Helen Pattison, Socialist Party London Regional Secretary
The current housing crisis is dire. 300,000 people are homeless and over a million families live in overcrowded homes. And that is just the tip of the iceberg. Almost all working-class people have their own housing horror stories, or have friends and family who do.
Nick Bano’s book ‘Against Landlords: How to solve the housing crisis?’ is full of hard-hitting statistics, detailing how British capitalism’s dependence on property wealth has devastating consequences for millions of working- and middle-class people.
Even for people who have homes which on paper they can afford, there are huge issues with housing being run down, mouldy, or just not fit for purpose. Over 2 million people live in homes with significant damp.
Two-year-old Awaab Ishak tragically died in 2020, from respiratory illness due to mould in his home – his family were living in social housing. There is a huge number of stories of families facing the crisis of being made homeless.
When people are looking for affordable places to rent, competition is fierce, with queues around the block of people waiting for viewings. The ever-increasing rent leaves people having to cut back in other vital areas. Potential tenants are ripped off with agents fees, and deposits, making the whole renting process more expensive and stressful.
Students
Students too face a similar crisis. The number of students has been growing, demand for purpose-built student accommodation has risen by 20%, quicker than it is being built.
In London for example, student housing costs 150% of the maximum student maintenance loan. So students are broke before they even start. The University of the West of England made headlines after it ‘built’ tiny temporary homes for its students. These were actually shipping containers. Students described them as “unfit for human habitation”.
The housing crisis doesn’t only impact physical health, but people’s mental health too. One study found that 1 in 3 renters felt it was impacting their mental health.
And while some big cities and commuter towns can feel like never-ending building sites, the crisis continues. Hundreds of thousands still struggle to find an affordable, decent-quality home.
One thing is certain. It is not the supply of land for housing that is the problem. Planning permission exists for 1 million new homes, but the small number of dominant big housebuilding companies prefer not to build on it. They control the supply of homes to keep prices up and await the chance to build on green (or grey) field sites rather than disused inner-city land, which can be expensive to build on. The government has swallowed the lies from big building companies, that new homes are being delayed simply by council planning departments.
House prices have increased by around 500% in the last 50 years and continue to grow. Today, more than half the country’s net worth is made up of land value.
More recently in particular, wages have been largely been stagnant in real terms. UK workers are around £11,000 worse off a year today than had wages risen at their pre-2008 rate.
While house prices and rents have risen, there has been a concerted attack on the provision of council housing, attacks on rent controls and the cutting back of tenants’ rights. Rent controls existed up until the late 1980s, tenants’ rights have been whittled away since with the aim of making housing and land more attractive for capitalist investors.
Today, even where limited protections still exist for tenants, the existence of Section 21 ‘no-fault eviction’ notices means that tenants are often scared to demand landlords make repairs. The constant movement of tenants and renewal of tenancies provides an ideal climate for forcing up rents.
Housing has always been commodified, often of poor quality, with huge sections of the population living in difficult conditions. But fear of growing working-class anger and organisation, has meant that throughout history, huge concessions on housing have also been won.
In 1919, in the wake of the Russian revolution, King George V said: “If unrest is to be converted into contentment, the provision of good houses may prove one of the most potent agents in that conversion”.
Against Landlords tracks the political shift over decades from the period when both Tory and Labour had programmes which supported rent controls and defended tenants’ rights, to the situation today which Bano describes as an era where big businesses attempting to speculate on housing “no longer have anything to fear from a government of either stripe”.
Bano fails to analyse the context in which this change took place. It included the end of the unprecedented capitalist boom in the aftermath of the World War Two, the attacks on social reforms and working-class organisation that followed, and the ideological setback internationally with the fall of the Stalinist planned economies of the Soviet bloc.
It was against this backdrop that capitalist politicians privatised, and sold of huge sections of industry and council housing.
According to Bano, one-third of Britain’s private rent bill is paid by the Department for Work and Pensions, in the form of housing benefit or housing portion of Universal Credit. It totals over £23 billion in 2022, meaning more is spent on subsidising rents than on whole number of government departments.
During the period of austerity since the 2008-09 banking crisis, increasingly huge sums have passed straight from the government, through the hands of tenants and into the bank balances of private landlords, and a portion of that to mortgage-lending banks.
There has also been a whole period where local authority ‘Housing Allowances’, which determine the level of housing benefit, have not kept up with rents.
Landlords
During the pandemic, as ministers saw that millions could default on their rents, the government took action and Universal Credit recipients were given a small weekly uplift of £20. But as Bano explains, because of short-term tenancies, and the weakness of tenants’ rights, as soon as landlords saw there was more money to be made, they simply increased the rents.
Bano looks at past struggles, such as the 1915 Glasgow rent strikes, as proof that working-class organisation can force huge concessions and win tenants’ rights. What’s missing from Bano’s analysis though, is that growing working-class confidence to fight on issues like housing didn’t happen in isolation. Glasgow rent strikes were just one feature of the whole period of ‘Red Clydeside’ – years of heightened industrial struggle and increasing working-class confidence from 1911-19 (see ‘Lessons of Red Clydeside 1911-1919: Workers’ potential power on display’ at socialistparty.org.uk)
Strikes were at a 30-year high in 2023 – low compared to levels of the 1970s and 80s, but capitalism has been in crisis for over 15 years. Living and working conditions continue to fall, and even bigger working-class battles are on the horizon. This will give confidence to communities to fight on all kinds of social issues too, including against the housing crisis.
