A record number of people in Britain are homeless; millions more are condemned to live in precarious, unaffordable, overcrowded and hazardous conditions. The housing crisis is a grim expression of how the British ruling class is squeezing working-class living standards in its desperation to restore profitability for big business.
‘Build, baby, build’
Ahead of the 2024 election, Labour pledged to build 1.5 million new homes in its first term – drawing enthusiastic funding from major property developers. A surge in house-building underpins the Office for Budget Responsibility’s (OBR) predictions for economic growth. Yet, despite the best efforts of new housing minister Steve Reed and the Trump-style ‘Build, baby, build’ baseball caps he dished out at Labour’s 2025 conference, that promise is floundering before the ruthless reality of the market. Under capitalism, homes are a commodity – they only get built if they can be sold for profit. And if the punters aren’t buying, then the builders aren’t building. At the end of October, the Home Builders Federation and major developers wrote to the OBR warning that the government’s ambition was ‘too optimistic’ in current market conditions. Housing delivery is currently 10% below the ten-year average, with completions well under the 300,000 homes per year needed to meet Labour’s commitment. The goodwill of those private construction companies whose substantial donations helped bring Labour to power is beginning to wane: the Home Builders Federation warned that ‘without meaningful action to tackle constraints on housing delivery [rising regulatory costs and taxes, regulations, lack of support for first-time buyers] the early confidence that industry placed in the government will begin to wane’. It continues ‘investment in new homes depends on the building of these homes being economically viable and for there to be a realistic chance of selling [them]’.
This is not for want of government attempts to placate the powerful financial interests on which it depends. Before the election, Rachel Reeves – now Chancellor – said she hoped CEOs would ‘see their fingerprints all over Labour’s manifesto’. ‘My role’, she reassured them, ‘is to remove as many of the barriers that are stopping you from investing as I possibly can’.
Reeves recently boasted about forcing through a development of 20,000 new homes in north Sussex which had been held up by efforts to protect a colony of rare snails – ‘a protected species, or something’, she scoffed. Earlier this year, then housing minister Angela Rayner, in similarly scornful vein, blamed ‘bats and newts’ for blocking housebuilding. The new Planning Infrastructure Bill is therefore designed to trample environ-mental safeguards in the interest of so-called ‘growth’; the bill also curbs the ability of nature groups or local communities to bring legal challenges. Nothing is to stand in the way of developers’ profits.
In late October, the housebuilding industry scored another win for profit-making, as Labour agreed to scale back the requirement on developers in London to factor in a percentage of ‘affordable’ housing (which includes Shared Ownership and rents up to 80% of market rate) into any development over 50 units – something they had long decried as an outrageous incursion into their profit margins. 44% of all ‘affordable’ housing in Britain is built under these so-called Section 106 agreements. In a further concession, developers will also be allowed to lower space, light and quality standards, and the Community Infrastructure Levy – through which developers contribute to local infrastructure, like schools and GP surgeries – is to be suspended. In its desperation to ‘get London building again’, the government has thrown the aspirations of the working class for decent housing under the bus.
Unaffordable homes
Even before these shameful concessions, the rate of building ‘affordable’ homes, and in particular homes for social rent, which is linked to relative local incomes, had virtually ground to a halt. Council homes are the only housing that is genuinely affordable and provides any kind of security of tenure to the poorest sections of the working class. In London, just 347 starts were made on ‘affordable’ housing of any kind in the first quarter of 2025; of these, just 120 were for social rent. There are just under 3,500 households on local authority housing waiting lists in London – a ten-year high.
In a bitter twist, much of the ‘affordable’ housing provided under Section 106 legislation is vacant because housing associations, which manage the majority of social housing in Britain (generally at ‘affordable’ rates), can’t commit to buying them. In October 2025, there were 900 ‘affordable’ homes in Britain lying empty, and a further 700 developments stalled. The Housebuilders Federation estimates around 8,500 further planned ‘affordable’ units will not be built over the next 12 months because of this. Meanwhile, the lives of working class people are being destroyed by the housing crisis.
A spiral of misery for the working class
Government figures for England published in October show the total number of households stuck in temporary accommodation – including the worst forms such as hostels, B&Bs and other nightly paid emergency accommodation – is up 7.6%; this is the tenth consecutive record-breaking rise since March 2023. As of June 2025, there were 132,410 households in England in such accommodation, including 172,420 children whose development is stunted by living in cramped, often damp, mouldy and vermin-ridden conditions, with no place to play or study, for years on end. The cost to councils of temporary accommodation was £2.7bn for 2024/25 – diverting local authority money away from essential local services. There’s also been an increase in the most extreme forms of homelessness – those rough sleeping on the streets or in parks; last year 15,000 people were recorded sleeping rough, a 10% increase on the previous year. Part of the rise is attributed by the housing charity Crisis to asylum seekers being evicted from hotels and the discharge of prisoners and hospital patients with no support or follow-up. According to the OECD, England has the highest rate of homelessness in the developed world.
The main drivers of housing insecurity are Section 21 ‘no fault’ evictions – and the inability to pay rent. It has taken Labour 18 months to finally pass the Renters’ Rights Act banning no-fault evictions; in that time, 11,402 households have been evicted by bailiffs and 30,000 eviction notices served. While the Act, which does not come into effect until next year, contains some much-needed protections for tenants, overall it grants landlords stronger powers to repossess their properties; no surprise when this government counts 44 landlords among its MPs, including both the prime minister and the chancellor. More than two-thirds of private landlords say they will raise rents to absorb any new costs and restrictions.
Meanwhile rents in the private rented sector (PRS) now consume, on average, 44% of workers’ salaries. Local Housing Allowance (LHA) – the housing benefit paid for private tenancies – remains frozen at 2024 levels despite rents continuing to rise. Just 2.7% of PRS properties nationally are now affordable to those on housing benefit, and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation has calculated that if LHA remains frozen, 80,000 renters – including 30,000 children – will be pushed into very deep poverty.
The working class has a choice – to accept the insane logic of capitalism, where the dictates of private profit accumulation trump human need, or to fight for a system where decent, safe and affordable housing is a human right. That system is socialism.
Cat Wiener
