to live there and moved out to other cities, whether it's in Birmingham or elsewhere. And that's and then of course, we've had 10 years of interest rates being kept artificially low. Normally, if you move the interest rates, it means that some of the people who shouldn't have a mortgage sort of drop off, we're going to see that next year great. But that 10 years of keeping the interest rates artificially low, was really there to help people who are already on the property ladder, not to help anyone else get on. And as I say, in the book, they effectively created a Ponzi scheme, which now everyone is holding on for dear life, we may not be so lucky by this time next year.
Something that's a really, really big theme in the book. And something I'll probably delve into more depth later in our conversation is the people who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo the way it is with with the housing market...
People like you and me now....?
Otegha Uwagba 15:24
Yeah, well, home it, although I genuinely would say, so I managed to buy a flat two years ago. And I generally would say that I would sacrifice housing, especially because I grew up on a council estate, I sacrifice the, you know, appreciation of my house price in order to even out the market. Like it's a really fundamental...
Hashi Mohamed 16:15
You're... you're you're in a minority in many respects.
Otegha Uwagba 16:18
Yeah, I probably am. And also it's kind of thinks easy to say when it's probably not gonna happen. But I do genuinely feel that way. Because also, I mean, that's one of the issues with the way the housing market works within the UK is that they're no longer treated as places to live and homes, they are treated as investment vehicles.
Hashi Mohamed 16:34
Correct. That's a really important point about that. Because the shift that took place of not having not treating your house as a home, but rather as an investment, a place to park cash for some people - a pension for some people - that actually really took place also in the early 1990s. Because some people may remember when Robert Maxwell killed everyone's pension, the mirror group, a really interesting thing happened in the psyche of the nation were people who had grown up believing that if I put my money in my pension, I will be able to retire and it will be a decent income. That moment shifted something in the psyche of the nation, when people started thinking, hang on, actually. So the money that I'm putting away isn't safe. And but the bricks and mortars are, and that was also a big factor in people starting to see their homes, not just as a place to live, but rather, this is my inheritance. This is what I'm gonna pass down...
Otegha Uwagba 17:31
Yes! End of life care, end of life exactly. Later. There are a lot there are a lot of people who plan to downsize when they hit retirement age or to release equity to fund the rest of their pension. A lot of people think like that now, but I mean, something that there was a stat in your book, under David Cameron and I wear my political leanings very boldly, very openly. Tory, aren't you? Yeah. F*** the Tories under David Cameron 39% of Conservative MPs were landlords and what does that mean for housing policy?
Hashi Mohamed 18:07
When you think about that, right? If you are 39% of people in in that government or in that party are landlords, they have a direct interest in maintaining that system. Right. So I do a lot of planning work. The direct consequence of this is I do a lot of planning work, and it takes me around the country. And what I always see is two things that are as clear as day one is the council's being stifled from building more housing that they need by the councillors who just don't want more housing in their borough. Just the other day, there's a guy called Chris Phillip, a member of parliament in Croydon, who was on BBC program. And he said, one of the things that Liz Truss is going to do is we're going to liberalize the planning system, and we're going to build more housing. And Jo Coburn, he was on the daily politics was like a really well, look at this tweet. Is this you? Is this you? And there's a tweet of him saying "Croydon Council are selling off our..." Croydon were building 120 affordable units. He was tweeting that Croydon council was being taken over by developers. She's like, "well, hang on. You're telling us this now. But this is you stopping housing being built in your own area?" He's like, "Oh, well, you know, has got to be built where they need to be built and blah, blah, blah." it's complete nimbyism. Yeah. And so for me, one of the things I touched upon in the book is in addition to that statistic is at the moment, the politicians are not willing to make decisions that are going to be unpopular or not in their interest today, for the greater good. They're just not and as long as that remains the case, the status quo will continue to be stifled and progress will be very, very difficult to make.
Otegha Uwagba 19:54
So this question: is that all the Tories fault?
