The Metropolis

Housing is the next political battlefield, with council tenants and private renters at risk

Josh Hall | Thursday 17 November, 2011 15:32

The provision of so-called affordable housing has stuck in the Tory craw for many years. The idea that society might provide decent accommodation such that those on low incomes are not left to the mercy of predatory private sector landlords is, of course, anathema to a government of landowners.

But the scale of the attack mounted by this government on council housing is enough to elicit gasps. As a result of the Localism Bill, which was rushed through Parliament earlier this year and which is now waiting for royal assent, security of tenure for council tenants will be scrapped – a move that MP John McDonnell this week said “ends council housing as we know it.”

Council housing will only be provided to those who are in the most acute need. In practice this means the precarity that characterises employment in post-Fordist capitalism will now be extended into the home, with council tenants expected to live in a constant state of instability. Austin Mitchell, another MP on the Commons Council Housing Group, has said that council properties will be little more than “transit camps”; staging posts through which tenants flow, unable to put down roots or foster any meaningful sense of community. This is, of course, a crucial element of a more general trend towards social atomisation and the destruction of basic societal bonds.

The Localism Act also provides for wholesale increases in council rents. The government wants tenants to pay 80 per cent of the market rate – while simultaneously instituting unprecedented cuts to housing benefit. The result, as even Boris Johnson has recognised, will be the drowning of thousands of tenants in a sea of rent arrears, their eventual eviction, and a step change in the relentless jackbooted march of gentrification. The poor will be pushed further and further out of London; families will have no choice but to leave the areas they have lived in for decades. They will be cleansed from the city, forced ever further out until they are but the faintest speck on the horizon of a pure, unsullied field of middle class indifference. Such is the Conservative-Liberal project.

Except, of course, the middle class is hurting too. Average real-terms earnings are 8 per cent lower today than they were in February 2008. That’s 8 per cent lower. Meanwhile energy costs are up 18.3 per cent on the year, transport costs are up 12.8 per cent, and food is up about 6 per cent. Unemployment is heading for 3 million. You don’t need to be Nouriel Roubini to see that something ugly this way comes.

Private tenants need to recognise that the fight for secure housing is their fight too. In many London boroughs the private rented sector has already mopped up the majority of the accommodation. Private tenants need to get organised on the same sorts of lines as some of the more militant council residents’ associations, or the squatting movement, in recognition of the fact that spiralling rents, pernicious landlords and, eventually, evictions, will become ever more prevalent in the private sector in the coming months.

Defend Council Housing will be hosting a meeting on 10 December at Camden Town Hall to flesh out the next steps in the fight for secure housing – for council tenants, for private tenants, and for squatters. I would urge everyone to attend.

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