During the Labour Party Conference in October, Keir Starmer trumpeted his proposals to tackle Britain’s housing crisis. Labour, he said, would ‘restore the dream of home ownership’ by ‘bulldozing’ through what he described – repeating the mantra of housebuilding speculators for years – as a ‘restrictive planning system’, in order to deliver 1.5 million new homes in the first five years of government and ‘get Britain building again’. Meeting the Conservative Party’s now abandoned target of 300,000 new homes a year was, he added ‘hugely important for the aspirations of young people who desperately want to get on the housing ladder’. This is a naked pitch to increasingly frustrated petit bourgeois professionals and better-off sections of the working class trapped by high rents – to say nothing of housing developers and builders – that will do precisely nothing to alleviate the crisis faced by the mass of the working class.
Deputy leader Angela Rayner boasted that Labour would deliver ‘the biggest boost to affordable housing for a generation’ – but there is no commitment to the only kind of affordable housing that could begin to address the housing crisis, that is the mass building of homes for social rent. Far from it: Rayner’s only critique of the lack of social house building was that it had served to destroy ‘the housing market’. The Affordable Housing Programme (AHP) that a Labour government would inherit already diverts 50% of its funds to Shared Ownership – a controversial ‘part-buy, part-rent’ model that generally requires an income of over £45,000pa, offers little security to ‘owners’ and has seen rents escalate so fast that many would-be buyers never acquire the promised 100% ownership of the property. Last year, just 13% of the AHP budget went on homes for social rent. Any significant increase in building such homes would require a vast cash injection – which the ‘fiscally prudent’ Labour Party has no intention of doing. Similarly, Labour has made it clear that it will not end Right to Buy – the single biggest cause of the dearth of council homes – nor increase grant funding to councils to build new homes.
To blame the housing crisis on planning restrictions is a red herring. In reality, more than a million homes have already been granted planning permission in the last decade, but have yet to be built. The only restrictions developers and builders want to sidestep are those that impact on their profits – whether Section 106 obligations to build affordable housing and infrastructure, or environmental regulations relating to sustainability. Labour will help them do so. Small wonder that housing developer Thakeham – formerly a major donor to the Conservative Party – was amongst the big businesses sponsoring Labour junkets over the conference weekend.
Homelessness soars as landlords cash in
Far from being ‘desperate to get onto the housing ladder’, increasing numbers of working class people in Britain would be glad to find anywhere decent to live at all as they navigate a housing crisis of catastrophic proportions, with unaffordable rents, cramped and hazardous living conditions and rising evictions. Starmer’s proposals offered them nothing. The needs of the poorest sections of the working class are not even on Labour’s radar.
A report published in October by the Housebuilders Federation showed that not only was England now ‘the most difficult place to find a home in the developed world’, but that more people lived in substandard properties than the European Union average. 18% of homes in the UK – the majority in the rented sector – have leaking roofs, damp, rot and other hazards.
Data from the ONS shows a new record for annual rent increases for the 12 months to April 2023, with a third of Britain’s 5.5 million households in the private rented sector spending over half their take-home pay on rent. In a new series on conditions in the private rented sector, The Guardian (14 November 2023) has shown that asking rents were up 22% on the last year in October – and 56% since October 2019. That’s for those who can even find somewhere to live in the first place, as landlords facing rising mortgage rates increasingly decide to cut their losses and invest in something more lucrative that does not need insurance paid and boilers serviced. This exodus has led to a sharp decrease in the number of properties available for rent – Foxtons for example reports 97,000 prospective tenants chasing just 2,000 rental properties earlier this year (Financial Times, 16 June 2023).
According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, up to the end of November 2023 just 5% of all new rental properties in Britain were affordable for those in receipt of housing benefit, compared to 25% two years ago. The increase in Local Housing Allowance (LHA) – which had been frozen since April 2020 despite soaring rents – will do little to change the situation, applying only to the bottom third of the private rental market. What it will do is transfer an additional £1.4bn of public money to private landlords over the next two financial years. Reducing rent through rent controls, rather than increasing state subsidy to private landlords has been ruled out by both the government and opposition.
Evictions due to rent arrears reached the highest on record going back to 2009 in the first three months of the year. Meanwhile, so-called ‘No-fault’ Section 21 evictions – which essentially allow landlords to boot their tenants out on a whim – are at their highest level since 2017. 8,747 people in England and Wales were forced out of their homes by Section 21 between July and September alone – up 32% on the same period last year. This insidious practice is set to continue despite being banned under the recently-passed Renters Reform Act. In a blatant concession to landlords Michael Gove announced the ban would not take effect until other changes to court procedures had been implemented. One in five Conservative MPs is a landlord.
Small wonder that homelessness is surging, with the number of people living in temporary accommodation at record levels; the latest figures showing 104,510 households, including 131,370 children, forced to live in substandard, cramped and precarious conditions. In October, more than 100 local councils wrote to the government to warn that they faced bankruptcy, with between a fifth and half of their total available annual financial resources being diverted to cope with a rapid explosion in homelessness and the cost of temporary accommodation. Rough sleeping is also on the rise – reaching its highest levels in London since the pandemic.
Yet the most recent government statistics, released in November 2023, showed there were 261,189 long-term empty properties in England – a rise of 12,556 homes compared to 2022 (The Big Issue, 21 November 2023). There is plenty of housing but it is increasingly concentrated in private hands, there only for those who can afford to buy or rent it. For the working class, solutions to the housing crisis lie not in the froth and glitter of Labour’s fake promises, but in controlling unpayable rents, building publicly owned homes on a mass scale and taking back empty homes into public ownership.
Cat Wiener
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 297 December 2023/January 2024
