Interview with Dara Turnbull on the challenges and future trends of European housing

As part of our global interview series for Future Local Lab, LGIU’s Andrew Walker sat down with Dara Turnbull, Research Coordinator at Housing Europe, to discuss his current specialism in social and affordable housing and economic inequality and what the trends and predictions are for the future of housing. 

This conversation covers a wide range of crucial issues, from the evolution of demographic trends to best practices across European nations and the implications of big data gaps for providing accurate insights. We also dig into what the appointment of a new Housing Commissioner for the EU means for this key policy area and how housing provisions in the future will have to adjust to meet demand.

Dara Turnbull is one of LGIU’s top 25 thinkers in local government make sure you check out the rest of the list.

Watch the full conversation on Youtube here.

1:45 – Dara’s background and journey into housing policy
5:18 – The role of the EU Housing Commissioner
11:56 – Demographic trends in housing across Europe
14:19 – Local government’s role in housing solutions
17:23 – Navigating long-term housing policies through data
23:57 – Housing policy’s impact on social wellbeing
26:44 – Key ingredients for successful housing systems
28:58 – Democratising housing
36:48 – The future of housing: trends and predictions

Watch/listen to the full conversation on Spotify here.

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Looking for just the highlights? A written version of the interview has been edited down into a Q&A format, which you can read below.

Can you tell us a little bit about your career, your involvement with local government and the insights you’ve gained?

My local government experience has always been more indirect rather than direct, but I’ve been considering getting fully involved for many years now.

I’ve been wrapped up and involved in local government more indirectly than directly for many years now. In fact, my Dad worked in one of the local municipalities in Dublin as the director of services at Fingal County Council. So, local government has been a part of my life since I was a very young child. In terms of my own background, today my focus is primarily on housing, particularly at the European Union level and on the sharing of best practices between different parts of Europe to make sure that good policies aren’t siloed and that they make their way to other parts of the continent, which is very important.

I essentially fell into housing by accident. My background is in economics, and I worked primarily in the financial sector for about six or seven years. But as a young person growing up in Dublin, I noticed that things were a bit off. Despite having good jobs and solid incomes, my peers were still living with their parents into their mid to late twenties. That’s obviously quite a big reversal to what would have been the norm for my parents’ generation or my grandparents’ generation. For them, by the age of 27, about two-thirds of people in Ireland actually were homeowners, whereas today in Ireland, 27 is the age at which people tend to actually leave the family home for the very first time, not to become owners, but to enter the private rental market – it’s quite a departure.

I was always thinking about these issues around housing, and then one day, I was having a conversation with my mother, who essentially said, “You think it’s hard now, but it was equally hard when I was your age to get access to housing”. She sent me an article that basically tried to make this point. They had looked at the history of housing affordability and challenges in Ireland and tried to put together the data to answer the question. The answer that they came up with was that housing is just as unaffordable or unattainable for millennials as it was for the previous generation. I looked into that article and said, ‘Ok, I’m an economist, let’s take a look at the findings. ’ I realised that they had basically used incorrect figures and their methodology wasn’t particularly robust and I said, ‘Hang on, surely someone can do better than this’. So in my frustration and to prove myself right against my mother, I decided to actually crunch the figures, which no one, surprisingly, had ever actually done before. I published two papers off the back of tha,t and my career in housing was launched from there.

I did some consultancy work for the housing agency in Ireland and other bodies. Then, I wanted a change of scenery, so I literally Googled the words ‘housing Europe’ or something similar. It popped up that there was an organisation in Brussels called Housing Europe, which was doing just that. I’ve been here since 2019.

A key part of your role at Housing for Europe is working for the new EU-level Commissioner for housing, which you and Housing Europe have advocated for for a long time. Can you tell us about this new role, its aspirations, and the challenges involved?

