Finally, an ingenious solution to a housing crisis that is sapping the quality of life of an entire generation: the humble van. More than 21,000 Britons applied to the DVLA in the past year – a rise of almost two-thirds in two years – to convert their van into a home. These can be furnished to include a shower, a bed, cooking facilities and a seating area. Apparently, some van homes even have hot tubs. With your cosy cubby-hole on wheels, you can escape the tyranny of a private rental sector defined by rip-off rents and a lack of security and roam the British landscape, unshackled, free!
Stop this – stop this immediately. This is yet another attempt to glamorise a national scandal, to dress up desperation at the inability of a wealthy society to provide one of the most basic needs of its citizens as kooky and fun. Will historians look back at this as a wacky, innovative trend, or will they write: “In 2019, citizens of the country with the sixth-biggest economy were forced to transform vehicles into places to live because of the lack of affordable housing”?
It is not just vans: public toilets – the decline of which is a depressing story in its own right – are being transformed into “dream” one-bedroom flats. Converted sheds are being advertised for more than £1,000 a month. In 2017, a developer announced plans to cram hundreds of studio flats into an 11-storey block; at 16 sq metres, some would be 40% smaller than the average Travelodge room. By exploiting relaxed planning rules, a developer is trying to build a flat with living space smaller than a taxi. “The back part of the building is essentially a windowless shed,” as one expert at an architecture firm put it.
Here is a shockingly radical suggestion. Instead of cramming people into depressing, confined spaces, why don’t we provide quality housing people can afford? Why not start a programme of 21st-century council housing – which would create jobs and stimulate the economy – combined with controls on private rents? Why not affirm comfortable, affordable housing as a basic human right in a society that has the resources to provide it for all? Vans are for driving. Sheds are for gardening tools. Homes are for human beings. That this needs to be stated is a sad indictment of the prevailing social order.
