By Pat Turnbull

Speaking at a recent webinar, John Hendy KC outlined how from 1945 into the 1970s, working-class incomes slowly increased along with the share of gross domestic product paid in wages. At the same time the share of GDP which went to profits decreased. Capitalism decided enough was enough and reversed the process. The price of labour must be driven down, and profits driven up. The attack on trade unions was intended to weaken working class resistance to the process (1).

Along with the direct attack on workers’ wages came the attack on the social wage, and as part of that, the attack on housing. Whereas in the period after 1945 building public housing with government funding was prioritised, from 1979 onwards the stock of public housing was eroded in all kinds of ways, and housing for profit took centre stage. The promotion of the Right to Buy council homes, the deliberate failure to replace them with new council stock, the transfer of council estates to housing associations, the starvation of funding for building and maintaining council and housing association social rented homes – these all mean that the capitalist market dominates the supply of housing, and that there is a crisis of provision of secure housing at rents people can afford. The figures speak for themselves – take England: in 1979, 31% of households lived in social rented accommodation, at the time almost entirely council housing; in 2018/19 it was only 17% (2).

SUBSTANDARD CONDITIONS

Housing hit the headlines in 2022 when a Rochdale coroner decided that little two-year-old Awaab Ishak had died in 2020 due to a severe respiratory condition caused by untreated mould whilst living in a social housing property. But the problem is much wider than Rochdale. In 2020, 11% of homes in the social rented sector failed to meet the Decent Homes Standard (3). Investment in repairs of social housing stock is 33% below target (4).  At the same time the cost of repairs and maintenance works has increased well beyond inflation levels, and VAT on retrofitting and refurbishing is currently 20% whilst there is no VAT on new builds.

The issue of damp and mould in private rented accommodation, which more and more people are forced into, has received less publicity. The English Housing Survey found that 11% of private rented homes had a damp problem, compared with 2% of owner-occupied homes and 4% of social rented homes. The charity Generation Rent is calling on the government to extend ‘Awaab’s Law’, which would set strict timescales for social landlords to respond to complaints about damp and mould, to private landlords. Private tenants are discouraged from reporting problems with their homes by Section 21 so-called ‘no fault’ eviction, which means they can lose their home with little notice for no stated reason. So the 1,106 private rented homes found in 2021-22 by councils in England to have levels of damp and mould so dangerous that they present an immediate threat to health and safety is likely to be the tip of the iceberg.  Nevertheless, Generation Rent found that while 81 councils identified a total of 9,033 Category 1 hazards, they issued just 2,179 improvement notices. (5)

LACK OF SOCIAL HOUSING

Housing charity Shelter reports that in England over a million households are waiting for social rented homes, while last year 29,000 social homes were sold or demolished and fewer than 7,000 were built. Since 1980, millions of households have been pushed into the poorly regulated, expensive, insecure private rented sector which has more than doubled in this time. The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government reports that since 1991 there has been an average annual net loss of 24,000 social homes. The results: in 2019-20 40,000 households were homeless, and in 2020 95,000 households were in temporary accommodation. According to the English Housing Survey, since 2000 the percentage of tenants in overcrowded homes increased from 4.5 to 7.6. In 2000, homes for sale cost four times the average salary: by 2021 this had increased to eight times. In the 1960s three million homes were built in England. Since 2010 it has been just 1.3 million. So this scarce product has become ever more expensive (6).

Temporary accommodation is often far from temporary and causes families great hardship.  A study by Shelter shows a 67% rise in the numbers in temporary accommodation over the past ten years, and that this affects more than 125,000 children. Over a third of children have missed more than a month of school after being placed in temporary accommodation.  The cost of temporary accommodation has also spiralled, hitting £1.6 billion last year, a rise of 61% in five years, with this money going into the pockets of private landlords. Of the families in temporary accommodation 68% spend more than a year in this temporary housing. They are often shuffled between properties with short notice, in poor quality temporary flats, hostels, bedsits and hotel rooms which lack basic cooking and laundry facilities (7).

Shelter Scotland reports a similar situation. In December 2022 Deputy First Minister John Swinney announced a 16% reduction in the budget to deliver social homes, but open homelessness cases increased by over 10% in the six months between March and September 2022. As of September 2022 there were 9,130 children living in temporary accommodation, the highest number on record which represented an increase of 120% during Nicola Sturgeon’s time as First Minister (8).

Flying in the face of the disastrous situation, the UK government’s Spring Budget 2023 maintained the freeze on housing benefit despite rising rents, and offered no investment in new social rented housing or in maintaining existing social rented homes. Following the forty-year trend of transferring funds from the people to the profiteers, the government will spend £9 billion a year on 100% tax relief on corporate investments.

PUBLIC SECTOR STARVED OF FUNDS 

The case of Awaab Ishak, the little boy who died on 21st December 2020 as a result of a severe respiratory condition, turned the spotlight on housing in his home town of Rochdale, a former mill town, one of the de-industrialised towns of the north.  Awaab’s father had been complaining about the mould in the one-bedroom flat since 2017. The coroner reported that his home had ‘inadequate ventilation and was not equipped for normal day-to-day activities which led to excess damp and condensation.’ In December 2020 a surveyor described the conditions at his home as ‘unfit for human habitation’. (9)

Rochdale Boroughwide Housing (RBH), the landlord of the property, has more than 12,000 properties across Rochdale, all former council housing. RBH became fully independent of Rochdale Council in 2012. In a statement issued in August 2022, an RBH spokesperson said: ‘Historic under-investment in housing by successive governments, coupled with age and type of much of the UK’s housing, has contributed to the multi-faceted housing crisis the UK faces today. Housing associations and councils across the UK face specific challenges around the type and quality of their homes, their ability to meet current and future housing needs, the need to rise to the climate emergency as well as building much needed affordable new homes’. Unfortunately the government has failed to rise to the challenge. Former housing secretary Robert Jenrick, speaking in July 2021 to ITV’s Daniel Hewitt said, ‘This is about neglect. This is about a lack of compassion and poor management in a small number of councils and housing associations.’ (10)

No, Mr Jenrick, it’s about a deliberate policy of successive governments to starve the public housing sector of finance and promote the growth of the private housing sector where the big profits are to be made. Awaab Ishak is one of the victim

(1) Hard Up? Who is to Blame? The Economic Consequences of the Anti-Union Laws. Webinar 27/3/23. Campaign for Trade Union Freedom, Socialist Economic Bulletin.

(2)The Better Social Housing Review, National Housing Federation and Chartered Institute of Housing. December 2022.

(3) Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, July 2022, English Housing Survey: Social rented sector 2020-21.

(4) Inside Housing, 6/9/22: RSH quarterly survey: inflation and labour shortages bring repairs investment 33% below target.

(5) Generation Rent, 14/3/23, Will Barber Taylor

(6) Social Housing deficit – Shelter England.

(7) Families in temporary housing harmed by hit to schooling, study finds. The Guardian, Patrick Butler 9/3/23.

(8) Next First Minister being ‘set up to fail’ on homelessness, says Shelter Scotland, Scottish Housing News 21/2/23.

(9) Manchester Evening News

 

Black mould photo by Tony Webster