Up until now, we’ve never had a commissioner responsible for housing. Housing has been at the periphery of a number of different portfolios, like social affairs, environment, and employment. We see from opinion polling across Europe that housing is consistently cited in most European countries, particularly in urban areas, as being one of the key determinants of how people vote in elections, especially for younger people and for people of lower incomes. So, we felt it was important to have someone who could be a focal point, who we could direct our questions to, and who could bring together the different strands of EU competences on housing, which previously, up until now, were more dispersed.

That was a bit of a problem for us because you would have to have a conversation with someone who’s working on social affairs, employment, and environmental issues, and they wouldn’t necessarily talk to each other. So we would become this quasi-interlocutor between different people and different functions. That became a bit difficult to manage.

It’s important to say that Housing Europe are not directly part of the European Union, we are effectively a membership organisation that works on behalf of about 43,000 local housing providers. For example, in Ireland, we have two members, the Irish Council for Social Housing and Cooperative Housing Ireland. Unfortunately, post-Brexit, we only have two members left in the UK, and they’re two Northern Irish members. Our Welsh, Scottish and English members are no longer with us, but they’re still very much in our hearts and in the work that we do, and we remain in good contact with them. It’s really important that we maintain that level of independence from the Commission because we have to be able to be critical of the work that they’re producing.

We’ve really hit the ground running on this in recent weeks. Just this morning, I had a good call with members of the new Housing Task Force, which was effectively set up to see how the European Union can help support member states in doing better on housing without overstepping the mark. That’s important because housing is not a strict competence of the European Union in the same way that agriculture or justice would be. But that doesn’t mean that the European Union is agnostic about the topic of housing. So, what we see is that it should be a body going forward that can help support the dissemination of best practices, but also identify current blockages within the system. There are lots of regulations coming from the European level related to things like climate change, decarbonisation, land usage, all these kinds of topics, which are not directly about, for instance, access to social and affordable housing, but do have a knock-on impact on the work that we do. We’re hoping that the Housing Commission can be a conduit to better identify those kinds of unintentional consequences and then advocate on behalf of ourselves and other like-minded organisations to make sure that those obstacles are moved and that member states are better equipped to provide affordable housing for people who need it.

With the Housing Commissioner and the Commissioner’s Office, do they relate exclusively to member states and then through member states to local municipalities and providers? Or is there more of a direct relationship with the EU level? What’s the pattern of governance there?

It’s clear that the EU is somewhat impenetrable to people who are outside of the Brussels bubble that I now find myself in. Indeed, I realised that before actually moving to Brussels and working in this environment, I thought I knew how the European Union really worked. And then I found out that actually, I knew almost nothing.

It’s important to understand that housing is not a strict competence of the European Union. So, there is a requirement for Dan Jørgensen, the new commissioner responsible for housing, not to overstep the mark too much. He shouldn’t be trying to deliver top-down rules and regulations, but play a more capacity-building and supportive role. One of the things that we’re talking to them about a lot at the moment is that if you look at our social and affordable housing or even cooperative housing, there are many countries that are far more advanced in that conversation compared to other countries.

Without meaning to stigmatise or stereotype, we see that particularly in Mediterranean countries, some central European countries and also Eastern bloc countries. They either have not been building sufficient quantities of social affordable housing for many decades, or, particularly in the EU accession countries, they stopped building social housing when they transitioned to a market economy in the 90s. There’s a very important job that has to be played by the European Union to try to get back into those countries, develop capacity-building tools, and make sure that the proper structures are there, such as the capacity to absorb EU funds that currently exist.

That’s one of the key challenges that we’ve seen in recent years that the EU has been doing more or less its part in terms of making funding available to support the development of affordable types of housing or even the renovation of housing for low-income people who may be access who don’t have access to funds do that themselves but there’s an absorption capacity issue whereby because we don’t have robust legislation at the national level. For example, we don’t have a national housing agency, and we don’t have the systems in place. It’s actually very difficult for many countries to absorb the funding, even if it is made available to them.