Hashi Mohamed 19:57
it's not all the Tories fault, not at all because what you'll see Going across the country is even in Labour areas, what you are seeing is councils are being taken over by what I call the coalition of the unwilling. And usually it's people who will stand up and they want to get elected purely on the basis of I will stop this development from happening. And so what then happens is that these people are not Tory or conservative or liberal democrat, they're just independents. And the independence essentially means vote me in, I'll do what you need me to do turn up a public inquiry. I'm always amazed, I look in the crowd and I go, "No one under the age of 50. And they're all against it." It makes sense. It makes complete sense. They will turn up and they will sell there's too much traffic or there's too much flooding or and I go tell me, there's a guy turned up in an inquiry I did in Lincolnshire, he was a former pilot in the army - retired. And in the in, in the years that he'd lived there, he'd taken aerial photographs of his area of his community area from his plane, every every five years, every five years, you'll take a picture.
Otegha Uwagba 21:06
Sorry, don't Google do that?
Hashi Mohamed 21:07
No, no, but this is I think this is about 10 years ago, it wasn't, you know, it's much better than Google. He takes these amazing aerial photographs every five years. And he turned up at the inquiry. And he said, look at these images. This is how my community has changed. He's in his 70s. Now, you know, and you want to build more housing. Look how much this has changed. And then the judge in the inquiry said to me, Mr. Mohamed, do you have any questions? Normally, general public people, I don't ask questions, because there's just no point. But I said, I've got two questions for for the gentleman. I said, Sir, you live over here. This is your house and this image and when did you move there? 1953 or something? How much did you buy your house for? 6,500 pounds. I said, Do you know what the average house prices in your area now? I don't know. I said no further questions. Because they just don't get it. You know, his kids, if he had kids wouldn't be able to afford where he lives now. His grandkids certainly won't be able to afford it. But for them, it's a sort of I'm on now, to hell with the ladder up. Yeah. To hell with the rest. So many people turn up. You're like, Oh, where do you live? Are you live over here? Oh, you live in that Taylor Wimpey site that was built in 2006. But you're here now saying no to this developer?
Otegha Uwagba 22:17
Yeah. And you know, it's going to be slightly generous in that sense. I think given, as we've talked about earlier, given the housing market is structured the way it is, and it is, you know, people's pensions or whatever, if you can understand, you know, you can understand you want to agree with it, you can understand I can definitely understand like that, and something that I wanted to talk about as well, when I was asking whether it's all the Tories for something you talk about in your book, is that even under New Labour? Yes, in the 90s, will you know, when labor is in power? What do they do about the housing stock?
Hashi Mohamed 22:47
So what I say in the book is that, that what was interesting about the new labor period was that when you had somebody like Gordon Brown, who was thinking extremely hard about child poverty, and thinking about Tony Blair, when he would always talk about education, education, education, and how they started that growth in the academies, or when you think about the waiting list in the NHS, when labour came into government, and how much that went down, they were really, really attacking public services that were poor, and fighting issues to do with inequality, particularly child poverty, but they completely dropped the ball on the housing issue, because they just never connected the housing issue to everything else, just like just how much the housing issue underpins all of this. There is a reason why the housing issue was considered a public health issues in the 1950s. So Labour, I would suggest definitely contributed to the crisis that we are in now, but not as directly willing and conscious about it as the Tories might have, for example. And so in that sense, I think they definitely caused an issue, but they didn't quite understand that failure to act in itself is a problem.
Otegha Uwagba 24:07
Yeah, exactly. I just want to give everyone a, you know, fair hearing. Yeah. Something that you kind of touched on there as the generational differences. And you will read this, you know, they'll always be there'll be an article every kind of three months and someone who, you know, let's say they're a boomer in the sense of that's their generation. I don't mean that in a derogatory sense. Boomer is quite a loaded word, but they are a boomer, and they bought their house, God knows when for 20 grand or something, and it's now worth half a million. And they say, well, in my day, we just buckled down and saved up... "The interest rates were really high." And you know, the reason that people my age generally can't afford houses is apparently because we're spending all of our money on avocado toast and Netflix, Netflix, as well. The classic, the classic. Why do they think that and there's a real, what's the reality? I guess, if we look at, you know, the proportions of income and housing.
