In the housing wars, Ed Miliband has picked a side

“There is a war between the rich and poor, a war between the rich and poor, a way between the man and the woman;

There is a war between the ones who say there is a war and the ones who say there isn’t”

                             – Leonard Cohen

Ed Miliband is at his best when he is at his boldest. As is the Labour Party. Forget managerial hemming and hawing. Forget triangulation based on outmoded data and a misguided sense of where the middle class are at. Ed Miliband is going big again. Good.

The measures Ed has announced on housing will change many, many lives.

As a campaigner on housing issues, I have heard countless horror stories about the appalling conditions in the private rented sector. The friend whose kitchen was infested with rats, but whose landlord refused to act and threatened to throw her out for complaining. Or the time a friend was given just a week’s notice to quit having to find a new house (and new fees for agents and deposits) immediately. Or the time my own landlord tried to charge me £500 for a broken kitchen tile (which was broken when I moved in. Having already refused to return my deposit – citing it as a cleaning fee – I figured I had little to lose and set them a cheque for £12 and the Argos catalogue with the kitchen page marked.

We need to solve the housing crisis, and building 200,000 new homes a year by the end of the next parliament will be a good start (though only that). But in the meantime, we need to sort out the wild west that has become our dramatically under-regulated private rental market.

At his fascinating IPPR lecture last night, economist du jour Thomas Piketty revealed a very interesting fact about the UK. 50% of people have hardly any wealth at all. The earn to live and live to earn. They have no assets and little if any savings. They make up – at most 5%  the countries wealth holdings.

It used to be the case, that the next level up, our middle classes, owned a fair whack of our national wealth, with the 40% in the middle owning about 35% of our wealth, but that has been reduced to just 25%.

The rentier class, the top 10%, now own 70% of our national wealth. Remember that when their Tory representatives in Parliament (a quarter of whom – as Mark has pointed out – are landlords themselves) try to present this as an attack on the middle classes. It is not. It is the very fact that the middle classes are finding their children paying a fortune to live in cramped and insecure conditions that makes this such a powerful issue. It unites the reasonable rest against the risible few profiteering from free market misery.

That’s not to say there aren’t good landlords. There are. But these are be unlikely to be hit by these measures. They are the ones who already have long term relationships with tenants and wouldn’t dream of moving them on every six months in order to hike up the rents and gouge a little more from the pockets of the poor.

This is good politics because it is both popular and the right thing to do. It won’t cost the government anything (in fact, with private sector rents being more than a third of the soaring housing benefits bill, calming these could even save public money over time) and will calm the housing market.

It is noticeable as a policy that will benefit the young more than the old too. This is another important development. My Leonard Cohen quote above would have been even more apposite if he had written about the covert (or even really quite overt) war being waged by the Coalition against the young. Young people are far less likely to vote (one oft-cited reason for this is their transience, so perhaps secure tenancies may help there too, though I don’t want to over-claim for a policy I already believe will deliver in spades) and as a result have been double dealt by the Libs and trampled by the Tories.

This move by Miliband answers the question asked recently about what our offer to the electorate would be like. This is not small. This is not timid or managerial. Miliband has gone big, and as a result many more will be able to go home. To a place that feels like home.