That’s an issue because it creates a two-tier system. So in countries like Ireland, like in the Netherlands, previously in the UK, of course, those kinds of systems and good practices were already quite evolved. Therefore, the countries that already have very well-functioning systems are the ones that are most able to access funding, even if theoretically they have the least amount of need. Whereas the countries with the most need also have the least amount of capacity. So it’s really those bread and butter issues that we hope the commissioner can help to evolve.

You mentioned how you initially became interested in housing because of demographic changes of people entering the housing market. What sort of trends are you seeing across continental Europe? Is it the same everywhere, or is there a lot of variation?  

There is a huge amount of variation. Eurostat produces quite good annual estimates of the average age at which a person leaves. They call it the family home (of course, there are a multitude of living circumstances) as a good catch-all term for the age at which a young adult becomes independent and forms their own household. We have good data on this: It depends on the country, but at least a decade’s worth in all countries and then even further back in some other member states. So we can see how this has evolved over time, and one of the issues that’s interesting regarding the evolution in that respect, countries that 10-15 years ago, already had quite a low average age of leaving the home, those countries have actually remained quite low or have even gone lower again. Then countries that maybe 10-15 years ago had quite a high average age have actually seen that push out. So in a country like Italy, someone would have left home at say 28 or 29, a decade ago. Now it’s probably into their early to mid-30s. Whereas a country like Denmark, where the average age today is about 21, it would have been around 21, 22 ten years ago also. So countries which were outperforming, relatively speaking, continue to outperform.

Countries where there were already issues around people becoming independent as adults have continued to lag behind. Of course, it’s important not to stigmatise because there are many cultural norms which have an impact on this. So it is definitely the case that across Mediterranean countries, we see people typically leave home later than Northern Europe, and there are many issues as to why that might be the case. It isn’t just a question of housing affordability or access, it’s also just the norm for people tend to leave home later in those countries for whatever reason. So in our work, we’re trying to work out the cases where people are choosing to stay at home and the cases where people actually are effectively stuck at home. And that’s the key difference that we try to make. Ireland is a good example from our recent work, where we see that many people who are currently living with their parents would prefer to be forming independent households, but due to the lack of affordable housing, that’s something they effectively can’t do, so that’s a key difference.

How does local government play into that? What are some best practices on a local level across the region to help alleviate the issue?

If people choose to stay at home, that’s fine, that’s their prerogative. But if they want to leave home and effectively can’t, that’s where we have an issue. In the countries where people who want to leave home can leave home more easily, we see that there does tend to be particular housing categories or housing provision made specifically for these groups. So, in many countries in Europe, you would have housing providers, some of which are owned directly or indirectly by municipalities and local governments, and some of which are supported by them but are effectively independent.

The municipality can be very proactive in terms of saying, “Okay, we as a municipality want to ensure that within our city or within a local area there is a sufficient stock of homes that are really earmarked and dedicated for the housing needs of younger people.” A good example might be somewhere like Finland, which has two types of housing providers: Municipal housing companies, which are SPVs owned by the local government, and housing associations, which are independent but still benefit from local government support and nurturing. It’s the latter form, the housing foundations, which would try to do as much as possible in providing housing for students, young workers, people who maybe are exiting the youth care system.

There are a lot of good examples from Europe that other countries could learn from, emphasising that the housing needs of younger people are quite particular and that the forms of housing that may be appropriate for them are also quite unique. But unfortunately in many countries, including many parts of the UK and Ireland, we don’t really see those kind of youth-focused housing policies coming forward. Young people tend to be lumped in with the overall housing market rather than being seen as a separate category, despite younger people being far less likely to have children, less likely to be in long-term durable relationships, making smaller units in a building that has more focus on community building aspects more appropriate. So I think our failure to acknowledge that is a problem in many cases, and there are definitely examples from Europe that we could look to where they’ve really considered those kinds of things. The particular needs and the situation of young people and make sure that housing that’s appropriate for them is available in the market and at at affordable prices, and often subsidised by local municipalities.

