Housing crisis will hit IT

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

Faced with skills shortages in the capital, the South East and the East of England, Whitehall has decided that certain occupations need help in 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?

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 long distances to work, from flats and houses that are too small for their families to live in.

London Mayor Ken Livingstone also spoke at the event, insisting 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 turn it over to homes, instead of hoping they can bring manufacturing back there.

An appreciative titter went up from the assembled housing association 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- and two-bedroom units for the chosen few.

It is all too easy to ignore the IT-lite backwardness of British construction, as Red Ken did. He proposed 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 to IT directors right now. But as more and more IT staff are forced to travel long distances into work, more and more will also wonder if their pay will ever allow them the space to be parents. Britain’s housing crisis is an issue for IT professionals, whether we like it or not.