Tory actions speak louder than words on social housing

"I don't understand why you keep going on about the need for more social housing - it just creates Labour voters."

Nick Clegg doesn't recall whether it was David Cameron or George Osborne who uttered these words.

But he knows it was one of them. Why? Because he was sitting across the table from them in one of the coalition's "guad" meetings when this nugget of unguarded Tory honesty slipped out.

The former deputy prime minister is in no doubt that this represented the cynicism-drenched view of the Conservative leadership on social housing and its residents, going all the way back to Margaret Thatcher's Right to Buy revolution in 1980.

Have things changed? Ministers, scarred by the eruption of anger over the treatment of social housing tenants and government housing policy in general in the wake of the Grenfell disaster, want us to think so.

"Regardless of whether you own your home or rent in the social sector, residents deserve security, dignity and the opportunities to build a better life," says the communities secretary James Brokenshire.

The new green paper on social housing talks of "tackling stigma", "empowering residents" and "ensuring homes are safe and decent". All sorely needed. But then there's the kicker: "expanding supply".

What better way for the Conservatives to bury the perception that they secretly regard social housing tenants as Labour-voting deadbeats than by creating more of them? But will they? Despite colossal pent-up demand - more than a million households have been on social housing waiting lists for at least a decade - the coalition deliberately ran down construction rates of homes for social rent.

The Conservatives, governing alone, have carried on with the policy since 2015. Official figures show that just 5,380 new homes for social rent were created in 2016-17, down from around 40,000 in 2010-11.

Cameron and Osborne devised a new category of social housing called "affordable rent", which essentially means subsidised housing that is more expensive for tenants without being quite as dear as open market rents. It was essentially an indirect means of reducing government funding for social housing (although it didn't contribute to cutting the deficit because it simply meant tenants needed to claim more in housing benefit to pay their rent).

The supply of new affordable-rent homes rose from zero in 2010-11 to 24,350 in 2016-17. But even if one adds new affordable rent to new social rent the supply of subsidised rental housing is still around a third lower than it was six years ago.

Kit Malthouse is the new housing minister, the eighth in eight years. He admitted yesterday that the annual supply of new social rent housing by 2021 is not likely to rise above 12,500. Which is not terribly surprising given the government, despite many flashy pledges of new funding, has not announced any major additional grants for social landlords to enable them to ramp up construction.

And the Treasury is still resisting pleas to scrap the borrowing limit on local authorities, something needed to enable them to start building council housing in serious volumes again, as they did between the Second World War and the 1980s.

There is a vigorous debate taking place among economists over whether increasing national housing construction rates to 300,000 a year, as the government is targeting, will actually have a significant impact on house prices. But regardless of the impact on house prices, it's clear that the UK needs more and better quality social housing, whether from housing associations or councils.

There are some 80,000 households in temporary private accommodation because councils cannot house them permanently, up 64 per cent since 2010. And those who have secured social housing are more likely to be overcrowded than they were a decade ago.

The numbers of families living in unsuitable private rented accommodation has shot up, as home ownership rates have collapsed. Many of them would be better off in social housing - and that is what hundreds of thousands of them say that they want.

Given that there are around 4 million subsidised rental homes, many of which will need to be replaced due to age, Malthouse's pathetic projected levels of new supply are essentially a prescription for the sector to wither.

Words are cheap. Creating more social housing isn't. Ministers will rightly be judged on what they actually deliver.

The curse of politicians' illusory superiority

In 1995 a 44-year-old man called McArthur Wheeler set out to rob two banks in Pittsburgh. In preparation for the crime he smeared his face with lemon juice.

Wheeler's bizarre logic was that since lemon juice can be used as a kind of invisible ink on paper, the liquid would also render his face invisible to the banks' security cameras.

After the robbery police retrieved the surveillance tape and gave it to a local news channel. Wheeler was duly identified and then arrested. During his interrogation Wheeler was confused over how his cunning plan to avoid detection had failed. "But I wore the juice," he reportedly mumbled.

Wheeler's delusions over his own competence as a criminal inspired two US psychologists, David Dunning and Justin Kruger, to run some experiments on undergraduates at Cornell University in New York. They asked students a series of technical questions on grammar and logic and asked them to estimate their scores and also estimate their rank relative to their peers.

The results suggested that some students who performed badly not only considered themselves to have done well - but also believed themselves more competent than those who performed considerably better.

Thus was established the "Dunning-Kruger effect": the cognitive bias of illusory superiority. People who rate their talents highly sometimes just don't grasp how incompetent they truly are.

"This is more work than in my previous life," Donald Trump told reporters from Reuters last week in an interview to mark 100 days of predictable fiasco from the property tycoon's White House. "I thought it would be easier. This is actually more work." Or as the former Apprentice personality might have put it: "But I wore the juice."

One does not have to look far in politics to find the Dunning-Kruger effect. David Cameron was once asked why he wanted to be prime minister and replied: "Because I think I'd be rather good at it." Before the 2015 general election he solemnly warned that Britain faced an "inescapable choice - stability and strong Government with me, or chaos with Ed Miliband".

Surveying the chaotic British political scene in 2017 many have begun to question whether this was an entirely accurate prognostication. But not Cameron. Speaking in Bangkok last week Cameron said he thought he did a "reasonable job" as Prime Minister, despite his humiliating resignation last year in the wake of the Brexit vote. And he apparently has no regrets about his decision to hold that vote. "The lack of a referendum was poisoning British politics and so I put that right," he concluded. In Cameron's mind the lemon juice apparently worked a treat.

In February 2016 the Conservative MP David Davis airily stated that there was "no reason" Britain could not conclude entirely new free trade agreements with its biggest foreign markets "within two years". Trade experts regard that as catastrophically ignorant of the technical difficulties involved in constructing such complex deals. But now that the two-year Article 50 European Union divorce proceedings have been triggered and Davis is the minister for Brexit he has an opportunity to prove himself correct. Let's hope the lemon juice is operational.

It gets worse. Research from scientists at the University of California suggests over-confidence is often taken as a signal by others of actual competence. So Trump and Cameron's electoral success may have reflected a view among the public that they must have known what they were doing precisely because they told us so forcefully. Ditto the super-confident Brexiteers like Davis.

Such cognitive biases may not only explain why we sometimes have such inadequate political leaders but also why we have such chronically unequal societies. The flip-side of unmerited over-confidence can be unmerited under confidence. And experiments by the behavioural economist Jeffrey Butler have found that when individuals are randomly assigned high and low pay in cognitive ability tasks those who are luckier often became more confident and competitive, while the unlucky tend to grow demoralised and to inaccurately underrate the relative ability.

Perhaps this research offers a clue as to why bright and diligent kids born into disadvantage so often fail to fulfil their potential while the most prestigious jobs and political power so often seem to be monopolised by the thrusting and grotesquely over-confident sons of privilege. Or to put it another way: why the lemons rise to the top.