Home improvement is the ‘triple dividend’ the UK desperately needs

Imagine you are a politician sitting at your desk, pen in hand, writing down ideas for the next election manifesto. 

Money is tight, with the UK projected to be running a budget deficit until 2028 - if not longer. So we need policies that can generate a significant return on limited investment. Economists and experts are predicting growing, potentially unsustainable, demand for public services based on current projections. So we need policies that can help improve the country’s health and wellbeing.

At the same time the UK is facing low growth and a cost-of-living crisis, so we need policies that can boost investment and reduce bills. On top of all this, we have a national mission to achieve Net Zero by 2050 and experts warn we may miss this target based on current commitments. So we need policies that can directly reduce our carbon emissions and reduce our carbon footprint. How do you find a policy agenda that ticks all those boxes?

The good news for our hypothetical politician is that there is a policy agenda which can achieve that:. Home improvement to fix our poor quality housing stock.  

Working with the Centre for Ageing Better and Dunhill Medical Trust and building on the findings of the former’s Good Home Inquiry, we have looked at the economic, social and environmental benefits that could be achieved through a pragmatic policy programme to improve the quality of our homes. We’ve called this project the Triple Dividend. 

The Economic Dividend from home improvement would be significant. Based on investment by the government of £625m a year, a sum that can be found through underspends and using existing resources more effectively, we estimate that £10 billion in economic benefit could be generated, supporting or creating 100,000 jobs and helping hundreds of thousands of households. 

The Social Dividend would greatly improve the country’s health. Over 3 million lives could be improved, adding over 100,000 quality life years to people every year. This means people would spend more time in better health. Not only does this mean better quality of life for people and the chance to participate in family and community life, but it also reduces pressure on our NHS and social care services. 

The Environmental Dividend would make a solid contribution to achieving Net Zero. Fixing our housing stock is not a magic wand but a consistent programme of investment could take nearly 750,000 tons of carbon out of the atmosphere every year. This is the equivalent of taking more than 450,000 cars off the road.  

For every pound that we spend, we can hit multiple targets across the board. Crucially for policy makers, it is something tangible that the public can understand.  More than 2 million older people suffer physical and mental ill health, and even death, as a consequence of living in a substandard and non-accessible home. Policymakers can tackle these issues directly, whilst meeting their objectives to grow the economy, improve the country's health and wellbeing and make progress towards Net Zero. 

There are a number of policy levers that the government can pull to achieve this.  

England’s national agency for housing, Homes England, has a strategic objective to build new homes but nothing about funding improvement to existing stock. Building on the work of the Centre for Ageing Better, we should put in place Good Home Hubs around the country, to provide a one-stop shop for people to access support for fixing their homes. 

A robustly enforced Decent Homes Standard could also unlock investment into improving private-rented housing. Finally, targeted investment to the most vulnerable and working with social investors to access new forms of finance could make limited public money go further. 

As our briefings show, we do not lack ideas on how we can tackle this problem, we just need policy makers to give this agenda a real push.  

There is rightly considerable focus in the policy debate on the need to build more homes. However, we must not take our eyes off the other side of the housing crisis, the need to fix the homes we have already built. More than four in five of the homes that we are going to live in by 2050 have already been built, so we cannot afford to duck this issue. 

Any housing policy agenda that lacks plans to fix existing poor quality housing is ignoring a big part of the challenge.