Homes fit for heroes

After the first so-called 'key worker' housing conference in 2002, hosted by the Guardian, their follow up conference Key worker housing: building on foundations to crack the crisis sought to look at some of the proposals to provide homes that key workers can afford in 2004. However James Woudhuysen noticed that it's been decided that IT specialists, like bus drivers, won't get the state's help in affording a home. So what will non-key workers do?

To the Institution of Electrical Engineers, for a Guardian conference titled Key worker housing: building on foundations to crack the crisis. Keith Hill, Britain's sixth housing minister since 1997, announces that half of all Londoners cannot afford to own a home.

Yet he is full of the government's progress.

Faced with skills shortages in the capital, the South East and the East of England, Whitehall has decided that certain occupations need help buying or renting accommodation.

Through its 2001 starter home initiative, it arranged for 10,000 new, affordable homes to be built for first-time buyers who were nurses, teachers and police officers. Now, through its October 2003 push on 'key worker living', the government has found £690m, over two years, to build 67,000 homes for a wider group, including occupational therapists, physiotherapists, educational psychologists, prison staff and probation officers.

What, though, of those unsung heroes - IT workers? Aren't they 'key' to the continued operation of London, the South East and plenty of other places in Britain? Doesn't the IT sector suffer from skills shortages, and from pay low enough to make a decent computer room back home an impossibility?

Tied microflats are an employment trap for underpaid 'key workers'

The question is not raised. Of course, against bus drivers who are paid £20,000 for what an employer admitted was a 75-hour week, people in IT do relatively well. But as a cogent platform speaker from UNISON points out, the whole idea of giving special treatment to people designated as 'key' is divisive. IT people keep the traffic light systems going, that allow a city's transport to function; but somehow officialdom regards them as undeserving - like teaching assistants, NHS theatre technicians and social workers. They too must commute large distances to work, from flats and houses that are too small for their families to live in.

Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, comes on. He insists that he will compel Tory boroughs to build more affordable homes. If councillors from my own Wandsworth have a site that's been vacant for 30 years, they must make it over to homes, instead of hoping they can bring manufacturing back there.

An appreciative titter goes up from the assembled housing associations and municipal types. Manufacturing in the UK? The very idea of it! Yet to house IT workers, office cleaners and all the rest, Britain needs to produce new, spacious, broadband-equipped homes by the million, not the thousand.

So IT, CAD and even UK-based manufacturing may be the only way to deliver more than one- or two-bedroom units for a chosen few.

It is all too easy to ignore the IT-lite backwardness of British construction, as Red Ken does. Instead, he proposes that the solution lies in doing up the space above Tesco's (100 dwellings in Clapham), or above railway stations.

Make do and mend, it seems, is about as physical as our leaders want to get.

These facts may not seem too relevant, right now, to IT directors.

But as more and more IT staff are still forced to come long distances into work, more and more will also wonder if their pay will ever allow them the space to be parents.

The continuance of Victorian Britain

Britain's housing crisis is an issue for IT professionals, whether we like it or not. James Woudhuysen 21 May 2004

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