SHARED ownership was supposed to be an “imaginative” housing solution pushed both by New Labour and Cameron’s Conservatives, but a recent article in online magazine The Lead says the “situation is so desperate that the plight of shared owners may well be the next big housing debacle.”

Shared ownership is for people who want to buy a flat but can’t afford ever-rising property prices. So you try and “own,” say,  30 per cent of your flat, paying rent for the remaining 70 per cent.

It’s meant to be a bridge between renting and buying. Maybe over time you can buy bigger shares of your flat and slowly join the respectable property-owning classes.

Only you don’t really own 30 per cent, you take out a mortgage. It’s supposed to be the best of both worlds, a bit of renting and a slow move into ownership.

It just about worked during the long period of low interest rates. But just clinging on through “shared ownership” when interest was low is turning into a nightmare as rates rise.

It’s well worth looking at The Lead in general, it’s a good, new socially conscious news website which carries Hanna Fearn’s article on shared ownership.

It says: “With inflation running at such high rates, shared owners now face a triple threat to their finances: rising mortgage payments, rises in the rental charge on the portion of the property they don’t own, and higher service charges claimed by the owner and manager of the building.”

They can’t easily sell on their share in their flats – rules for selling are restrictive – so are stuck being squeezed on these three fronts.  

Housing associations are usually the co-owner of the “shared ownership” flat. These associations have been squeezed by lack of government funding and  now in turn squeeze shared owners: “These organisations have to fund their core work somehow. They have, quite openly and rather brazenly, been relying heavily on shared owners to balance their books.”

With a growing crisis for shared owner flat dwellers, it’s worth looking at how we got here.

The old solution to the housing problem was accepting a purely commercial housing market just wouldn’t meet everybody’s needs. It had to be supplemented by a very large social rented sector. In 1980 nearly a third of people lived in council houses .

Thatcher hated social ownership, selling off as many council houses as she could and stopping councils building new ones. The long-term result has not been a massive expansion of home ownership. Instead, there has been a big growth in private renters.

The sold-off social houses often simply ended up with private landlords. Without the big supplement of social housing, we have ended up with housing shortages and rising prices.

When Labour was elected in 1997, they could have tried to create more social houses to replace those Thatcher sold off. Instead Labour tried to find a “third way,” accepting Thatcher’s basic idea that everybody should move as quickly to ownership as they could, and let social housing decline, but with a tweak. 

Labour seized on shared ownership, as a supposed bridge between affordable and market housing. Low interest rates made it look workable in the medium term, covering up the  obvious dangers of making people have both a mortgage and a landlord.

One or the other is bad enough.

Labour MPs repeatedly talked up shared ownership. My own Labour MP, Alan Whitehead, urged the government in 2000 to see  that shared ownership “could be of great assistance in making affordable homes for people on their first salaries.” 

In 2001 Lord Falconer was claiming “shared ownership can make a real impact on the homelessness problem.”

No Labour MP was more closely linked to shared ownership than Yvette Cooper, who was housing minister from 2005-8. She endlessly talked about it in Parliament, telling MPs she was trying to “increase shared ownership schemes” and that “we need more shared ownership in order to help people buy a share of their own home even if they cannot afford the whole house price.” 

Cooper overrode her own housing experts and advisers to make housing associations and developers  expand shared ownership.

When Labour left office, the Conservatives were happy to continue Labour’s policy of increasing shared ownership while allowing the social rented sector to languish. Grant Shapps was a particular fan.

This was “third way” politics – trying to find a way to cover up Thatcherism, not reverse it.

But rising interest rates have exposed the shoddy foundations. The shared owners – the lower-middle income earners, the teachers and nurses who couldn’t quite buy a house and were sold the shared income dream by centrist politicians, are facing a nightmare.

At precisely the point Yvette Coopers centrist politics are exposed by reality, she has returned to Labour’s front bench.

 Sharma coins it in

THERE is much scepticism about how effective the UN’s 2021 Climate Change conference, Cop26 was. But it has transformed the income of Alok Sharma, the Tory MP who chaired the Glasgow-based conference.

Sharma recently side-hustled from his MP’s job to be paid £20,000 for just one speech to JP Morgan. Sharma says he spent four hours on the speech, which was made in May but only listed on the latest Register of MPs’ Interests in June.

It’s very unlikely Sharma could have commanded this kind of fee based on his unspectacular ministerial career, but having been on the international stage heading Cop26 makes him much more attractive to the big money men.

JP Morgan has every reason to want people who can tell it how to talk the language of international climate change regulation. The bank are simultaneously one of the biggest investors in fossil fuels and one of the most involved in “greenwashing” those investments to make them look less of a threat to the climate.

According to 2023 estimates in Banking on Climate Chaos, a report by a coalition of environmental NGOs, JP Morgan are the world’s leading investor in fossil fuels.

The bank are also experts in complicated mathematical attempts to prove their oil investments are actually promoting lower carbon – with concepts like “carbon intensity” – which critics say are merely greenwashing.

Having Sharma along as a friendly speaker can only help the bank carry on like this.