The rent of a home – a necessity for working class families to recuperate between the hours of work – has risen to crisis levels. Under capitalism, lack of housing is a constant threat to the working class, but in Britain for the 35 years after the Second World War, the working class successfully demanded state provision to ease its lot. In that period, local authorities and housing associations built 4.4 million social homes, at an average of more than 126,000 a year. However, by 1980 the ruling class had returned to the offensive, to cut the cost of sheltering its workforce. JAMES MARTIN reports.
From 1980-83 building new ‘council housing’ was halved then severely restricted. The state housing stock was put up for sale. The Thatcher government promoted ‘home ownership’ to induce the conservatism imposed by mortgage debt. The aim was to seduce workers on less than average pay into the illusory position of a ‘lower middle class’, while shoving the poorest workers back into the hands of predatory landlords. To boost the ‘privatisation’ process, from 1986 discounts of between 27% and 50% were offered, depending on length of residence. The cash from the sales went towards cutting income tax rates for high earners.
However, the scale of ‘individual purchases’ was insufficient for the money-grubbing landlord class. Between 1986 and 2015 multiple large-scale volume transfers of local authority stock were made to private registered providers. After January 1989, tenancies with these new landlords were no longer secure, even if they had been previously under local authority ownership. Previously secure or regulated tenancies were changed to ‘assured tenancies’, with intimidating probation periods introduced to ensure tenants paid rents. From 2003 onwards, ‘demotion’ from safer tenancy application lists could be applied for ‘anti-social’ behaviour. In England a Section 21 notice allowed a landlord to terminate a short-term let without having to give an explanation, known as a ‘no-fault eviction’.
To ram home the sense of insecurity, in June 2022 then Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced the extension of ‘Right to Buy’ to housing association tenants. Giving any sense of secure shelter to the poorer sections of the working class undermines their role as part of a mobile reserve army of unemployed. In any case, a gamut of occupiers – those in the most difficult social circumstances or of uncertain immigration status – are entirely excluded from the Protection from Eviction Act 1977. Such ‘excluded occupiers’ can be evicted by bailiffs without a court order once their tenancy or licence to occupy has been ended.
Social homes have been sold off faster than they have been replaced. 2,006,690 social housing dwellings were sold through three Right to Buy schemes from April 1980 to March 2022. There are about 1.5 million fewer social homes today than there were in 1980. Consequently, one in five households – more than 11 million people – in England now rent from a private landlord. A proportion that has nearly doubled in the last 20 years despite extortionate rents, poor living conditions and chronic insecurity.
Protests about the housing crisis forced the government to promise to abolish no-fault evictions as part of the May 2023 Renters’ (Reform) Bill but it backtracked after landlords ‘raised concerns’. The long-awaited ban will not now be brought in until ‘a new court process and stronger possession grounds for landlords’ are in place. Property rights must be assured! Meanwhile evictions have accelerated.
By the end of 2022, rents in 48 council areas in Britain were classified as ‘unaffordable’ on average wages, rents having shot up by almost a third from 2019. During the pandemic in 2020, over 208,000 households, either homeless or threatened with homelessness, approached local councils for help – despite the government’s promise of a pandemic moratorium on evictions.
More than 50% of homes in Britain are built by just ten companies, compared to 9% in the 1960s. There is little choice and little variety. The seller’s market churns out low-quality products to sell at 12% to 30% profit: 57% are ‘not affordable’. From 1995 the house price to average annual earnings ratio rose from four to nine times. Even the Financial Times concedes that ‘it now takes 13 years to save a deposit for the average UK property (up from three in the mid-1990s), and 30 years in London (up from four). To state the obvious, nobody spends 30 years saving for a house. The dream is over’. (13 January 2024)
By 2023 rents in Britain were rising at the fastest rate since the Office of National Statistics records began in 2006: an average 6.2% per annum and 6.9% in London. Rent increases are an eviction mechanism, and homelessness has surged. The suggestion of temporary rent freezes (not controls), and more ‘housing benefit’ are thus disingenuously floated by defensive captains of the status quo, as tenants in London and Manchester mobilise to protest. Landlords’ associations reject the abolition of their arbitrary right to expel tenants which hangs permanently over the heads of the poor. It forces tenants to live in constant fear of being evicted if they raise complaints about the property. In 2022 – as the removal of Section 21 was being discussed – there was a 50% increase in households threatened with such evictions, which resulted in 24,060 expulsions. Over half a million such threats were handed out in November 2023 alone, in a battlefield for rented shelter in a growing sea of poverty. The number of eviction claims made between July and September 2023 increased by 19% on the year till then, to 24,938.
In England landlords rent out squalid homes in shameful conditions of the type common nearly a century ago. On 13 November 2023 the chair of the Association of Chief Environmental Health Officers in England, Peter Wright, called for wholesale reform of private rented sector regulation to address ‘serious systemic failings’ that left tenants at the mercy of rogue landlords. ‘There are some living conditions today that are as poor as we would have found in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s. It is shameful … that there are still people living in terrible conditions in 2023 in England.’ More than half a million of these properties have hazards that pose ‘a serious and immediate risk to a person’s health and safety’. A large proportion of these suffer cold, damp and mould. Scotland and Northern Ireland have tougher laws, meaning it is an offence to rent out a property in serious disrepair. Wales has a similar legal framework to England, though in 2016 it introduced a ‘contractual obligation’ on landlords to ensure homes are ‘fit for human habitation’.
Two-year-old Awaab Ishak died from a respiratory condition caused by exposure to mould at his family’s rented Rochdale home in December 2022. The government has been forced to amend the Social Housing (Regulation) Bill to introduce ‘Awaab’s Law’, which will require landlords to fix reported health hazards within specified timeframes. However, the same rules will not apply to the private rented sector. Once again, the private exploitation of the working class, the forcing down of its real standard of living, is exposed as the underpinning principle of capitalism. We demand effective state construction of affordable, safe and healthy public housing, for all in need, with strict rent controls!
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 298 February/March 2024