I suppose one of the challenges that arises is around time scales and operating over the long and short term. Policy can take a long time to catch up with some of these demographic shifts due to political shifts, funding access, and construction times. So, how do these areas manage those competing timescales to provide stability and sustainability while being responsive and agile?

A lot of the work that I do in Housing Europe is about looking at data to try to draw different conclusions about the need for housing now and in the future. But while we have data from national censuses and various national research institutes, we don’t really have robust analysis from most countries for these kinds of questions. We did a mapping exercise in the last two years to try to see what is the unmet need for housing in Europe. That’s kind of the first question that we have. And then could we go more granular than that? Could we say, OK, specifically, what is the unmet need for affordable social housing? What is the need for housing for younger people, for older people, for families, these kind of things?

Unfortunately, we know very little about these questions in most countries. Really, the data are effectively not there. Even in quite large countries where they have research institutes which would kind of look at these issues, they struggle to come up with accurate figures, and I don’t fully blame them. Many national governments now are putting pressure on ministries to produce yearly estimates of how many homes should be built each year out to 2030 or 2040 based on demographic needs. And they really struggle to come up with those figures. They tried this in Germany in the early 90s when the country unified and they completely underestimated the number of people who would be coming from East to West, and as a result, they built a lot of housing in the former East Germany around cities like Leipzig. And that housing effect was redundant because the population shift was so dramatic and so quick that there was no one to occupy the homes, and they actually ended up having to demolish some of those homes because they were working off faulty premises. So again, I really have a lot of sympathy for agencies who have to try and look at these questions because in this day and age, unfortunately, trying to really make a strong robust prediction about demographics, how that translates into housing and so on is proven to be increasingly difficult and it’s interesting that even in countries like the UK, like Ireland where there are those sorts of estimates produced, they’re frequently revised. I mean every three to four years they tend to be revised because they overestimated, underestimated or didn’t provide sufficient insight. So it’s definitely an issue that needs a lot more work but the problem is trying to find a methodology which can retain some value even over the short to medium term and that’s been quite difficult in Europe for a long time now.

Is there something about the importance of partnerships here, both within the public and private and third sectors, to access and analyse that data? Is that something that is being pursued to access better data, more granular data, more cohesive data that brings in other elements as well as people’s direct housing situation?

So most of the data that we would look at anyway, and take the UK and Ireland as specific examples, will be produced by the likes of the ONS in the UK or the CSO in Ireland. I’d say that in the UK actually you’re quite privileged. I mentioned frequently in presentations the example of the housing surveys which are conducted annually in England and Scotland and quite frequently in Wales and Northern Ireland, which do actually give you a lot of very valuable insights. Unfortunately, this is missing from Ireland where we rely on Eurostat EU data, and that would be the norm across most of Europe. So it’s definitely coming from the public. But where we see valuable partnerships, the first one to mention is a lot of cities that have quite a lot of scale realise that actually they need to be producing their own bespoke research. In London, for example, there is attached to the Mayor of London a specific housing research unit which basically produces London-specific analysis of available data sources.

That’s the public sector but the people who work there, most of come from academia, come from kind of econometric analysis, and similar. So it’s leveraging people from academia and external institutions to come in and really make sense of data at the more granular local level. And that pattern of saying, okay, the national figures will only take us so far. We need to do something really localised where local authorities can take the lead in supporting these kinds of institutions. And that’s becoming more common. We see many of them in France, many of them in Germany, in Spain, now coming on stream more in Portugal, and Northern European countries. And it’s for this reason that it’s become very apparent in recent years that the sorts of indicators that were appropriate in the past just don’t cut it anymore. We don’t really get enough granularity to develop housing policies which work in specific localities. They’re far too high-level and far too homogenous. So I think that that kind of housing observatory model has been quite successful in recent years. And then of course, we see a lot of the estimates that do exist for housing needs, being produced by third-party institutions like research institutes. In Ireland, for example, the Economic, Social and Research Institute, produces a lot of the best figures we have on housing needs but drawing on publicly available resources.

