Call for an End to Housing Greed: Come to the National Demonstration Against the Housing Bill in London, Sun. Mar. 13

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Call for an End to Housing Greed: Come to the National Demonstration Against the Housing Bill in London, Sun. Mar. 13

Where to begin in discussing Britain’s housing crisis? Since the Labour victory in 1997 we have been disastrously misled by governments prioritising an endless housing bubble as an alternative to anything resembling an actual functioning economy. The only break in this divisive and unfair policy came after the global banking crash of 2008, but since the Tories got back into power in 2010, via a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, the bubble has been back with a vengeance.

The latest phase of the revived bubble is, as is now taken for granted, promoted via interest rates that are permanently near zero, making savings appear pointless, and housing the only attractive investment — and also, of course, via the permanent wooing of foreign investors from every part of the world, who are somehow persuaded that the overpriced towers rising up everywhere in London are good value for money. With the addition of a shortage of supply, dating back to the enforced decline of social housing under Margaret Thatcher, who sold council homes but refused to allow councils to build new properties, and chronic under-investment for 30 years, it becomes possible to understand how housing is now out of reach for more and more of London’s workers — even professional couples with generous financial support from their parents.

As the Guardian reported in an article last September, “Revealed: the widening gulf between salaries and house prices”:

In 1995, the median income in London was £19,000 and the median house price was £83,000, meaning that people were spending 4.4 times their income on buying a property. But by 2012-13, the median income in London had increased to £24,600 and the median house price in the capital had increased to £300,000, meaning people were forced to spend 12.2 times their income on a house.

At these kind of prices, of course, few workers can actually afford to buy in London, a situation unprecedented in living memory, and one that has no justification except to enrich the already rich — and the entire mortgage industry — at the expense of everyone else.

In addition, the cost of renting in London has also gone through the roof, as the Evening Standard highlighted last July, in an article entitled, “Rents in EVERY London postcode are ‘unaffordable’ for workers on Living Wage.”

The Standard article drew on research by SpareRoom.co.uk establishing that workers paid £9.15 an hour — the London Living Wage at the time, which is now £9.40 an hour — had to spend 56.1% of their income on rent, and also noted that apprentices were completely unable to afford rent anywhere in the capital. I’ve also done my own calculations, and have worked out that anyone on George Osborne’s delusional living wage of £7.20 has to pay a shocking 71.3% of their income on rent.

Not only does this divert a huge amount of money into comparatively few hands, but it also strangles London’s economy in general, as less and less people have any earnings left over to spend on the goods and services that a huge section of those working are employed to make, sell and provide. Without money circulating, and as those priced out leave London in greater numbers, the wider economy in the capital will start grinding to a halt.

While this is happening, the government is also determined to destroy social housing, which delivers the only genuinely affordable rents available — with the exception of those few individuals who bought their rental properties years ago and are not motivated by the relentless greed that is the norm nowadays. However, the social renting sector has already been undermined by the government’s insistence that all new social tenancies should be set at what ministers, with breathtaking cynicism, have defined as affordable, which is 80% of market rents; in other words, not affordable at all for most people.

In addition, the government has been attacking social tenants who receive benefits, introducing the reviled “bedroom tax” — whereby millionaires with more rooms than they can count penalise social tenants for having what can be twisted into the notion of being a “spare room,” and also introducing another breathtakingly cynical and unjust policy, known as “pay to stay.”

Via this disgusting innovation, council tenants who earn more than the median wage will be made to pay market rents, doubling, tripling or even quadrupling what they have to pay, and meaning that, as the Observer reported last month, according to a report commissioned by the Local Government Association, “almost 60,000 households in England will be unable to afford to remain in their council properties from April next year.”

When this was floated last summer, Sky News published a disgraceful story entitled, “Crackdown On ‘Rich’ Council House Tenants,” claiming that “pay to stay,” directed at “anyone earning over £40,000 in London or £30,000 outside the capital,” will make sure that “[b]ig earners living in council houses or flats and paying cheap subsidised rents are to lose the perk in a Budget crackdown.” Elsewhere in the article, the plan was described as “a purge on rich council house tenants.” What is so disgraceful about this, as anyone who does the tiniest amount of research should realise, is that £30,000 outside London and £40,000 in London is actually the median income for a couple, meaning that “rich” and “big earners” are completely incorrect descriptions, as the median income is what 50 percent of people earn more than, and 50 percent earn less than, and those on the median income cannot, with any honesty whatsoever, be described as either “rich” or “big earners.”