Hashi Mohamed 24:55
Very, very straightforwardly, you're saying to mine, my neighbor is in their 70s, just down the road from me bought their house in 1976 for £22,000, it's now worth £1.2million. Okay, well, well, £22,000 in 1976, £1.2 million today, they will say we worked three jobs, we worked so hard to you know how hard it was to get a mortgage for £22,000, you know, and so on and so forth. Now, let's not take away from the fact that that generation worked hard, they saved, they might have gone through rationing, they might have gone through the three day week power blackouts, all of which might be actually all coming back. But that's another story. You know, without taking that away from them, the reality today is so far removed from that, that it's just not comparable, for a variety of reasons. One, today, the affordability ratio between what you are earning, and what a mortgage is are just on completely different planets. When you were in the 1970s, 1980s, banks were usually begging you to take a loan, if you were to Healthy People with two jobs, the banks were willing to give you 100% mortgage. Sometimes they'll pay you to pay for a few more months. Okay? Today, no bank will touch you, if you don't have at least 20% deposit. Some banks don't even loan anything.
I think I think they're just not to give just to give some some hopes people if that's not your position that you can get a mortgage less than 20% deposit. But it's a lot easier once you cross that threshold.
But the problem with if you get a mortgage that's less than 20% deposit, you are effectively in the negative because the interest rates that are attached to that mortgage means that you're barely treading water. If you get a mortgage that you put down 20%, that's just about a good comfortable position to be able to live and not literally just work for the bank. If you get a mortgage for 5%, you go to work every day for the bank, you're gonna struggle really to cover the mortgage and be able to live a decent life later on. It's much much harder. But you're right, you can get a mortgage, what I'm saying is that 1976, the affordability ratios, the the amount the bank was willing to lend to you, the houses that were available to you, the stock that was available to you was completely different today, if you try and go anywhere in London, and it's a house that has I don't know, let's just for argument's sake half a million, go and do a viewing on a house, it's half, half a million in London, there's 30 people around the corner. And then they will bid and these crook crooked, no offense to any crooked estate agents will do everything they can to try and pit one person against the other. So for me in a nutshell, to answer your question, let's not take away from that Boomer generation who may well have worked extremely hard to get what they wanted. And we need to respect that. But they also need to show some humility, because the reality of what we face today is incomparable to what they went through. And frankly, the reality of what we face today is...
We'll leave that hanging there. I think we get we're getting it. But then I also wonder, do we focus too when we talk about the housing crisis, and especially kind of generation rent and private rental? Do we focus too much on the young? I read an article in The Guardian couple of weeks ago about, you know, the growing number of over 50s, who are in the private within the private rental sector, I think there is a tendency for obvious reasons, because the demographic breakdown means that you know, generally younger people, but there is a growing issue of older people who also cannot get on the housing ladder and haven't been able to do that.
I wrote an article. No, I wrote an article in the Financial Times last Saturday. And I shouldn't do this. But I went and wanted to read the comments. And I have to say, it's the first time I've ever written for the Financial Times, they're probably the most well informed readers that you're ever likely to come across. They were so, so well informed. But I read about six comments that a lot of people liked, because I just looked at the most liked comments about six or seven comments of people who are over 50. And they say that they were renting.They were over 50 saying "I've been renting for 10 years. And I'm in the same predicament. But no one talks about us." Everyone talks about the young people who are out, you know, out there, but actually, I'm one of them was saying she's 53 and she's in a house share. And I was like, wow, you know, and she was talking about just how much this was affecting her mental health and all of her, you know, all of these things. So there is definitely a wider conversation to be had and maybe that's where the solidarity and the connection needs to be made. With different generations and not characterized everyone who's over 40 years living lush and on the property ladder, and so on.
Otegha Uwagba 30:07
Something I found really interesting. Your book actually was your definition of housing insecurity. I tried to find the quote I was going through last night, but couldn't find the exact words. So I will just paraphrase slightly. Yeah. Okay, maybe we can play this game. Because I think it's broader than what I went into the book thinking it was. But essentially, you extended your definition of housing security to those within the private rented sector whose tenancies could potentially end at any time.
