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Our national housing crisis - the case for council house building

Sarah Evans Andover
31st October 2011 at 12:26
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Council housing can play a central role, not only in ending the massive housing crisis that we face, but in helping to end the economic crisis that was caused in no small part by the shameless exploitation of housing need by bankers, spivs and speculators in the sub-prime mortgage scandal.

Anyone who watched Michael Collins’s excellent BBC documentary, the Great Estate, a few months back, will know how far the very concept of council housing has been undermined since its heyday in the late 1970s, when a third of Britain’s people lived in council housing, including a fifth of the top ten per cent of earners.

Today there are just four million people still living in council accommodation in England, Wales and Scotland.

Today, the government would have us believe that what remains of the council-housing stock is something akin to charity: something that only the deserving poor are grudging allowed, but only as long as they remain poor and remain deserving.

It is the return of Victorian values – the values of the poor law

If you haven’t seen Collins’s documentary I would urge you to: it is an inspiring piece which shows the aims and aspirations of the visionaries who developed council housing, where council estates were not there as a safety net for the poorest in society, but were there for all, regardless of status, income or employment.

How far things have come since the days of Nye Bevan, when the NHS and hundreds of thousands of council homes were built out of the rubble of the Second World War when the country’s debt was, in real terms, twice what it is today.

Successive governments have bit by bit chipped away at our welfare state – our NHS, our state education system, our public services and our council homes – and the current government has set out to dismantle it completely – finishing the job started by Thatcher in 1979.

For council housing the rot started when Thatcher conned the country into believing that the “right to buy” council houses would create wealth and opportunity for all.

We know now how wrong that was.

For instead, alongside the criminal disposal of the vast bulk of the country’s best council housing stock and an effective ban on new council-house building, we have seen negative equity, homelessness and overcrowding rising relentlessly and house-price inflation that has put access to decent housing out of the reach of a generation.

To its eternal shame, new Labour not only carried on the Thatcherite policy, but even managed to sell off more council homes than the Thatcher and Major Tory governments.

So what do we have today?

We have five million people in 1.8 million households on council housing lists.

We have a hyper-inflated housing market that has benefited no-one expect the spivs and speculators who lent money at eye-watering interest rates to the poorest and most vulnerable in society who didn’t have a prayer of meeting their payments.

We have an almost unregulated private rented sector which allows people to be fleeced for often sub-standard accommodation by landlords some of whom make Rachman look like an amateur.

(Remember Shelter’s excellent campaign which pointed out that if the price of food had risen at the same rate as that of housing a chicken would cost something like £25.)

We have families told to use their living room as a bedroom, parents forced to share bedrooms with their children and families of five in one-bedroom accommodation told that they are not overcrowded.

We have local authorities like Westminster Borough Council in the wealthy west end, renting bed-bug ridden hotels in Hackney, one of London’s poorest boroughs, so they can unload their housing problem on a poorer borough’s social services.

We have a generation of sofa-surfers who do not even register on the homeless statistics.

We have working people encouraged to turn on one another in competition for what little housing there is.

And now we have a government that vilifies council tenants as scroungers, aided by the Mail, the Express and the Sun, in order to justify massive benefit cuts

The present government’s response to the housing crisis will not only make it worse, but will place even more of the burden on the very people who are already its victims.

Instead of regulating rents, the government has capped housing benefit.

Tory Westminster City Council estimates that some 5,000 households – and this is just one London borough – will no longer be able to afford to live there.

Across the country it will mean tens of thousands of families forced to uproot in what even Tory London mayor Boris Johnson describes as social cleansing, with the breakup of communities, and even more breakdown in social cohesion.

The amount of taxpayers’ money that ends up in the pockets of greedy private landlords is stomach-churning, but what kind of sick logic is it that aims to cut it by forcing people out of their homes and neighbourhoods rather than regulating rents and providing more homes?

So what is the long-term solution?

The housing crisis is part of the wider economic crisis.

Having seen the bitter fruit of housing hyper-inflation, caused by shortage of housing exploited by bankers and speculators, you’d have thought that the government would want to stop that happening again.

But you’d have thought wrong.

The government is determined to leave housing to the market, when all our experience has shown that market mechanisms cannot deal with the problem precisely because shortage means bigger prices and bigger profits.

What the market wants is exactly the reverse of what the people need.

Relying on the market to build its way out of this crisis is like living in cloud cuckoo land – Capitalist supply and demand dictate that reducing supply keeps prices high.

The privateers who are out to profit from houses will not – indeed cannot – do anything to bring prices down.

In 1945 Britain faced an even more dire economic situation than today’s.

The national debt in 1945 was twice what it is today as a proportion of GDP.

Yet the 1945 government created the National Health Service and embarked upon a massive council-house-building programme.

That approach not only began to solve the massive housing problem that had existed even before the blitz made it worse, but it also helped to kick-start the economy by creating tens of thousands of jobs.

Today’s economic crisis is no less dramatic, and the government’s slash and burn approach to public services is making it worse.

Turning taxpayers into benefit claimants by destroying their jobs is not cutting the debt, but making it worse.

The economy needs investment, and what better investment could there be than a massive council-house building programme?

The benefits are massive.

No-one can deny that we need the homes.

No-one can deny that we need the jobs.

And only the bankers, spivs and speculators who got us where we are would deny that we need to bring down house prices in the private sector.

Alongside that we need legislation to allow local authorities compulsorily to purchase the half-million empty properties around the country, and that allows councils to buy back council homes that have been sold.

But there is another benefit to council housing that the ConDem government, Blair and Thatcher would have us forget.

Council housing is democratic.

If your council does a bad job maintaining its council homes you can vote them out. You cannot do that to a private landlord, a bank or even a housing association.

And that is true of all our public services – as the ConDem government erodes the welfare state and our rights to council homes it is also taking away democratic accountability.

The last Labour government spent millions bribing, persuading, blackmailing council tenants to transfer to housing associations, arms-length HATS and the like.

Housing associations may once have played a positive role as a minor co-operative sector, but today they have become undemocratic monoliths, with vested interests – corrupted by the process and far too often unable to deal with tenants any longer as individuals.

It is my view that the economic stimulus created by a massive house-building programme would be enough, easily, to outweigh its cost.

Shelter, which has a proud record of campaigning for housing rights since 1966, calculated that for every £1 spent on building homes, £3.51 would be generated in the local economy – that’s reason enough to get building.

By contrast, for every £100 million cut from the capital investment budget, national economic output will fall by £351 million, with 2,500 fewer jobs in the construction sector and 1,650 fewer new homes.

But to those who still worry about where the money is going to come from, let’s remind ourselves of a few facts.

Every year, around £120 billion in tax remains unpaid, evaded or avoided.

Since 2008 you and I have forked out £850 billion to bail out the banks whose greed got us where we are, and we continue to underwrite them by tens of billions each year.

Like health, like social care, like education, I believe that housing cannot be seen as a commodity but as an essential requirement for life.

Council housing is a model that has provided homes, jobs and economic growth for generations.

Today we need all these things more than ever.

The article is also on my blog: http://sarahevanslabour.blogspot.com/2011/10/our-national-housing-crisis-case-for.html

Tags: council housing (1) | homelessness (1)