Isai Marijerla, Socialist Party executive committee
Everywhere you go, you hear stories of how we are struggling to find decent, ‘affordable’, comfortable homes that we can live in without being forced to move again and again because of rent hikes and short-term contracts.
Young people are often forced either to live with their parents, couch surf or move too frequently to build a stable life. The hope of a permanent home is shattered for many young and working-class families.
Even if you are one of the ‘lucky’ few that have managed to get a mortgage, the increase in interest rates and inflation means your costs are going up. This is before you take into account the increasing cost of bills and food.
More than 1.28 million households in England are currently stuck on council waiting lists for a social home, according to charity Crisis. In some London boroughs, at current rates the waiting list for social-rented homes would take over a century to clear. More than 130,000 households are trapped in temporary accommodation. In the past ten years, 177,487 social homes have been lost from demolitions and sales.
We need council homes – high quality, genuinely affordable, low cost and secure – and enough of them for those who want them.
But instead of building more, the government is selling more. More than eight times as many council homes are due to be sold off this year than were constructed last year. In other words, council housing stock is decreasing at a fast rate. This pushes more people into extortionate private rents with less secure tenancies.
We can’t trust Labour
Based on their record over the last year, we don’t trust the Labour government to provide us with the homes that we need. Earlier this month, homelessness minister Rushanara Ali was forced to resign after the humiliating revelation that she evicted tenants living in a house she rented, then put it back on the market having increased the rent from £3,300 a month to nearly £4,000. No wonder there is a growing anger against Labour.
There are more than a million empty properties in England, over a quarter of a million of which have had no one living there for six months or more.
Councils up and down the country should take over these empty properties, as a start to provide housing for all those in urgent housing need. Councils already have the power to do this, it’s a political choice that they are not.
Councils should then use their borrowing powers and reserves to start a mass council house building programme and build a campaign to demand the money to do so from Starmer’s Labour government.
Rent increasingly unaffordable
Alex Sampson, Plymouth Socialist Party
The cost of renting in almost every part of the UK is increasingly unaffordable for the average worker. Office for National Statistics (ONS) figures show that approximately 36% of median salary being spent on rent (with this proportion rising to over 40% in London and large parts of the south-east, Bath, Bristol and Somerset). The ONS considers 30% of salary to be the affordability threshold for rented accommodation.
These figures are even more alarming when we take into account that the ‘median salary’ in the UK is over £37,000 – a figure that minimum-wage workers could only dream of. The hard fact, according to homelessness charity Shelter, is that many low-income tenants are actually spending two-thirds of their income on rent.
Meanwhile, it has been reported that the Labour government is considering taxing landlords’ income – a cost that, without rent controls, would no doubt be passed onto already struggling renters in further rent hikes, rather than private landlords risking their ‘passive income’.
MPs on another planet
The housing situation in Britain is in severe crisis and MPs, one in eight of whom have declared income from rental properties in the last year, have little personal incentive to fix it. MPs on £95,000 a year with expenses paid and second homes have no idea how much low-paid workers are struggling to keep a roof over their heads, while still paying increasing bills. Food is becoming an afterthought for far too many households in the sixth-richest nation.
We don’t need more private landlords growing fat on the hard-earned wages of the working class; we need safe, secure, permanent housing for everyone. We need rent caps and we need a government that will commit to a mass council house building project so no family will ever fear being tossed onto the street at a landlord’s whim. We need a socialist alternative to the broken system that generations of capitalist Tory and Labour governments have created and ignored.
