The epidemic of shoddy ‘exempt housing’ has become an embarrassment for councils across England. It’s clear that this housing model – supposedly ‘supported housing’ funded directly by the DWP and therefore exempt from the cap on housing benefits – is rife with exploitative landlords and only leaves those it’s supposed to help worse off. Reports from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government on projects in Birmingham, Brighton, Bristol and Hull show that providers of exempt accommodation – which is supposed to help those who’ve been homeless, have drug issues, are victims of domestic abuse or are recent prison leavers, refugees or migrants – were providing falsified reports on both their profits and the levels of support they were supposed to provide. This has forced councils to act, with MPs and the Levelling Up Housing and Communities Committee (LUHC) launching investigations and legislation. But, so far, this has done little to address the structural issues that have brought exempt accommodation into being. Instead, the targets are once again the most vulnerable sectors of the working class.
The response in the ‘capital of exempt housing’, Birmingham, has been a crackdown by police – not on unscrupulous and in many cases criminal landlords, but rather on the tenants themselves. It’s not surprising that drug abuse, as well as dealing and growing, are common in these exempt houses. Many tenants have found themselves there precisely because of drug problems that underfunded support systems have been unable to resolve. The lack of any real support offered by exempt housing premises also leaves vulnerable residents open to exploitation and abuse by criminal gangs. Birmingham’s Labour-run City Council has used this as an excuse to work with West Midlands Police to sweep away ‘problem tenants’. As of March only one closure order for a provider has been served whereas there have been 131 eviction orders. The council boasts that over the last 18 months the police have conducted 453 investigations into myriad criminal activities, locating cannabis farms and illegal weapons. No landlords have been prosecuted. Birmingham is home to more than 8,000 ‘exempt housing providers’ and the sector is estimated at being worth some £110m.
In FRFI 286 we explained that the rise in exempt accommodation is a result of capitalist crisis. Social housing has been sold off or demolished at a rate of nearly 4,000 homes a year over the past two decades. Mental health services and domestic abuse support have seen their funding slashed. The inevitable result has been a spike in the number of people eligible for benefit cap exemption. Private support housing providers have flooded in to exploit housing benefit loopholes. For example, an FRFI supporter in Quinton, Birmingham was being charged £230 a week for a room in a house of multi-occupancy (HMO) – a shockingly high rent for the area. Housing Minister Eddie Hughes points to the ‘unscrupulous landlords exploiting the most vulnerable in society’. Clive Betts, Sheffield MP and chair of the LUHC blames ‘neglectful landlords… pocketing taxpayer money’. But this is not simply a problem of bad landlords appearing out of nowhere to trap tenants in their webs. Vulnerable tenants are faced with almost nowhere else to go for better support or accommodation that accepts DSS precisely because social housing has been sold off or privatised by the same council that is now wringing its hands over the problem.
The LUHC has made vague promises to give more power to local authorities and changes to housing benefit regulations and introducing standards for support. But nothing has been said about reversing the huge cuts to social housing in general, nor to restoring properly funded mental health services. There’s no commitment to ending the privatisation within the framework of social housing that incentivises profit over people. And meanwhile those who are exploited and criminalised are the poorest sections of the working class.
Joe Smith
