A cruel, nasty and dangerous homes policy

By Jeremy Corbyn MP / @jeremycorbyn

Last week Kensington and Chelsea Council jumped the gun and started phoning council tenants whom they deemed to be “under-occupying” and told them they would have to move or face homelessness.

Quite clearly what they were doing was illegal, but they were only acting in response to statements made by the coalition government about tenants remaining in council property when their grown-up children have moved out and limiting the security of tenure of any new tenants.

There are 1.8 million people waiting for social housing and the house-building rate looks like being the lowest since 1923 as the council housing projects started under the Labour government are cancelled, one by one, almost every day. In an attempt to ameliorate this situation, housing minister Grant Shapps has announced that the government will subsidise any local authority by paying the council tax for six years on any new home constructed, with only a small differentiation between private-sector and council and housing association properties.

Thus on the one hand the government has taken a very sharp scythe to the council house-building programme which spluttered into life in the latter days of the last government and on the other hand it is subsidising the building of any home, however wealthy its new occupant may be. Quite simply, the coalition government has taken money from the council house-building programme and will use it to subsidise private-sector free-market developments. The Tory attack on public-sector housing is a combination of refusing to fund new developments and threatening existing tenants and removing the whole principle of housing for life for new tenants of council housing association properties.

The Tories are proposing a five-yearly means-tested review of council tenancies and if they deem the person to be earning enough then tenants will be forced to vacate their council property and move into the private sector, creating uncertainty and potentially catastrophic effects for children and families.

Tragically, like so many coalition policies, this idea was first raised by the ultra-Blairites when Labour was in government, but thankfully it was squashed by Margaret Beckett during her short time as housing minister. Because of the inadequate building programme for council properties since the early 1980s, more and more people cannot afford to buy, but don’t have needs extreme enough to get a council place and are therefore forced into the private sector. In 1980 the Tories effectively ended most rent controls and made local authorities responsible for the administration of housing benefit.

The combination of a shortage of council housing and increasing demand has meant an incredible growth in housing benefit payments and a publicly funded bonanza for private landlords. The obvious thing to do is challenge the principle of an unregulated private rented sector in this country, but instead the coalition government plans to limit housing benefit payments and thus force tenants to spend increasing amounts of their own benefit on topping up the housing benefit to meet the landlords’ excessive demands. Either that or they will face homelessness. It’s a cruel, nasty and dangerous policy and it threatens the prospect of social cleansing of large parts of London and other major cities as families in receipt of benefits will not be able to pay for private rented property in the areas where they currently live. It’s a national version of what Shirley Porter tried to do in Westminster.

It’s quite clear that there has to be the most enormous national campaign to protect the principle of housing as a right.

We need to defend the principle of lifetime tenancies in council housing, demand an enormous investment programme in new council housing, remove the proposed cap on housing allowance and instead introduce rent controls in the private sector and improve security of tenure for private tenants. Most of the media only reports housing in terms of the prices and profitability of housing for those who already own a property. Millions in Britain have no chance whatsoever of finding a place to buy that they can afford and therefore rely on public provision of housing. To not invest in good-quality housing is to confine children to a lifetime of misery and to allow the most incredible returns on investment by private-sector landlords. Labour didn’t do anywhere near enough, but in the last two years it did show a welcome return to the principle of council housing.

The Conservatives and their Lib Dem accomplices are taking us back to something worse than Thatcher’s Tory years of the 1980s.

This article was also published in the Morning Star.