Hashi Mohamed 30:33
Correct.
Otegha Uwagba 30:33
...which is pretty much anyone writing renting privately is the current laws are in the UK.
Hashi Mohamed 30:37
Correct. Because if you are living in a, if you're living in any rental sector, young, and you're living in what's called the assured short term, tenancy, you're only really guaranteed 12 months, right. And after six months, the landlord could give you two months notice in you're out.
Otegha Uwagba 30:54
And after 12 months, you on a rolling contract, where...
Hashi Mohamed 30:56
...after 12 months, estate agents come along and go, Hey, we're gonna put 100 pounds on your, on your rent or whatever. So for me, why are those people not considered to be insecure housing, if you go to somewhere like Germany, and parts of France, you might be able to find in some places that they will say, actually, here's the rent. And here's a three year contract, enjoy your space, see you in three years, mentally, if you think about that, if you're a human being mentally sleeping in a property where you think I can breathe for three years, you are so much more productive, you're so much more secure, you're so much more willing to engage in life and society as a whole, as opposed to 12 months, takes you two months to move in. And then three months to actually feel like you're at home. And then you start thinking, my God, the clock's that's running down, I've got, I've got to sign another contract.
Otegha Uwagba 31:50
I just really appreciated that definition, because I think it brings far more people kind of into struggle. When I thought about when I was renting in London, I was like, I would never before reading your book have defined that as insecure housing. But then I looked back and I was like, did I feel secure? Did I? Like, you know, I was constantly thinking about what could happen. And when and I think I've faced two I call them soft evictions in the sense that, you know, it's like, you've got to move out, given a month's notice, in some case, I never felt really secure. So I just thought that was really interesting, because I don't know what the stats are of the proportion of people in the UK living within the private rented sector. But if we can essentially say pretty much all of them living in insecure housing, that really broadens the scope of who it is that we're trying to help.
Hashi Mohamed 32:30
Exactly. And that was deliberate because I thought to myself, I don't want to just write a book that seeks to speak to just the people who might be considered homeless or people in council houses, because I thought to myself, if I widen that definition, a lot more people can relate to what I'm talking about.
Otegha Uwagba 32:50
Why is the private rented sector you So you mentioned your it's really interesting. I haven't aren't family friend who she lives in Switzerland. She lives in Geneva. And but and she lives in it. It's all very traditional. And one of those lifts, you know, the kind of French lifts where you kind of crank, you know, you kind of go up, very scenic and I remember one of my earliest memories is going to visit her when we were five years old. She lived in a sort of flat in an apartment. A couple of years ago, I made a comment to my mom because my mom had gone to visit her shows because every so often, I was like, Oh, she's still on that flat was. I was like, I wonder all I want average paid for it. And my mom was like, she doesn't own that flat. And I was like, what she was like, yeah, she rents it. And I was like, she has been in the same flat for at least 25 years. That is unthinkable. Yeah, in this country. But she was like, the laws are complete, like she will be in that flat as long as she wants and essentially until the day she dies.
Hashi Mohamed 33:45
It's the same in Sweden. In Sweden, you can buy a flat in an apartment. Yeah. But as part of that, it's not exactly like a leasehold. But you join a management committee, you own it, okay, you've paid a significant amount of money. And Sweden is not cheap. You pay for that flat. But you're not allowed to do a rental thing. You're not allowed to sell it without the commune community sort of having a word about it. And people who might be - certain numbers are rented, you're not allowed to be turfed out sort of willy nilly. They have that kind of security of tenure in places like Switzerland and Sweden, that allows for that kind of thing. Incidentally, recently, Switzerland did something interesting where they were finding that a lot of the bankers who live in Geneva and Zurich, were buying these really, really expensive flats in the center of town, and a lot of them were leaving them empty. So the Swiss government passed a law that effectively overnight meant that if your apartment or flat was like empty for more than like six months, that year, you pay the equivalent of three times your council tax like that, you know, and then all of a sudden, the flats were not so empty. Yeah. There are close to, I can't remember the statistic. I won't give you the statistic but in Kensington and Chelsea, gosh, in Kensington and Chelsea where Grenfell happened, I will not give you the statistics, but it's 1000s of houses and 1000s of units are empty. Kensington and Chelsea alone. Okay, yeah, 1000s.
