Raise the roof – fight for secure and affordable homes

Hundreds of thousands of people are starting the year under the shadow of losing their homes. A quarter of a million more are enduring lockdown in cramped, damp and unsafe temporary accommodation. Exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic, housing for working class people is increasingly precarious, overcrowded and dangerous; the high costs associated with rents in the private sector, especially in big cities, are driving escalating levels of poverty, debt and homelessness. Decent housing for the working class will be a key battleline in the struggles that lie ahead.

Eviction crisis looms

On 8 January 2021, Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government Robert Jenrick announced that the ‘Christmas truce’ on evictions, due to expire on 11 January, would be extended for six weeks to 21 February. While the last-minute measure will bring temporary relief to some of the 840,000 households already in rent arrears, it only postpones a looming crisis. At the same time the new ‘eviction ban’ removes significant protections for renters, having done away with the vital provision that arrears built up since the first lockdown in March 2020 must be disregarded. This will be devastating for those sections of the working class – particularly young people, single parents and the self-employed – who are the most likely to have lost their jobs and seen their income plummet during the pandemic. Between February and August 2020, an additional 560,000 households received help with housing costs, through Universal Credit or housing benefita; London saw an increase of 52%. Landlords, protected throughout the crisis by a mortgage holiday, have been under no obligation to pass those savings on. Why would they? As Engels famously pointed out, in a system where housing ceases to be a basic human right and becomes instead a commodity, ‘the house owner in his capacity as capitalist has not only the right, but…to a certain extent also the duty of ruthlessly making as much out of his property in house rent as he possibly can’.

Many in the private rented sector were already struggling to keep a roof over their heads before coronavirus struck, with more than a third (37%) living in poverty in 2018-2019. Evictions are, after all, only the extreme example of what happens when housing costs outstrip income. For the 8.5 million people renting privately, rent already swallows up an average 41% of household income; in London, amongst the poorest households, the figure can be as high as 60%. The ONS says private sector rents had hit a record high of an average £700 a month per household as the country went into the first lockdown (with the London median £1,425) Housing benefits do not cover private rents in most of the country’s big cities; nor, for the poorest, do salaries, with a majority of households claiming Local Housing Allowance containing at least one person in work. Many working class households are simply priced out before they start.

The cost of private rents force households into accommodation that is overcrowded and often in poor repair as landlords spend the bare minimum on maintaining their properties. According to the Health Foundation, at the start of the pandemic 7.6 million households already had at least one major housing problem relating to overcrowding, affordability or poor quality; a million households had several of these. A fifth of all homes in the private rented sector were overcrowded, with an estimated 30,000 people living in a home consisting of just one room throughout the pandemic. Ethnic minority households were six times more likely to be overcrowded. The lethal results of this situation can be seen in the patterns of transmission, illness and death from Covid-19 in the poorest areas of big cities.

Shadow renting

253,000 working class households with children now find themselves reliant on squalid and unsuitable temporary accommodation – the highest number in 14 years. One major driver of this is the Overall Benefit Cap, which limits the amount of benefits unemployed families can claim. Research by the Child Poverty Action Group in December last year estimated that by March 2021, a further 76,000 households would be capped – 63,000 by the end of January. Three-quarters are families with children.

Others on low incomes, particularly migrant workers, end up having no choice but to resort to the world of shadow renting, where threats, violence and illegal evictions are used to extort rents from vulnerable populations. These properties are dilapidated, often dangerous and managed in such a way that there is no accountability, with fake companies and a string of shadowy figures involved. Those forced to rent from these charlatans speak of being attacked by the landlord’s goons if they were late with payments or complained about conditions, of locks changed in their absence, their possessions thrown out in the street. One man described being attacked with an electric drill; another was thrown down the stairs. Between March and July 2020, reported harassment and illegal evictions in this sector tripled. In a report on such ‘shadow renting’,* the authors report that when the council did intervene it was accompanied by law enforcement officers more interested in tenants’ immigration status than prosecuting criminal landlords. In such a highly unregulated market, where housing law is barely enforced and rents are so high, it is no surprise that so-called ‘rogue landlords’ flourish. In addition, in a particularly vicious circle, many councils are reluctant to prosecute because they rely on the same landlords for a supply of cheap temporary housing for those on their ever-increasing housing lists.

Fight for homes for the working class

The only solution to such a crisis would be the mass provision of housing that is secure, safe and affordable. 90,000 new social rented homes are needed every year just to meet current demand. But just 7% of this was built between 2018 and 2019, with the number of homes built for social rent as a proportion of all new homes falling to 3%. The coalition government of 2010-2015 reduced capital spend on publicly owned housing by 63%. The trend continues with the push towards home ownership – with ‘Shared Ownership’ classed as the preferred form of ‘affordable housing’. The government’s White Paper on social housing is entirely geared to promoting the market, promising renters ‘will be supported to take your first step towards ownership’. The housing crisis is a product of the crisis of British capitalism. It has been exacerbated to breaking point by the pandemic. The ruling class cannot and will not provide adequate housing for the working class. We have to organise and fight for it.

* Safer Renting: journeys in the shadow private rented sector, Cambridge House, August 2020