A Defence of Social Housing in a Resolutely Hostile Political Environment

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Tomorrow, Londoners will go to the polls to vote in council elections in the capital’s 32 boroughs,and across the UK there will also be elections in 34 metropolitan boroughs, 67 district and borough councils and 17 unitary authorities.

Voting ought to be a simple matter. The Tories, under Theresa May, are spectacularly useless and, wherever possible, cruel. Engaged in an effort to implement Brexit that seems to be destroying them, they are also gasping from one scandal to another — the latest being the Windrush fiasco, initiated by Theresa May, who is, to be blunt, a racist, and this whole racist disaster demonstrates quite how unpleasant they are.

And yet, if you care about fairness and social justice — in the specific context of housing, the biggest issue facing Londoners today, as well as many, many other people around the country — then voting for the Labour Party is not, in general, to be recommended, leaving a giant hole where participation in the democratic process ought to be.

On housing, lamentably, Labour boroughs across the capital — and across the country — are engaged in the mass destruction of their constituents’ homes, via the demolition of council estates, and their replacement with new developments, built by private developers, from which almost all the existing tenants, and even leaseholders (those who bought their homes under the ‘Right to Buy’ policy introduced by Margaret Thatcher) are priced out.

The roll call of Labour councils involved in this destruction is shameful. It began in Southwark, where the Labour-led council, under Peter John, sold, for no profit, the more than 1,000 homes of the Heygate Estate to the rapacious, Australian-based international property developer Lendlease, which has demolished the estate, and is providing just 82 new homes at social rent on its replacement, the underwhelming Elephant Park. Undeterred by massive criticism of its appalling behaviour at the Heygate, the council has followed up with similar destruction on the even larger Aylesbury Estate.

Elsewhere, Lambeth Council is intent on destroying several estates, including two, Central Hill and Cressingham Gardens, that are architecturally acclaimed, and for which no rationale beyond profiteering and social cleansing exists to justify their demolition, and Tower Hamlets has done the same with the architecturally-acclaimed Robin Hood Gardens, now half-destroyed, while Hackney Council, meanwhile, is engaged in the complete destruction of the huge Woodberry Down estate, a gem of post-war social housing when it was built, and in Lewisham, where I live, the Labour council is also intent on destroying perfectly sound homes in deals with private developers.

The list goes on and on, with the only real distraction from Labour’s enthusiasm for social cleansing being the terrible disaster at Grenfell Tower last June, when, under a Tory council, over 70 people died in an inferno that was entirely preventable, and which showed, fundamentally, how those in social housing are regarded as second-class citizens by those who rule us.

Of course, most efforts to understand why this epidemic of social cleansing is happening end up with the blame resting squarely on the Tory government of the last eight years — although don’t be fooled; many of these estate demolitions were being discussed by Labour councils before the crash of 2008 and the Tories’ supremely opportunistic embrace of austerity. However, the Tories have massively cut the amount of money available for housing since coming to power in 2010, and this, in turn, so the general narrative goes, has forced councils into deals with private developers.

From the beginning, however, councils failed to stand up to central government, and to stand with their own tenants and leaseholders, and it is impossible not to conclude that, along the way, some councils — and councillors — became overly enamoured of the money swilling around at the international property fairs and conferences they were wooed at by private developers, while other councils and councillors, though representatives of the Labour Party, were happy to engage in social cleansing, squeezing out poorer members of their communities through estate demolitions, while welcoming in those with more money.

Again, it is a fact that, in a state of permanent austerity, the unemployed and the low paid end up costing money rather than providing it to councils in need (via council tax, for example), but, again, no council has ever stood up to central government to point this out, and to suggest that, for example, perhaps all the Labour boroughs in London — currently 21 of 32 — could unite in opposition to the unparalleled destructiveness of the Tories’ policies.

The Tories also cut funding to housing associations, which have taken over much council housing, and the role of councils as social housing providers, since Margaret Thatcher’s time, but housing associations, too, have largely gone the way of councils, enthusiastically embracing a new role as private developers, and, with councils, becoming two sides of the same social cleansing coin.

The current dark farce, when it comes to social housing, is the plethora of different rental systems that have been established over the last eight years. Social rents — those that council tenants and housing association tenants in place before 2010 pay — are around one-third of market rents, which, unfettered and actively promoted by central government and the banks for the last 20 years, are genuinely out of control in the capital.

In Lewisham, where I live, for example (with thanks to Crosswhatfields for the information), the market rent for a two-bedroom flat is £323.08, while social rent is £95.54. Under Boris Johnson, during his eight lamentable years as Mayor of London, one of his great innovations was the criminally inaccurate term “affordable”, for rents set at 80% of market rents; in Lewisham, in other words, £258.46 — and it is this unaffordable “affordable” category of housing that the Tories insisted must apply to all new social tenancies after they took power in 2010.

Since Sadiq Khan became Mayor — swept in, lest we forget, because the housing crisis was the number one concern for Londoners — he has introduced compromises into a market that desperately needs fundamental change. The first compromise, introduced last year, is ’London Affordable Rent’, which is supposed to consist of ”rents for genuinely affordable homes aimed at low-income households.” In Lewisham, ‘London Affordable Rent’ for a two-bedroom flat is £152.73 a week. This year, Khan has introduce another compromise, ‘London Living Rent’, introduced as “a type of affordable housing for middle-income Londoners”, for which a two-bedroom flat in Lewisham costs £225.46 a week.

We all need better than this. The housing bubble, which is now 20 years old, and has — absurdly, shamefully — become the main driver of the economy, needs puncturing, but as no one in a position of power will do that voluntarily, and as it would create a huge negative equity problem if implemented bluntly, the best way to achieve it is for there to be a massive, not-for-profit social homebuilding programme, and while we may hope that this would happen under Jeremy Corbyn as Prime Minister — and Labour’s housing proposals (Housing for the Many) are worth looking at — at present the Labour councils who are destroying social housing in London and across the country have nothing in common with these aspirations.

So tomorrow, who are we supposed to vote for? Not the Tories, obviously, but nor, in most cases, Labour either. Have a look at this list of councils involved in estate demolitions (34 projects approved by Sadiq Khan despite his claim that there should be no more estate demotions without ballots), and see what you think, and also check out the 17 proposed demolitions that haven’t yet been approved, which I’ll be writing more about soon.

Unless you can establish that a Labour council appears to be behaving quite well on housing — in Islington, for example — or unless they have transformed themselves, as Labour has in Haringey, where a grass-roots movement kicked out the social cleansers, or unless it’s in Kensington and Chelsea, where Labour can reasonably be given a chance to take over from the Tories who presided over the Grenfell disaster, then I can’t endorse supporting them, and would suggest that a vote for the Greens is a much better bet — or, in some cases, a vote for the Lib Dems.

So that’s it — please vote wisely tomorrow, and let’s find a way to return social housing, and genuinely affordable social rents, to where they need to be — at the heart of political life in London and, more widely, in England as a whole. Or, as I described it in a Facebook post earlier today, “We need a massive social homebuilding programme … aimed at providing permanent homes at social rents for anyone who wants them, to restore some necessary sense of justice and fairness to society, to free up economic activity so it’s not all sinking into the deep and unproductive pockets of the rentiers, and so our children can finally have the prospect of a brighter future free of rent servitude.”

Please note: The photo at the top of this article is from my ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London.’

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 music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (click on the following for Amazon in 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), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from six years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of a new documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London.

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