But going beyond housing needs specifically then, what’s the picture in terms of data and our understanding across Europe of how housing policy, housing interventions can be used to help with a range of other policy goals around healthy lives and wellbeing and sustainability and transition to net zero and all these kinds of things?

Yeah, so actually when it comes to this kind of issue of social return on investment, I would say the UK and Ireland are probably ahead of the curve. There are many parts of Europe where, again, we know very little, much more than you would expect. Again, we know far too little about the social trade and investment and social impact from our sector but just housing more broadly. There is one agency which has produced a couple of really valuable studies on this, called Eurofound, the research agency linked to the European Commission. It’s based in Dublin, actually but that’s just how they spread around the duties around Europe.

So it’s not something specifically Irish, although they often do link in with Irish authorities. But they have tried to think about what the impact is on your health of not accessing decent housing, on your mental health, on your labour market progression and these kinds of externalities linked to housing. I know that they did try to estimate what the impact on GDP would be of inadequate housing across Europe, and we’re talking about billions of euros here spread across Europe in terms of just people who are missing work because they’re sick, people who are not accessing employment or education or training because they’re effectively locked out of the types of housing markets where those sorts of opportunities tend to be located.

If your frame of reference is the UK and Ireland, you’re quite lucky actually as that kind of analysis is not really available across most of Europe today, and that’s something my colleagues and I would try to push for again. And that brings it back to the earlier conversation about the European Commission. That could be a place where the European Commission adds a lot of value by recognising these kinds of gaps in our knowledge and understanding and trying to see what efforts could be made either through the likes of Eurostat or through various research funding initiatives to try and understand more deeply these kinds of impacts.

Over the course of your career, what are some of the key lessons you’ve learned about the key ingredients for success? What really helps municipalities to improve the housing situation in their local area?

One of the first things I did when I joined Housing Europe is we worked with the United Nations for about four years on an initiative called Housing 2030, which was a link to the sustainable development goals and other UN work on housing, on adequacy, on placemaking, all those sorts of topics. And we tried to essentially answer the question that you’ve just asked. So what are the key ingredients of a good housing system? What are the recommendations that we could maybe take from countries or from local areas that seem to be doing quite well on these topics and then transfer to other parts of the continent. One thing we realised quite quickly is that there is no one-size-fits-all all approach. For example, a lot of the discourse in many countries now will be about Vienna, right? Everyone is really admiring of Vienna’s housing model and so on, even though when you talk to people who talk about it, you realise quite quickly they don’t really understand what it is or how it works. But it’s often held up as being this really shining example that we should all be trying to emulate. And it is a great model and a fantastic system, but they put in place a lot of the infrastructure that led to the outcome they have today over 100 years ago. So it isn’t like flicking a light switch and saying today we’re Dublin or today we’re London and tomorrow we’re gonna become Vienna. It doesn’t really work like that.

So we try to get away as much as possible from the idea of a one-size-fits-all model or from a blueprint and basically say, for historical reasons, for sociological reasons, what may work in one country may not be very transferable or applicable to another country. We have to be cognizant of that fact. There’s no point in us trying to say to many different parts of Europe, you need to be more like such and such a region or such and such a country, because it’s not going to work. They’re basically going to tune in to the conversation, because they could say, look, these guys are talking way above our heads. So one key piece of advice is try and meet people at the level that they’re at today. See what you think could be achievable over the medium term or the longer term.

I’m really interested in some of the work that you’ve done recently around the democratisation of housing. Could you say a little bit about that and the potential benefits and positive impacts of democratised housing?

In what we’ve discussed today, I think probably too much of my focus has been on social housing, public housing, affordable housing, which would of course be quite common in the UK and Ireland. But actually, if you go back to the foundation of Housing Europe in the late 80s, most of our most proactive membership and the impetus behind the creation of Housing Europe was actually more the cooperative housing movement more so than the public social housing movement which came into the fold a little bit later in the conversation. And if you look at our membership, we are still very much representing both sides of that question so we’re looking at publicly supported forms of housing, affordable housing but also definitely still working very closely on cooperative housing and that is again a broad spectrum as much as is case for social housing, which can mean many things to different people. Cooperative housing likewise can mean many things to different people. But it’s built around one central ethos, that is housing where people come together, they collaborate, they discuss common issues affecting them and their neighbours and their local area. And they try to go simply beyond that ‘I turn the key in the front door and I walk into my own apartment, to my own home, I shut it behind me and then I don’t really engage too much with the outside world’ mindset. It tries to go beyond that. I’m really talking about people who work collaboratively to make better homes for themselves, but also for their community.

I mean, I could really talk to you about this all day. I mean, some of the best conversations I’ve had in recent years have been with grassroots organisations who are trying to represent this cooperative spirit in housing. And it’s been really eye-opening for me because, at least in the Irish context, cooperative housing was something we dabbled with in the 50s, 60s, maybe 70s, but I don’t think it really ever got off the ground properly speaking.

There is a nascent neo-crop movement which is now coming to the fore. You see that, for example, in things like community land trusts, which I know are popping up around the UK and other parts of Europe, with the idea that the land is owned by a trust that we’re all part of in some way but I own my own home but there’s still focus on collective decision making around things like renovations, around the use of common spaces, all these kinds of things. There are other really interesting movements that I would mention. In Barcelona, there’s an organisation called Sostre Civic and they’re doing some really incredible things around the idea of collaborative housing, democratising housing, collective decision making and that even trickles down all way to the architecture of the buildings. If you think about it anyone who’s ever lived in an apartment block, more likely than not, that apartment block has actually not been really set up to promote democratisation of decision making or around building a sense of place and community. Especially the more modern apartment blocks tend to be built very homogeneously to cater for as broad a cohort of the population as possible. So Sostre Civic, they’re really trying to say, okay, how can we actually put community and collective decision making even into the architecture of the building. And you see things like that, for example, in their apartments, you would not have a utility room. Most people, if you say to them, OK, I’m not going to have a utility room, but I’m also not going to go down to some sort of dark basement where I have to go and fight for a machine of the people. So they’ve tried to find a compromise between that. So they want people to come together in shared spaces to wash their clothes, but also to have a coffee at the same time or to where children can play.

And it also means that when you’re actually building the homes, you have more square meterage for your living room, your kitchen, for your dining room, because you’re not losing space for utilities and for other things that could actually be done in a more communal way. And it’s very, very interesting. All decision-making is collective. They have a membership. You have to join the cooperative. You have to meet regularly to talk about how should we use the common spaces. How should we use collective funding for different things. How should we govern ourselves? All these sorts of things. So that’s one side of it. But we also see a number of countries in Europe in which these kind of democratised forms of housing also overlap into social housing and affordable housing. The best one to probably mention would be Denmark. It’s not that well-known, but actually in Denmark, the housing associations provide non-profit housing. The majority of the seats in the Board of Management, both at the local level and the national level, are reserved for tenants. So actually it’s basically a tenant-run model of social housing which is quite unique. It’s really housing by me for me, it’s housing by people who really know what it is to have a low income for those same cohorts, you know, that could be one of the critiques that we see of the type of housing like public and social housing that maybe the people who come up with the schemes are not the people who will need to access those services themselves in the future. And therefore they just don’t fully understand the tenant experience or they don’t fully understand what it is to think about paying your bills at the end of the month or paying your rent at the end of the month. So Denmark has really excelled in that regard because again, it’s people who have first-hand experience with those kinds of issues who are also making the decisions around investment, around renovations and all these sorts of things. And it leads to a very nice cohesive outcome. If you go to Denmark, you can visit a lot of really, really vibrant neighbourhoods which are built on this kind of tenant democracy principle that has been very, very effective for many decades.

Is that being picked up and shared, that kind of practice? Is there interesting discussion at the European level in the kind of forums that you’re involved in? Is there wider interest to adopt those sorts of practices?