Otegha Uwagba 34:17
So that's, that's, especially with the London property market. That's thing, people just park their cash, you can put, you can buy a house for X amount, I don't know what's going to happen. Now we'll talk about what's going to happen now. Now that, you know, interest rates, low interest rates seem to be at an end. But you could just park your cash there do absolutely nothing with it the value of appreciates. You can think of a better investment than 100 London properties.
Hashi Mohamed 35:40
All those properties across the river in Nine Elms, you know that area of where Battersea Power Station is, they will buy them off plan in Hong Kong, they will keep them empty for five to 10 years, they will pay a council tax council tax is what £2000, at most a year, you pay your £2000 a year, keep it empty for five to 10 years, and 10 years later, you can put it on the market and say it's a brand new flat, but now worth 10 years more money. That's happening in London, it's outrageous.
Otegha Uwagba 36:13
Yeah, I mean, to kind of move things along and think about be a bit more solutions focused and maybe try and be a bit more optimistic. And you've kind of alluded to some of what needs to be done in order to I guess, reform the housing market. And to improve the situation. I want to break it down to a few different sections. So first of all, what needs to be done by government and politicians in order to improve the kind of situation we find ourselves in.
Hashi Mohamed 36:38
So in terms of government policy, if I was to pick the biggest and the boldest decisions they need to make is bring back the powers and the finance capabilities of local authorities to be able to build housing, there was a time where local authorities could borrow from the banks at very, very generous rates against future properties they were going to build. So they are borrowing from the bank against the security of something they are yet to build these to be able to do that. And banks would lend to them because they're thinking this is a local authority underpinned by government policy, we will do that. And that's how we managed to build a huge amount of housing. So that's one idea. The second idea for me big, big idea is we need to have a conversation about something called the Greenbelt. The Greenbelt policy that was put forward in 1947 is essentially if you guys go home tonight, and you just Google Greenbelt, and wherever you live Greenbelt, Birmingham Greenbelt, London Greenbelt, Manchester, the Greenbelt is essentially an area of open land that is designed to ensure that people don't overspill and mix up areas and stop urban sprawl. Now, the Greenbelt is essentially open space that makes sure that London doesn't become part of Surrey. And Surrey, doesn't merge into Kent.
Otegha Uwagba 38:00
is that the only reason for its existence? Because I also how do environmentalists feel about the Greenbelt?
Hashi Mohamed 38:06
Good question. A lot of environmentalists will tell you the Greenbelt is there because it's a great piece of land that holds habitats and and so on and so forth. Some of that is true. Most of that is not.
Otegha Uwagba 38:19
But also in terms of in relation to climate change.
Hashi Mohamed 38:21
Yes, true. But a lot of the land that we do have that we can build on sustainably is completely out of bounds. So the conversation we need to have is how much of the Greenbelt can we sustainably release in order to build more housing without compromising our environmental aspect of things? Because the idea of the Greenbelt, as I say, in the book is somehow associated in the national psyche with the concept of the green and pleasant land. When a lot of the Greenbelt is crap, a lot of the Greenbelt is not even green. It's like hodgepodge of crap around cities that just is derelict. So allowing local authorities to have that power and finances and having a conversation about all this derelict land. Those are the two things that I would say the government managed to tackle could be something but a lot of the greenbelt and a lot of the green and pleasant land happens to be in very much the Shires and Tory heartland. And it's not, you know, exactly a vote winner. So what I'm talking about is not exactly a vote winner. And it's what is needed.
Otegha Uwagba 39:30
Yeah, just just very quickly, I'm just going to say I am going to open things up for questions in about five minutes. So let the ideas percolate. But I'm gonna ask a few more questions.
Well, my next question was, what can we do on an individual level on an individual level? If anything?
