Mihaela Ivanova, Tower Hamlets Socialist Party
The UK has been sinking further into an irreversible housing crisis. The average private rents increased 8.6% in the 12 months up to July 2024, according to the Office for National Statistics.
Rents are soaring at a faster rate than both inflation generally and wages, and have been the single biggest cost for tenants. Students are acutely affected, many are forced to work while studying full-time as we struggle to cover rent with insufficient maintenance loans.
Landlords get away with cranking up rents as high as they possibly can while renters are increasingly forced into homelessness and poverty. Crippled by Tory austerity, and with Starmer’s Labour making its austerity intentions clear, there is a desperate lack of safe and affordable housing and a drained welfare system that cannot manage the longest social housing waiting lists since 2014. The system is broken.
Starmer has firmly put the new Labour government on the side of big business, scrapping Corbyn’s plans for council house building and telling London Mayor Sadiq Khan that it has “no plans whatsoever” to give the go ahead for his limited rent control plans. The truth is, Labour councils, Mayors and other devolved administrations don’t have to wait for permission, they could do it now!
The Socialist Party calls for rent controls that cap the level of rent, democratically elected bodies of tenants, housing workers and trade unions to play a leading role in decision making, and the nationalisation of privately owned land banks, large building companies and estates to provide genuinely affordable and high quality, carbon-neutral council housing.
