The Labour Manifesto promises to overturn some of the worst Conservative policies, such as abolishing Right to Buy; introducing mandatory building standards; and ending immigration checks by landlords. Most notably, it has pledged £75bn in direct funding to local councils to build 100,000 homes for social rent a year, in addition to 50,000 ‘affordable’ homes.
However, behind the headline figures, Labour’s New Jerusalem is built on sand. Its social housing commitments are a drop in the ocean in the face of the 1.1 million households currently on council waiting lists and the 8.4 million living in unaffordable or unsuitable homes.
The Manifesto recognises that rising land prices have driven the exorbitant cost of housing. It therefore proposes a Sovereign Land Trust, forcing landowners to sell undeveloped land at lower ‘current usage’ prices. Inevitably, the proposal provoked a right-wing storm, with the Adam Smith Institute accusing Labour of a ‘Venezuela-style land grab’. If only. To force landowners to forego their exorbitant profits will take a battle. Does Corbyn have the stomach for the fight? Would Labour be prepared to issue compulsory purchase orders against the investment companies, hedge funds, mining groups, aristocratic families and major housebuilders which between them own most of the land in Britain?
For anyone who has been at the receiving end of Labour councils’ housing policy over the past 20 years, there will be scepticism about the party’s new-found commitment to social housing.
It is, after all Labour councils that, far from challenging Conservative policy on eroding social housing, have enthusiastically engaged in the process. The ‘regeneration’ of council estates has seen vast tracts of publicly-owned land and working class homes reclassified as ‘brownfield land’ and sold off cheaply to developers. The result has been the replacement of thousands of council homes by a tiny percentage of social housing cross-subsidised by homes for sale at market prices. In the south London Labour borough of Southwark, 7,500 council homes have been or will be lost through regeneration schemes; just 262 have been built since 2013.
Will a Labour government challenge these councils, and their cosy, corrupt networks of alliances between developers, planning committees and ‘consultancies’ set up by serving or former Labour councillors?
Will it end the outsourcing of house building and bring it in-house, ending the stream of private consultants, architects, planners and contractors each creaming off a slice of profit?
Will it stop Labour councils allowing shipping containers to be used as temporary accommodation and prevent them shunting homeless families out of borough, sometimes hundreds of miles from families, jobs and schools? Will it instruct its councils to stop evicting desperate families from temporary accommodation for falling behind with their rent?
Will it, in essence, take on the powerful vested interests that currently control Britain’s land and housing and that are absolutely central to the profits of the capitalist state? Will it build the safe, decent and affordable council homes the working class so desperately needs? Its record suggests the opposite.
Cat Wiener
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! 273 December 2019/January 2020