Hashi Mohamed 39:51
It's a good question. On an individual level, I think you need to lobby your local MPs get more involved in... Lobby them to stop making short term decisions that only affect their electoral success. You need to get more involved in your local planning committees. I know it's boring. But if you're a young person, those decisions that are being made by those gray hairs, no offense, that are that is gonna affect you. You need to be more involved on an individual level, find out what your local council is doing, find out what your local councillor is doing, find out what they're doing to make housing more affordable, get more involved.
Otegha Uwagba 40:33
Then one of the issues that you point out in your book is that being invested in your community like that doesn't happen as much when someone is insecure, transient renting. You know, it's a kind of contradict what I was saying earlier about what I think my values are, I've only really gotten involved with anything to do with my local council once I actually managed to buy a flat and then all of a sudden I'm quite interested in of course, you were in what's going on and you know, actually know him like, you're like you're looking around, you're genuinely I've had to stop myself from doing that, because I became a curtain twitcher!
Hashi Mohamed 41:04
But now, somebody's trying to build something next door you like hang on? Does you have planning permission?
Otegha Uwagba 41:07
Yeah, you know, you you become because you're invested in the local community. I think it's, it's really hard to persuade people who might be living on the other side of London in six months time to get involved in those things.
Hashi Mohamed 41:19
I talk about that in the book about getting involved in your local community doing all of that really comes if you feel you've got roots, if you feel that you're actually settled. And that settlement is very, very hard when the washing machine breaks, and you're like, Oh, I've got to call the landlord now. And he might not come and see me for another two weeks.
Otegha Uwagba 41:38
My final question before I open things up to the audience, how much optimism do you have about any of these measures being put in place?
Hashi Mohamed 41:44
I'm an inherently optimistic person generally. And, and that has always been my nature. But I feel genuinely not optimistic at a political level, that much is going to be done. And I know this might sound really dark. But I really think that the instability that we've seen in the markets and how the interest rates are going up really could be the beginning of something, I feel something is happening now. We're having a massive meltdown about people losing, you know, property prices and stuff like that. And in a way, I'm just sitting there going, Whoa, this is interesting. This is different. So I'm pessimistic about the people who are making the decisions. But I'm optimistic that the current climate has brought to the fore just how unsustainable our housing system is. And hopefully now something could come out of this.
Otegha Uwagba 42:34
A lot of people who might have thought they were secure either now realizing they weren't or we'd be pushed into insecurity in various ways, whether it's through unaffordable mortgages, those mortgages presumably being passed on to renters in the form of exactly these prices. Does that mean something you say in your book is essentially and you mentioned earlier, politicians, they this is kind of the problem with with the short termism of politicians generally, because often, they're that they're out to win votes.
Hashi Mohamed 43:02
Yes. That's all they care about! Jacob Rees Mogg. Funnily enough people know Jacob Rees Mogg being their sort of, you know, intergenerational wealth. JJacob Rees Mogg's sister (Sister put aside - she's also quite rich) Jacob Rees Mogg's wife, her family own a huge amount of land around Somerset, huge amount of land around Somerset. Now you tell me, do you really think that guy in government cares about us?
Otegha Uwagba 43:28
But it's back to what I was saying earlier 39% of MPs under David Cameron, they're not going to vote against their interest? How would they legislate against their interests?
Hashi Mohamed 43:35
They're always the same tropes. If you ever see a politician being asked about, they always have the same tropes, building the right houses in the right places, using brownfield sites. First, we must build with community engagement we must build with community acquiescence. What community acquiescence? The only people who turn up are the people on the property ladder? And they always say no, so not all, but mostly for the most part, they say no, for whatever reason. So how do you expect to make progress in that kind of context? Anyway, we need to make sure we finish on a positive note by the way.
Otegha Uwagba 44:10
well, over things out questions. The audience. Yeah, I've got loads.
Hashi Mohamed 44:15
I'll take three in a row. You want to answer them and get as much through
Audience member 44:20
Thank you very much for that presentation. I'm just wondering if there's another aspect to this. I want to hear your thoughts on whether there's another aspect to this where the housing crisis has also been driven by too many people wanting to live in too few parts of the country. Just in recent memory stoke had the 10 pound house scheme. I believe Liverpool did I believe Middlesbrough did and Sunderland, where there is housing, but because our economy works in this particular way of being drawn into honeypot areas, that's where the people go as well.
