Britain faces a housing crisis, possibly the gravest housing shortage since 1945.
Simultaneously we have colossal housebuilding programmes which dramatically worsen the crisis. Travel through Hackney, east London, for example and you see massive housing projects being constructed. But it is all luxury housing. Rents start at £500 a week, rising to £1,500. Some houses cost up to £1,500,000. One Tory-controlled local authority is building whole new estates, but only for those on incomes of £90,000 a year or over.
Luxury developments are bought up before completion, often by Russian oligarchs, Saudi oil sheikhs, and Hong Kong and New York bankers.
Some of these have allegedly already been “sold on” to other buyers for a “healthy” profit in a form of pyramid selling. Meanwhile some housing associations are changing their role, becoming dual HAs and property “developers”, in order to get their snouts into this very lucrative trough.
Private sector house prices and rents are soaring. A June 2012 internal Labour Party report stated private sector rents in London are increasing at around 14% a year. The Office for Budget Responsibility predicts the price of residential properties will increase by 27% over the next few years, and in London by 50%.
It has now become a widespread practice for landlords and landlord companies, when tenants on short term tenancies are forced to move, to give the property a luxury “makeover” and then increase rent by as much as 100%. The case of a property in Battersea where the monthly rent was increased from £1,915 to £3,445 is not untypical.
Private tenants are ruthlessly exploited, pay extortionate rents, have little or no security of tenure, and often the accommodation is appalling. A 2010 survey showed 37% of dwellings in the private sector failed to meet the Decent Homes Standard.
Recent years have seen the re-emergence of the slum landlord, much of whose property is in a very bad state of repair and regularly lacking basic amenities, and whose tenants are often the poorest and most vulnerable in society. In some cases what we are seeing is the return of “Rachmanism” — exploitative slum landlordism.
The Regulation of the Private Rented Sector Bill, sponsored by left-wing Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn, designed to give some measure of protection and legal rights to private sector tenants, goes before Parliament in the New Year. If the Tories throw it out, Labour must pledge to resubmit it if they win the next election.
A Labour government must create a powerful regulatory body with legal powers of enforcement to oversee the entire private sector. In addition it should require all landlords to go onto a central registry which entails them signing up to a specific code of conduct towards their tenants. Failure to register or failure to comply with that code of conduct should lead to compulsory purchase orders on property, heavy fines, or in extreme cases confiscation or even imprisonment.
Crucially, a Labour government must impose a cap on private sector rents. Most of all housebuilding must be for need not profit. A future Labour government must commit to building a minimum of 100,000 council homes every year.
It is only by building council, not luxury, housing that the housing crisis can be solved.
Resist housing co-op evictions in Lambeth
In the early 1970s Lambeth council (like many others) began purchasing housing for “slum clearance”, demolition or renovation.
Due to lack of funding many councils were unable to afford to bring the properties up to minimum standards to rent them out. They designated some properties as “short-life” homes and allowed people to live in them paying low rents.
Later on Lambeth council asked these tenants to form housing co-ops. Those co-ops organised rent collections and considerably improved the properties. Having set them up, the council and the secondaries (housing associations) then remained at arms length and the residents ran their own self-reliant communities, repairing and maintaining houses with no involvement from outside authorities.
Many many years later, in 2009, Lambeth said the remaining short-life properties (about 170) would be recalled. Many of the properties are now worth over £500,000 because of the inflated property market, and the council want to sell them. They want the money, but if the council followed a strictly capitalist logic that money should go to the people who have re-built and “added value” to these houses over four decades. The residents just want the chance to stay in their homes above all else.
The council say they will use money raised to bring other council homes up to standard, but there is no guarantee they will do this and when they are questioned about this they admit that it is not ring-fenced for housing. In any case, making people homeless to find this extra cash is wrong.
The residents have advanced a plan for a “super-coop”, one strand of which would turn residents into rent-paying council tenants (something that was never offered to them over the 40-year period that some people have now been in their homes) but Lambeth, the so-called “Cooperative” Council, are neither interested in people setting up co-ops nor in gaining more council tenants.
Some of the short-life tenants are physically and mentally vulnerable. If the residents chose to fight for their right to stay they will lose the right to be re-housed.
Their campaign to stay in their homes is being supported by Labour MP Kate Hoey amongst others. They were also supported by their three local Labour councillors, but two of them have sold the residents out and voted for their eviction!
The residents have had support from many other people locally, from members of all political parties, and even from the council’s own “co-operative commissioners”!
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