The new government’s much-vaunted housing programme promises to ‘turbocharge’ housebuilding to deliver 1.5 million new homes over its five-year term – a rate not seen in Britain for more than 50 years. To achieve this ‘ambitious target’, the government says it will ‘drive a bulldozer’ through planning legislation, extend powers of compulsory purchase of land and allow building on whatever bits of the green belt it chooses to redesignate as ‘grey belt’. This is a charter for unfettered profit-making by the housebuilding companies and property developers who supported Labour’s election campaign and whose shares rose dramatically following the party’s landslide victory. It is also intended as a clear bribe to sections of the middle classes and better-off sections of the working class desperate to get a foot on the housing ladder. But it will do nothing to address a housing crisis that has seen the poorest sections of the working class who are increasingly being forced into squalid, unaffordable and overcrowded homes, or made homeless.
Only council homes can solve the crisis
It is clear that the majority of the 30,000 houses Labour says it will deliver each year are intended for home ownership. It has failed to set any target for the provision of homes at social rent – that is, housing provided by local authorities and housing associations at around 50% of market rent. Over the last year there has been a net loss of over 12,000 social homes, with just 9,561 built between 2022 and 2023 and more than 22,000 sold or demolished. Over the last ten years, the net loss has been 177,487. Meanwhile, nearly 1.3 million households are languishing on housing waiting lists, some of them for years. A record 109,000 families (including 145,000 children) are being housed by local authorities mostly in cramped and unsuitable temporary accommodation at a cost of nearly £2bn a year.
Evictions in the private sector are at a record high, with rents still rising inexorably while housing allowance (housing benefit) remains frozen. Only 5% of all new rental properties in Britain are affordable for those in receipt of housing benefit. The National Housing Federation estimates that by 2030, a fifth of all households will be living in housing deemed unaffordable as it swallows up more than a third of their income. No-fault Section 21 evictions have gone up 52% in the last year.
So-called ‘affordable housing’, whether for rent or sale, set at around 80% of market prices, is unaffordable for much of the working class. Currently 50% of the funds available from the Affordable Housing Programme (AHP) are diverted to Shared Ownership, a part-buy, part-rent model that generally requires an income of over £45,000. Last year, just 13% of the budget went towards homes for social rent. Labour has made it clear that there will be no new funding for the AHP.
So with local authorities facing massive black holes in their housing budgets (£700m in London), where is the money going to come from to provide homes for the working class? Housing associations – now little more than private companies – are hardly going to take up the slack. Their building of homes for social rent is at the lowest level in 60 years. One of the largest, L&Q, has seen housing starts fall by 70% in the last year, despite posting a post-tax surplus of £268m.
No one can seriously believe that Labour is going to provide the massive injection of funding to councils to let them build affordable, decent and secure homes on the scale needed. Nor will it force councils to refurbish the more than 30,000 council properties across England left empty and decaying (with the worst offenders being the London Labour councils of Southwark, Ealing and Camden). It will not requisition some of the 270,000 homes across the country that have been empty for more than two years. Starmer has made it clear he will not abolish Right to Buy, which has decimated social sector housing, calling it ‘a legitimate working class aspiration’; nor will Labour cap rents in the private sector. Whether it is any more prepared than the Conservatives to challenge the vested interests of private landlords and abolish Section 21 through its promised Renters Rights Bill remains to be seen. This is a party that spectacularly refused to commit to lifting hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty at the modest cost of £3bn a year. Why should it care if working class children are living in precarious, unsafe, damp and mouldy conditions, many in homes so overcrowded that 300,000 are forced to share a bed with their parents?
A charter for property developers
Instead, Labour’s proposals will boost the profits of housebuilders and developers by slashing planning regulations and offer a sop to the aspirations of better-off voters who dream of home ownership. It will provide a bonanza for landowners as swathes of protected green belt are recategorised as ‘poor quality and ugly’ grey belt ripe for redevelopment, driving a new wave of speculative land acquisition in the southeast. Property consultant Knight Frank has identified what it says are 11,000 ‘previously undeveloped sites’ in the south of England – 40% of them in London’s green belt area. No wonder seven out of ten property developers told pollsters in January that they were backing Labour.
Cat Wiener
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 301 August/September 2024
