Is housing at the heart of unequal Britain? With Anna Clarke

I'm Conan Akin, Senior Researcher at the Intergenerational Foundation. We're a research charity fighting for a fairer deal for younger and future generations in the UK. We work on some of the big policy challenges shaping the lives of young people, from housing and student finance to taxation, the labour market and the environment. Our work focuses on exposing intergenerational unfairness and proposing practical, evidence-based reforms. In this new podcast series, we'll be speaking to some of the UK's leading experts about the issues that matter most to younger and future generations. My guest today is Anna Clarke, Director of Policy and Public Affairs at the Housing Forum. Anna's worked across housing policy, research and public affairs for many years, including in academia, at Peabody and now at the Housing Forum, which brings together organisations from across the housing and construction sector. Today we'll be speaking with Anna about the housing crisis and intergenerational fairness. So we'll be talking about how we got into the mess we're currently in, how it's affecting younger generations and what we should do about it. Anna, thanks for joining me.

Thank you. Nice to be here. Great.

So you've spent a lot of your career working on housing policy and research. So perhaps the best place to start with is how you first came to the topic and why it's remained such a kind of focus throughout your career.

I guess I'd trace it right back to a chance conversation as a student walking home late one night about whether or not we should give money to beggars, which resulted in me and my friend concluding that we should go and volunteer at the night shelter instead of giving money. So I did that and then finished my degree. Not really much of a clue what I wanted to do next, but saw a job for a paid role at the night shelter. So I took that. So I worked there for a couple of years, which was certainly a baptism by fire into the problems of the acute end of the housing crisis. It was a 25 bed direct access problem. project for street homeless people with all sorts of problems and issues and challenges. But a lot of the time we could help people. We could get them into hostel places. Sometimes we could even get them housing. But mostly we couldn't get them housing. Mostly they stayed within the homeless system and their problems got worse, not better. So an awful lot of the kind of things we associate with street homeless people were things that became problems because they were homeless, because we couldn't move them on, because there wasn't enough housing. So we were sort of picking up the pieces all the time. And I was finding this frustrating that well you know every time we help people there's more people coming through our door and it's really hard to get people housed so I went off and did a master's in research methods and got into housing research trying to kind of unpack why this was why is it so difficult to get people housed why is there not enough housing why is it so expensive so I worked in research for many years and I've now moved kind of downstream of that I suppose into more directly trying to influence policy and get things changed