Housing

Decent housing is a basic human need, but it is one where the UK continues to fail people in many ways. The TUC campaigns for more housing to be built in order to deal with the entrenched crisis. A crucial part of the campaign is the call for more social housing, including more local authority housing. The TUC also calls for more affordable mortgages and better services for owner-occupiers, and for better standards in the private rented sector. Another important strand of our work is to campaign to defend housing benefits, which are under attack by the Government.  

We are concerned that poor and overcrowded housing ruins people's life chances, increasing the risk that they will do badly in education and suffer from poor health. We have also become very worried that poor housing also undermines people’s ability to do well at work.

The pamphlet Can Housing Work for Workers? addresses that issue head-on, challenging commonly held beliefs around home ownership and arguing that our distorted approach to different types of tenure traps many in vulnerable work and unemployment.


The most recent documents available on this subject are:

Can Housing Work For Workers? Touchstone Pamphlet #11

Public and government attitudes to housing in the UK are shot through with assumptions and prejudices. Most prevalent is the strongly held view that certain forms of tenure are better than others. This pamphlet argues that this 'false hierarchy' h...

15 July 2011
Government must not forget poorer homeowners, says TUC

Government must not forget poorer homeowners, says TUC The widely-held ideological view that buying your home is always best has led successive governments to ignore poorer homeowners, says a new TUC report published today (Wednesday).

13 July 2011
Housing benefit changes will increase risk of youth homelessness, says TUC

Commenting on the announcement today (Monday) by Pensions Minister Steve Webb that from January 2012, earlier than previously planned, single adults aged 34 or under will only be able to claim enough housing benefit to cover the costs of living in a ...

28 March 2011
House prices show we're not all in it together

The latest figures published today (Friday) from the Land Registry for England and Wales suggest that while it's business as usual for the wealthy, ordinary people, especially the young, are struggling to get onto the housing market, says the TUC.

26 November 2010
Two thirds of welfare cuts will fall on working families

Nearly two thirds of the £15.9 billion of welfare and benefit cuts announced in the emergency budget and spending review will hit working families, undermining government claims that they are 'making work pay', the TUC reveals today (Monday).

1 November 2010
Housing cuts for long-term unemployed will hit at least 194,000 vulnerable adults a year

New TUC analysis published today (Monday) of the Government's proposed 10 per cent housing benefit cut for adults who have been claiming Jobseeker's Allowance (JSA) for more than 12 months, reveals that at least 194,000 unemployed adults will lose...

6 September 2010



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