Hashi Mohamed 44:48
That's a big part of the conversation. Definitely. And I talked about that in the book, and in particular about a lot of the big housing crisis that we're seeing is in the places that people want to live and where the job are. If you look at Vancouver, Toronto, London, all the major cities where the jobs are clustered is definitely where the massive massive crisis is. There is no doubt about that. So there is a slightly bigger conversation to be had about how our economy functions and where the jobs are. And in a way, actually, now that I had a really good friend of mine, who was thinking about moving out of London to buy something, and she found a three bed house in Blackpool for £100,00. And she said, "I'm out of here because my job I'm doing it all online." So she went to Blackpool, her daughter, her and her daughter, she's a single mum under £100,000. And she's like, I work from home now. And I get to pick her up, bring her home, we have a nice garden. Okay, I'm living in Blackpool, not exactly, you know, Finsbury Park, but I'm happy. And so you know, God Willing that she doesn't have to get a job that means that she has to be somewhere physically. But that's an exciting kind of thing that's happened since the pandemic, right.
Audience member 46:07
Yeah. So you spoke a lot about solutions, and quite rightly focused on building more homes. But I was curious, how much importance would you place on ownership. So in terms of trying to prevent second homeowners trying to curtail the very extractive private rental sector, trying to bring more homes into Council ownership and so on? Because I find that often, there's almost two two camps. And, you know, the camp that talks a lot about building more homes is can that toggle that ownership? But it sort of feels like you need a little bit of both? But yeah, from your perspective, yeah. Where would you kind of wait them against each other? I guess, is building more homes, the silver bullet? Or do we need a lot more of, you know, trying to change the ownership models as well? Yeah,
Hashi Mohamed 46:45
Very good question. So in the book, I explain that we have to also get away from this conversation about it has to be about ownership. But in a way that's quite rich coming from me that I am an owner. So I don't want to feel like I'm lecturing somebody else about not owning, because there are certain people who do want to own and who want to have that security, and we have to give them that opportunity. But I completely agree with you that, for me, I'm seeing a lot of the young people today, a lot of people don't really want to feel like they're being tied down. Some people often want to just move and go and live in Canada for three years, they want to go and move to somewhere else and live there without having to worry about a mortgage that is tying them down somewhere else. So I definitely would argue for a slightly different conversation about ownership. I would also argue another point, which is part of the conversation that we're having about the baby boomers earlier, is that we don't give enough of those people an opportunity to downsize. So a lot of people who bought their houses a long time ago, and their kids are flown the nest, or they didn't have any kids are now living in houses that are really too big for them. But they don't want to move out of their community. But there aren't enough opportunities for them to be able to downsize and still stay within their area. And that's another conversation to be hard, because I've come across a lot of people who are older, who do want to move and who do want to downsize, but the opportunities just aren't there. So I would add that part of the conversation. So I definitely do not think that building more housing is the silver bullet. But it's a big part of the picture.
Otegha Uwagba 48:16
And I just add as well, I think something you've talked about really well in the book is the fact that it makes sense that Britain is a nation focused on homeownership, because for the most part, it's the only route to housing security in the UK. And if the private rental sector reformed in such a way that you could achieve security through renting and like my aunt in Geneva, who doesn't care about owning her place, because she you know, renting owning seemed it to her she's still, like I said, been there 25, probably 30 years. So I think part of the issue as well. It's like, Yeah, we could de emphasize Pomona that actually makes sense to aspire to homeownership in the UK, given the way things are.
Hashi Mohamed 48:53
That's the only way. Yeah, exactly. No, I completely agree.
Audience member 48:56
Thank you. Hi. Do you think there is an argument for really restructuring how the planning laws work in terms of what they facilitate? So the whole there's this whole thing about building on brownfield site, but has that really happened and the whole thing, you know, what people can object about? There seems to be a lot of quagmire built into the whole planning system, which doesn't help.
Hashi Mohamed 49:23
It helps me financially.
