By a UNISON member and local government worker
Three months since Starmer’s government came into power, it is clear that they have no coherent plans to address the huge crisis in housing – a decades-long crisis that is having a devastating impact on working-class people and our communities.
In many ways, housing is a microcosm of the omni-crisis that is British capitalism: chronic underinvestment, rampant money-grabbing landlords, gross profiteering from the super-rich developers, a huge lack of access to decent and affordable housing, and the collapse of public provision.
Shortly after the General Election, Angela Rayner, the Deputy Prime Minister and Secretary of State for Housing, announced a new National Planning Policy Framework, as part of Labour’s pledge to overcome the housing crisis by building 370,000 homes a year over the course of the parliament. However, there is no realistic prospect of this target being met, particularly given how reliant they are on the private sector building the houses that we need.
Over the last several decades, as public sector house building has plummeted, developers and landowners have failed to deliver. The reasons are speculation, profiteering and land banking, whereby developers and landowners wait until market conditions become more favourable (i.e. profitable) for them to build.
For all the blame that is aimed at council planning departments, there are thousands of houses that have planning permission on paper, but they will not be brought forward for development because it is not currently profitable for the developers’ cartel to build them.
However, the housing crisis is not just a supply problem. Today, one in every 21 adults is a landlord – there are four times as many landlords as teachers. This means that virtually everyone else struggles to afford a home that meets their needs. Back in the nineteenth century, Karl Marx described how everyone’s interests are aligned against landlords: they are an economic deadweight, to the extent that in Britain last year, tenants paid an astronomical total of £85.6 billion in rent.
The government’s recent announcement that they will ban Section 21 evictions, also known as ‘no-fault evictions’, is a victory for housing campaigners. But their Renters’ Reform Bill is woefully inadequate and will do little to improve the conditions of millions of tenants who are living in unsafe and squalid conditions. Many will also be questioning how Labour can be taken seriously, when their new MP for Ilford South, Jas Athwal, was recently revealed to be a slum landlord.
As part of the new legislation, landlords who fail to address serious hazards could be fined up to £7,000 by local councils and may face prosecution for noncompliance. Such fines will be a drop in the ocean compared to the vast profits that landlords make and, given the current crisis in the courts system and the chronic underfunding of local government, it is highly unlikely that prosecutions will ever actually happen.
As socialists, we demand immediate rent controls as a way of alleviating the huge problems caused by ever increasing housing costs. But the housing crisis cannot be fully resolved under capitalism, which puts profit above all other interests, where homes are seen as investment opportunities for the richest. We also cannot rely on the private sector and profiteering housing developers to deliver the houses that we need.
The only solution is for mass council house building to provide high quality, climate-friendly housing that is genuinely affordable for working-class people. The big building companies should be immediately nationalised, bringing them under public control, alongside the banks and finance institutions. Only in this way can housing needs be properly met and profiteering brought to an end.
