10 February 2026
Housing as a Human Right: Learning from the NHS
What Bevan and Attlee achieved for healthcare, we must achieve for housing.
Before the NHS, healthcare was a privilege. If you could pay, you got care. If you couldn't, you relied on charity or went without. The creation of the National Health Service in 1948 didn't just expand access—it changed the very idea of what healthcare was. It became a right of citizenship, funded collectively, available to all.
The parallel with housing
Today, housing occupies the same position healthcare did before 1948. It's a market good, rationed by ability to pay. The result: families in temporary accommodation, young people locked out of ownership, and a generation for whom a secure home feels like a distant dream.
This isn't inevitable. It's a choice. And it's a choice we can reverse.
What would a housing equivalent look like?
We're not prescribing a single model. Different places will find different solutions. But the principle is clear: housing should be treated as infrastructure for human flourishing, not as a speculative asset. That means significant public investment in social housing. It means security for renters. It means ensuring that everyone has a threshold below which they cannot fall.
Michael D. Higgins put it well: if we had any version of citizenship, there would be a social floor for health and housing. We built that floor for health. It's time we built it for housing too.