Audience member 49:25
Well, and I'm very happy for that. No, but I just think that the whole it's just a quagmire that people get stuck in and entrenched in they they have they hold positions just because they can
Hashi Mohamed 49:38
I agree. To that to the guy at the back. I'll come back to that. Yes.
Audience member 49:41
I agree with you that Mrs. Thatcher's decision was one of the most ruinous decisions we've had in any government since war, and the point being that the the whole social fabric of our nation has been made About with. And when we hear them trying to build something now they say, we'll have a nice social mix. It never works. We had the wonderful social mix. If you lived in St. Ives, you'd have a council house on the outskirts. Everybody was happy in the countryside. We haven't mentioned it at the moment. But similarly, those council houses are the ones which have been taken up by second homeowners. Yep. It's an absolute tragedy. I agree. And when you think that within a year of it happening, we had the Tesco heiress being fined 30 million pounds for letting her friends buy the ones in Westminster. I just don't know how we allow that to happen.
Hashi Mohamed 50:50
I completely agree. And I'll tell you, I was just trying to find a passage in the book about that. Because in places like Cornwall and St. Ives, they've actually stopped second home ownerships and have banned a lot of the second home ownerships. In Vancouver, if you're not a resident, you're not allowed to buy something. In New Zealand, there's a massive curtailment of foreign ownership. So a lot of the stuff I'm talking about is already out there and already in place and already implementable. The planning system I talked about in great detail here. I think that personally, the planning system is not the problem that everybody thinks that it is, it's the way we interact with it. First of all, it's a completely arcane system of hotchpotch of policies that people rarely understand Hence, why people like me are making living out of it. But actually, the planning system, the best way to understand it is this technocratic system of facts, data, statistics, technical details that decide how many houses how much cars can handle this particular community, the roads, the lighting, the schools that are needed to facilitate that particular housing, the GP, the shops that you're going to need, all of that is that statistical hard data that specialists deal with. But then we try and pull that through a sieve of politics. And what comes out is just shit. Because the sieve that you're putting it through, is a short term, individualistic, selfish, political system. But actually what the technocrats come out with, of City Planning, no country does it better than we do. Genuinely, if you ever fly into the UK, when you see those houses the way they are planned, and the grid. And the roads. That's that is not by accident, that is planning at its best. You know, from an aerial perspective, if you go home tonight, and you look on Google Earth, and you see your streets, that didn't happen by accident, a bunch of people got together and figured that out. And thought that through from your sewage, to the air that you breathe to the light that comes into your house, all of that was thought through, but we just don't do it anymore. Because by the time the decision comes out, the politicians of gold got hold of it and choked it and killed at source. And that's the problem. So the planning system in of itself, is a product of our ambitions, but just being poorly implemented. That's my argument about that.
Audience member 53:26
One last thing I want you to make is that, I hear that in the private sector, they can ignore the measurements which was set out so clearly, for council houses in the 50s. Yes, instead of that you can build a room like a cupboard. Now who's in control of that and shouldn't there be regulation that nobody can build a house with rooms smaller than such?
Hashi Mohamed 53:56
No, I, there's a big issue of policy that and that is a big problem for sure.
Otegha Uwagba 54:01
Okay. Unfortunately, that is all we have time for. This has been such an enriching conversation. Thank you guys so much for listening. And for your questions. It's really added a lot to it. I cannot recommend Hashi's book any more. It's A Home of One's Own. It's so brilliant. I think it's really clear. It's also you know, short essays. You can read it one evening, but I think housing is something that affects us all. We all need housing, we all want secure housing. So if that's you, and that is every single person in this room, then you should absolutely buy this book. So we're going to be outside just at the front desk. Hashi will be signing copies of the book. You can ask him more questions if you want. I just want to say thank you so much for talking to us for making housing entertaining.
Shantel Edwards 54:47
Thank you for listening to this episode of The Birmingham Lit Fest Presents podcast. Follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook at BhamLitFest. All information about the festival and upcoming events can be found on our website www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org. The Birmingham Lit Fest Presents podcast is produced by 11 C and Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands