We need to build public support for solutions and change the UK housing market so it works better for everyone. Everyone in the UK should have access to healthy, affordable, stable housing. Right now, too many of us are denied the essential foundation of a good home.

It doesn’t have to be this way. The present housing system has been designed, and therefore, it can be redesigned to work for us all. We need to change the way our housing system works. To achieve this, we need our politicians and policy makers to do things differently. We need to ensure that everyone has access to healthy, secure housing that they can afford.

These changes will only happen when the public gets behind them. Increased public understanding will in time create a powerful demand for the changes needed to solve the housing crisis. While most people in the UK are aware of a well-documented crisis, they don’t know what’s causing it and what can fix it.

Therefore, the way we talk about housing matters. Our communications need to paint a clearer and fuller picture. They need to help people see what’s going wrong and how it can be put right. They need to motivate and inspire a different future.

JRF and the the Nationwide Foundation are working with the FrameWorks Institute to explore:

• public attitudes to housing: what do people think and why?
• how this aligns with the housing sector’s perspective
• how we can talk about housing to build support across the sector and the public for the solutions we need to see.

Our collaboration builds on JRF and FrameWorks’ award-winning and widely-used Talking About Poverty research. It will involve organisations across the housing sector.

Frameworks will be conducting the research during 2020 and 2021. There will be opportunities to hear about what we’re discovering and what it means for how we should talk about housing across the sector.

Phase One research has resulted in an early set of recommendations on how to build support for social housing, ‘Moving from Concern to Concrete Change'. Further recommendations on how to devise effective narratives on social housing will be published when the project concludes in Spring 2022.