Bano is dismissive of rent strikes, as being difficult to organise and with potentially the risk of tenants losing their homes. He explains how even the limited protections around industrial action do not exist for rent strikes. There are also other differences between organising in the workplace against a single employer and as tenants against any number of landlords.
Tenants today pay their rent to as many as 2.5 million different landlords, an increase of 2 million in the last 30 years. On the backdrop of cuts to pensions, care and provision, many will have taken on a buy-to-let property as a contingency for the future. Others have become landlords by accident, as an elderly relative dies. Fighting to ensure no-one lives in poverty in their old age means fighting to fully fund social care, free at the point of use, and increasing state pension provision.
Tenants fighting back
Tenants can and are organising to fight back, for example the many ‘service charge strikes’ that have taken place against unscrupulous housing associations, in many cases with the involvement of the Social Housing Action Campaign (SHAC).
It is tenants being organised collectively that is the most important factor, above the specific tactics that are pursued.
On paper, Butterfields tenants in east London in 2016 had limited legal rights when their landlord chose to sell up, and the new buyer wanted to evict the families and massively increase rents. But by organising with the local community and using the tactic of refusing to leave their homes, they were able to win and remain in their homes.
Council housing has been so underfunded for decades, with thousands-long waiting lists, that many feel that council housing, with decent tenancies and security, is out of reach.
Housing associations are increasingly pushed to act like any other private landlord or business, run for profit. To be useful in protecting tenants’ interests, instead of their hedge fund and big-business owners, they must be brought under the democratic control of tenants’ groups and trade unions.
To give tenants the real ability to choose how their homes and communities are run, means fighting to transform the housing landscape against the interests of profit, through democratic public ownership of housing.
This would give tenants’ groups the ability to decide whether their housing should be organised under the local authority, as council housing, or through co-op structures. Either way, the building of tenants’ committees to give all tenants a democratic voice is needed.
Given the state of the rental market, it’s no wonder people aspire to homeownership as a route out of this mess. But with high mortgage rates, large deposits and low wages, homeownership is increasingly out of reach for working-class people.
Bano believes that mainstream politicians have aimed their policies at homeowners and those who want to own their homes in the future with policies like the failed ‘help to buy’ scheme.
Many people will hope that, even if they are struggling today to find housing, at some point there will be a transfer of wealth from an older generation who own their homes to their children. But even that is increasingly unlikely with attacks on social care provision and cuts to pensions.
Empty homes are also a part of the picture, particularly in the short term. The Socialist Party raised how, in the aftermath of the tragedy of the Grenfell fire in 2015, the movement could organise to requisition empty homes to house homeless families. As leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn raised this possibility at the time.
There are an estimated 500,000 empty homes in Britain. Councils could act to bring these into council ownership to alleviate the housing crisis.
That said, this alone will not fix the totally unplanned nature of the housing market currently run in the interests of profit. A long-term plan is needed to build environmentally friendly homes, which are cheap to run, under tenants’ democratic control and publicly owned.
Where building has taken place, it doesn’t mean this helps relieve the crisis. These companies build with the aim of making profit, not meeting the genuine housing needs of people in the area. Too often we read about ‘rabbit hutches in the sky’ as another ‘monster block’ is planned.
Profit-driven developers will not solve the crisis. The large building companies and land should be nationalised so that a plan can be drawn up to build good-standard council homes, in the variety of sizes and with any extra accommodations that people need. Nationalised banks under the democratic control and management of the working class could provide finance and cheap mortgages.
Where rental homes are of poor quality and the landlords are unable or unwilling to bring them up to scratch, councils should take over those homes, with compensation paid only where there is proven need, to ensure that small landlords and tenants’ needs are both met.
Bano concludes his book: “By methods as prosaic as law reform, we can work towards de-commodifying housing, and drive landlords and house-price speculators from the face of the earth.”
Legal reforms of the past have been won through struggle, explicitly on the issue of housing as well as a product of wider working-class struggle.
The push-back on tenants’ rights coincided with the pushing back of working-class political organisation. Part of that has been the capitalist class wholeheartedly gaining control of the Labour Party.
To fight to improve housing rights means also fighting for a political voice that can represent the interests of all working-class people. Bano says: “A timid Labour Party in office or opposition is a dangerous thing”, but today’s Labour Party isn’t timid. It is unashamedly acting in the interests of big business and the rich.
Clearly building a new mass workers’ party to challenge the many different capitalist interests that dominate the housing sector – corporations, building giants, banks, (even John Lewis is trying to get in on the building game according to Bano’s book), – is an important part of the struggle to end the housing crisis.
Bano says it is possible to end the housing crisis on a capitalist basis – by leaving the banks, big housebuilders and big business in the hands of a small number of super-rich capitalists.
To ‘solve the housing crisis’ means taking on those profit interests. It means getting organised, in our workplaces and local communities, and fighting for a socialist programme.
