Fairytale housing is building up new problems

Solve one social problem but don't cause another crisis.

Imogen Ball

Imogen is a writer, mum, and priest on a new housing development in the South-West of England.

A CGI of a new housing estate viewed from above.

Home Builders Federation.

This time last year Labour promised 1.5 million new homes as part of its election campaign. Now plans are afoot to get these houses well and truly off the ground. New housing is seen as the salvific answer to one of Britain’s greatest social problems. The housing crisis sees rent-avoiding sofa surfers, impossibly high interest rates (except from the bank of mum and dad), and a scarcity of social housing.

New builds are to the housing crisis what the fairy godmother was to Cinderella. Adequate and safe housing is an essential infrastructure for any society and is a fundamental human right. With an influx of new properties on the market, prices fall, social and affordable housing increases, and people are able to buy before their inheritance arrives. Families on housing waiting lists can live in a home somewhere they know. New housing offers Britons opportunities to find, purchase, and live in their forever, fairytale homes. In theory.

It could turn out to be a nightmare. We are instead sentencing them to social and spiritual isolation. By focusing on building houses, we fail to meet the essential human need for community, social interaction, and connection. (Wo)man is not, and never will be an island. Building homes is not enough. We must also build communities.

As we build community we safeguard against the epidemic of loneliness, segregation, and isolation

On new housing developments, organic community creation is challenging. Momentum is required to create communities. The government’s house building target does recognise the need for infrastructures such as doctor’s surgeries and schools. But these are not developers’ priorities. And they are also not enough to embed community into those new developments.

Can you imagine your fairytale home without the corner shop for an emergency pint of milk? Or without the café for bleary eyed mums and babes? Or without the play park, pub, poo bin, and postbox? Can you imagine your happily ever after will be without a local hall for big birthday celebrations, for scout groups, and for Pilates? What about a church, with bells ringing out the universal soundtrack of Sunday mornings, offering a space to breathe, to pray, and to explore your own spiritual journey?

We have recently moved onto a new housing development and have seen firsthand the need for community amongst these supposedly dream homes. We are also part of a new church here, writing a different story and weaving community throughout the development. Knowing our neighbours’ names and giving and receiving help are part of embracing social interaction. Our pop-up coffee bike is a place where people can gather and get to know one another around a nearly-expertly brewed beverage. This is the beginning of human connection within a community.

But the church also offers a place for spiritual connection. New housing without the opportunities for human and spiritual connection leave residents on a cliffhanger. The church offers people another ending to their fairytale. Because the dream-like show-home does not become our own and we are left with the disappointment of reality. The story of Jesus speaks of miracles not magic wands, redemption not Red Riding Hood, the Prince of Peace not Prince Charming. In the void left by developers, Jesus can speak, the Spirit can move, and the church can show up to offer human and spiritual connection and meaningful community.

Though these new builds may solve the housing crisis, they may also contribute to a crisis of community across our nation. But as we build community we safeguard against the epidemic of loneliness, segregation, and isolation. We imagine spaces into being so that community can flourish. Perhaps then we can look forward together to a different kind of happily ever after.

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Justice

Redemption

15 May 2025

4 min read

The case of Peter Sullivan proves once and for all why we shouldn’t bring back the death penalty

It’s not the wrongly convicted who are redeemed when justice is done - it’s all of us.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A court sits, with judges raised above the others.

The Court of Appeal.

Judiciary.uk.

The quashing of the conviction this week of Peter Sullivan, who served 38 years in jail for a murder he did not commit – along with the release in 2023 of Andrew Malkinson, cleared of rape after 17 years inside – are deeply shameful. They are revolting stains not only on our judiciary, but on all those who politically invigilate it and on the rest of us who elect them. We should all be deeply ashamed.

As we peep through our fingers at these terrible travesties of justice and the lives that have needlessly been wrecked, it’s natural to ask what we do next. In the absence of time travel, we can hardly make it up to Messrs Sullivan and Malkinson.

But we can grapple with what they mean to us for the immediate future. Probably the first and easist thing to say is – if I may not so much mix a metaphor as summarily execute it – that they should hammer legislatively the final nail in the coffin of the death penalty.

Sullivan would doubtless have swung for the murder of florist Diane Sindall in 1986 that he did not commit, if execution by hanging (or by other means) had not been abolished in 1965. True, rape hasn’t been a capital offence since 1841, when the penalty became transportation (which was almost as irreversible as death).

But Malkinson’s case rather makes the point: The very fact that he was still incarcerated meant that he could be released. Let’s take a case in which no such remedy was available – Derek Bentley, say, who was hanged in 1953 for allegedly abetting the murder of a police officer and exonerated, a trifle late, in 1998.

The arguments of thornproof and white-knuckled proponents of the death penalty may be as swiftly dispatched as they would wish such innocent victims to be. They were probably “wrong ‘uns” anyway. Their sacrifice would have discouraged others from committing heinous crimes. The taxpayer shouldn’t have to pay for their decades in the slammer. Well, pah. Try telling any of that to the Sullivan family.

But these are not, to my mind, the biggest issues and, enormous as they are, that must make the biggest pretty gargantuan. I wish to address the business of redemption.

But we can ransom the present to redeem our future.

Now, when I mention this word to those holding the pitchforks, prodding people they despise towards the scaffold, they usually assume I’ve come over all pious and priestly. And I suppose I have. But they invariably misunderstand what we mean by redemption.

The assumption is that the victim of the miscarriage of justice can be redeemed if they are still alive. Their life is in some way redeemed from suffering. That’s true, so far as it goes, but it’s not really what we should mean by redemption in these circumstances.

The Latin root of the word refers to the buying back, or the paying of the ransom, of a slave to enable his or her freedom. The ancient scriptural usage of the word relates often to the saving actions of the Hebrews’ God, in redeeming his people from slavery in Egypt, and to the Christian culmination of that redeeming work at the cross (totally uncoincidentally, both events are commemorated at the Jewish Passover, that first divine covenant being, in Christianity, fulfilled in the second).

The debate down the ages has substantially concentrated on to whom the ransom of that latter redemption was paid. For some, it was paid to a vengeful and wrathful God, for others to a somewhat gullible Satan, who took the bait of pay-off. Either way, a debt was paid which released humanity from bondage and slavery.

The theology of this can only be satisfactory to a proportion of people who read it, whether believers or not. The important matter is to whom the act of redemption is of value. A slave who died building a pyramid for a pharaoh doesn’t seem to have been redeemed in any more meaningful sense than the young Bentley being pardoned 45 years after he was hanged. Exoneration isn’t redemption.

In the Christian tradition, it’s significant that the compilers of the gospels and the books thereafter develop less the idea of ransom to explain the cross, than the idea of deliverance from bondage that was its result.

And there the answer, rather than the victims, hangs before us. We can’t redeem the injustice of the past, anymore than we can give Sullivan and Malkinson back their lost years. But we can ransom the present to redeem our future.

To those who claim that murderers and rapists “get off” because of “loopholes” in the law, we say there are no loopholes, only the law. And we’re all enriched when we get the law right. So, ultimately, it’s not the wrongly convicted who are redeemed when justice is done and they’re finally released. It’s all of us.