Yeah, I mean, it’s definitely something which has come into the fore more. So like I said, it could be argued that in many parts of Europe, the cooperative housing movement had become not stale, but, you know, they had found a routine, they’d found a model that kind of worked for them. And that had been the same kind of approach for many, many decades. And now we see in lot of countries, these new kids on the block, these new cooperative models that are coming to the fore, often linked to local environmental movements or political movements or reform movements, where they’re kind of saying, OK, it’s fine. We have an existing model, but we think we can do better. We think we can re-energise and reinvigorate what has been a very, important part of housing policy across many parts of Europe for many decades now. And again, I mean I think a lot of those new movements, they’re trying to see what’s happening in more established models like Denmark, like Switzerland. I’d say it’s probably quite Nordic in its focus. But at the same time, they’re also doing something that really makes sense for them. That’s one interesting aspect of community-based housing and of more democratised forms of housing is that if there’s ever a case for not having a one size fits all model and for really relying on locally specific factors, it’s those form of housing because the idea of copying and pasting what would be a social norm in Denmark and then saying, okay, we’re going to bring that to Barcelona. It’s not going to work because your idea as a Dane of good place making and good sense community probably isn’t likely to be different.

It’s likely the same as someone from Barcelona who maybe has a very, different conceptualisation of what living well with your neighbours looks like. So it’s actually very, very grassroots driven and very bottom up rather than top down or borrowing from other parts of Europe, and it really feels like there’s so much potential there to help at least to solve some of the challenges around some of the demographic change that we’re talking about. There’s long term shifts, but things that are coming down the track very, very quickly. So it’s really encouraging that there’s good practice going on there. It feels like that’s a sort of potential positive outcome.

Could you give us your thoughts over where things are going over the next 12-18 months? There’s a lot that’s changing in the world very quickly at various levels, which obviously has a huge impact not just on European governance and municipal governments, but the residents of local places. Where do you see housing markets, access to good housing, some of these challenges that we’ve been talking about, going over the next period?

It’s an excellent question, as my boss, when I worked as an economist in the financial sector said, if I could predict the future, I wouldn’t be sitting here talking to you but sipping a cocktail on the beach somewhere. And that’s probably the case there. Things at least in my lifetime have probably never been as uncertain as they are now. Political trends are going in one direction in Europe and maybe that isn’t necessarily well aligned to the types of things we’ve been talking about in the conversation here today. But I mean, I’m still quite optimistic. The fact that we now, again, at European level, we see that there is a renewed focus on housing, access to housing, affordable forms of housing. And what’s interesting is that that’s quite popular right across the political spectrum from left to right. And that’s something which is probably definitely has not been the case in previous decades where, let’s say, public support for housing policies was maybe seen as more of a left-wing issue and then maybe more free market policies as being a right-wing issue. Ireland is a good example of this where basically across the political spectrum, because of the fact that the housing situation is as bad as it is for so many people in the population, we see that basically it’s not viable politically to ignore the housing question and it’s not viable politically to say that, OK, as a government we will provide additional capital or additional resources for making sure that the people who currently do not have access to housing have that. And say, if you look at Poland from across Europe, we see that support for governments to do more on the provision of housing. That could be social housing, could be cooperative housing, it could be grants or subsidies, polling is not that precise but I mean generally speaking there is a recognition from citizens that government should be doing more and there is generally quite a broad support for additional government capacity building and resource provision and so on.

So I’m quite optimistic on that front, that at least if the politics is going in a way that you or I or the people might find a bit worrying, within that bizarrely housing has become this unifying force somewhat that more or less everyone agrees we need to be doing better on. And if there’s anything to be positive about in the current context, maybe that’s it.

This interview is part of LGIU’s new Future Local Lab – a holistic programme of resources aimed at helping you to prepare for and respond to the emerging challenges facing local government everywhere. It’s open to everyone, make sure you’re signed up today.