Much of the government’s latest assault on social housing in particular is contained in the latest Housing and Planning Bill, where “pay to stay” was introduced, and it is the object of a national demonstration this Sunday, March 13, in London, organised by the Kill the Housing Bill campaign, which points out that, as well as introducing “pay to stay,” the proposed legislation “[f]orces local authorities to sell ‘high value’ properties on the private market when they become empty – the biggest council housing sell-off in generations,” “[a]bolishes new secure lifetime tenancies in council housing, replacing them with 2-5 year tenancies,” and “[d]oes nothing to address the housing crisis, and instead replaces obligations to build social housing with Cameron’s unaffordable ‘starter homes’ — requiring an annual income of £70,000 in London.”

Campaigners will assemble at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, WC2A 3TL, at noon on Sunday and will then march on Parliament to oppose the Housing and Planning Bill and, as the Kill the Housing Bill campaign describes it, to “demand: secure homes for all, rent controls, and homes for people not for profit.” The campaigners add that the bill, which is currently in the House of Lords, will “make the UK’s housing crisis much worse, send rent and house prices soaring and spells the end of council and social housing.”

The Kill the Housing Bill campaign is supported by Defend Council Housing, Radical Housing Network, Focus E15 campaign, Momentum, People’s Assembly, GMB Union, National Union of Teachers (NUT), Communication Workers Union (CWU), Bakers Union, Unite Housing Workers, London Gypsy Traveller Unit, National Bargee Travellers Association, Leeds Hands Off Our Homes, The Green Party, John McDonnell MP and many other organisations and individuals, including other MPs, members of the House of Lords and celebrities, and, the campaigners note, the march and rally “will be attended by council tenants, home owners, private renters, architects, students, migrants groups, women’s campaigns, trade unionists and many more.” It is also hoped that, as well as John McDonnell, the Shadow Chancellor, and a longtime supporter of social housing, Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, Green MP Caroline Lucas and Natalie Bennett, the Green Party leader, will be able to attend, and to speak at the rally outside Parliament at 2pm.

Speaking of the campaign, John McDonnell said, “People are desperate for a stable and decent home they can actually afford to live in but the Tories’ Housing Bill will make the housing crisis drastically worse. Labour is opposing it in Parliament but I’m also opposing it outside Parliament by supporting the Kill the Housing Bill demonstration on the 13th March. Millions of people across the country are struggling to afford to rent or buy a home but the Government is callous in its disregard for people’s right to secure themselves the right to a decent home. This bill demonstrates the worst attack on social housing provision seen in decades. It will result in more genuinely affordable social housing units being sold off which is scandalous when we have such a severe housing crisis on our hands. Under this Tory Government homelessness is already sharply on the rise and thousands are being socially cleansed from our cities.”

Caroline Lucas said, “I am proud to support the Kill the Housing Bill campaign in their fight to stand up and defend the right to a secure and truly affordable home for everyone. The Government had an opportunity to utterly rethink the housing model but instead they have put another nail in the coffin for social housing. This Bill is being used to pull the rug from underneath those who rely on our already limited stock of social housing, destroying the very bricks and mortar of the welfare state. It is also a sure fire way to extend — not end — the housing crisis.”

A Kill the Housing Bill campaign spokesperson added, “The Tories’ Housing Bill aims to destroy council housing, and will hit everyone on low or middle incomes trying to rent or buy. It condemns millions to a lifetime of insecure, expensive private renting. Everyone deserves a decent home, but landlords, developers and the rich will be the only ones to benefit from this Bill.”

For more information, see the website of the Kill the Housing Bill campaign. Also see Shelter’s assessment of the Housing Bill and this commentary by Architects 4 Social Housing. For further information, please contact the organisers by email, or call Joe Beswick on 07873 557040 or Katya Nasim on 07791 018631.

Please also check out Our House: A Pop-Up Community Centre, in which housing activists have occupied 221 Brompton Road, Kensington, SW3 2EJ, stating, “We have occupied a building in the heart of the most expensive part of London to host a community-led occupation in protest at the Tories Housing Bill, the housing crisis and to highlight the insanity of empty properties when thousands are homeless.”

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose debut album, ‘Love and War,’ is available for download or on CD via Bandcamp — also see here). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and the Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2016), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).