Mass council-house building now

The working class needs more council housing. Progress depends on government action.

From the 1920s, and more from the 1940s, councils built millions of new homes, improving working-class lives. With the Thatcher government of 1979-90, council housing was put into reverse.

Councils could not get finance for new building. The stock was run down through “Right to Buy” (1980), when the Tories bribed better-off tenants for political support by offering them ownership at big discounts.

Thatcher declared: “I want a capital-earning democracy. Every man and woman a capitalist. Housing is the start. If you’re a man or woman of property, you’ve got something. So every man a capitalist, and every man a man of property.” This was class politics with the aim of bribing a base for the Tories by having more working-class people see themselves as part of the propertied classes.

The bribe was paid by councils, remaining tenants, and future home-seekers, not by the Tories themselves. It began a big shift towards private renting and outright homelessness.

We have our own class politics here: to secure the basics of life for the working class as social rights, not strokes of good luck in the property market.

Two million council homes have been sold off since 1980, and 14,000 more just in the year to April 2026.

The government’s Social Housing Bill will limit “Right to Buy”. It should be scrapped, not just limited.

Council housing has a forced inflation-plus-1% rent rise each year, which should be scrapped too, but decreasing rent income due to decreased council stock has left councils with a “historic” Housing Revenue Account debt of £32 billion to cover.

The labour movement should back housing charity Shelter’s demand for that “historic” debt to be cancelled. But the government, instead, has recently excluded councils from a new low-cost loan scheme for new house-building, available to private developers and to housing associations. (Why? Because including councils would make the overall public debt figures look worse).

We must also demand a vast increase in cheap credit and outright grants to councils to build and to buy up and refurbish existing housing now privately-owned.

As of now, there were just 1,040 council house-building starts in the UK in the year 2025, and 240 in January-March 2025-6.

The total “delivery cost” (not just construction) of a new council home is about £290,000. Those homes, if not sold off at discount, then cover their cost from rent income in about 30 years.

Buy-up-and-refurbish housing is cheaper. The UK has about a million empty homes, 250,000 empty for more than six months, some of them costly mansions held as speculative assets, and councils need more powers to be able to buy them up.

To finance 100,000 new homes might need up to £29 billion a year. A lot? That is just one per cent of total annual income, a small outlay to secure a basic of life for all.

Even if councils can borrow the money to build, they have difficulty getting land, often monopolised by large landowners looking for better returns on their property from luxury ventures. The government should nationalise all building land, making the common basis of society available for social purposes.

Councils have to spend a lot on maintenance and refurbishment to make their housing stock safe and up to standard. So they should: Grenfell and “Awaab’s Law” push councils and housing associations to fix fire safety and damp speedily.

“Awaab’s Law” still does not apply to private landlords, and neither does the 2006 “Decent Homes Standard” for social housing. The Renters’ Rights Act legislated for “Awaab’s Law” to apply, and the government says it plans to extend the “Decent Homes Standard” to private renting. But it has not yet even given dates for implementation.

More refurbishment and retrofitting needs doing, not less. House insulation needs upgrading; fossil-fuel heating needs to be replaced by renewable-powered heat pumps or similar. Only 1% of homes in the UK have heat pumps, as against 16% across Europe.

A lot of recent council house-building has been “regeneration” projects, where councils empty blocks which are difficult to maintain or refurbish then, with private contractors, demolish them to replace by new housing with a big proportion of luxury homes for private sale or rent, in order to pay for the project.

These developments, which often stretch for decades, reduce council housing in the short and even usually in the long term.

Councils used to run Direct Labour Organisations capable of major refurbishment and even construction projects. DLOs were almost abolished by the Thatcher government, and have recovered usually only as smaller-scale repair operations.

The labour movement should demand the refloating of DLOs and public ownership of the whole construction industry to create a nationalised operation capable of training teenagers and others in the skills and offering long-term job security with union rates and conditions. Construction jobs at present are usually fixed-term contracts or spurious “self-employment”. Union density in the industry is down to 11% to 14%.

20% of households – in London, 28%, and 69% of households headed by young people (16-24) - are now in private renting, which increased a lot in the early 2000s as a delayed effect of Thatcher policies. The Renters’ Reform Act limits some market abuses, banning no-fault evictions, limiting rent rises to once a year, and giving tenants facilities to appeal against above-market-rates rent rises. It does not include “fair rent” controls such as were in force from 1965 until abolished by Thatcher, and are demanded today by the left.

Karl Marx in Capital showed that the “labour market” is “a very Eden of... Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham” only when viewed from one angle. When we see it from the angle of production, “he, who before was the money-owner, now strides in front as capitalist; the possessor of labour-power follows as his labourer. The one with an air of importance, smirking, intent on business; the other, timid and holding back, like one who is bringing his own hide to market and has nothing to expect but — a hiding”.

Private-renting is even less a “fair” market, even in bourgeois terms. Its transactions are between sitting-pretty property-owners and workers who have to seek shelter however poor, and cannot even combine to shift the balance a little as we do in the “labour market” through trade unions. Private renters now spend about 34% of their income on housing, and the percentage is higher for the worse-off. In London, according to the UCL Bartlett review, “on average, renting a one-bedroom flat costs 46% of gross-median pay… 60% of London’s [private] renters live in unacceptable conditions”.

Housing benefit covers a lot less since its ceiling, the “Local Housing Allowance”, has been frozen or semi-frozen for years, forcing people to cover their rent from benefits or low wages supposed to cover food and other essentials.

The expensive, poor-quality, insecure housing is not even near work: the latest official average commute time for jobs in central London is 56 minutes one way.

Andy Burnham has talked about more council house-building, but almost not at all about how to achieve it. Solidarity will work to mobilise the whole labour movement, including the unions, to get the achievement.