The Metropolis

Rent is too damn high, regardless of how Snipe tries to spin it

Josh Hall | Friday 20 January, 2012 14:00

Earlier this week Dave Hill wrote in the Guardian about Lucy Glennon, a Londoner who may lose her home as a result of Conservative-Liberal cuts to housing benefit.

The 26-year old, who suffers from a genetic disease that causes her near-constant pain, lives in a two-bedroom flat near the Euston Road. The location makes it relatively easy for her to get to St Thomas’s Hospital, which provides specialist care for the illness from which she suffers. She needs the second bedroom for her carer, who visits twice a day and who stays overnight when Glennon’s illness is at its most acute.

Glennon stands to lose £60 of her £350 a week housing benefit, thanks to the new cap that will be introduced in March. She is also likely to lose the mobility component of her Disability Living Allowance – despite the fact that she has difficulty walking. Her illness makes full-time work impossible; she can’t leave the house alone.

On Monday, Snipe’s Metropolis editor Mike Pollitt duly expressed the socially necessary minimum amount of concern for Glennon, before agreeing with the government’s decision that she should be kicked out of her home.

Pollitt said he didn’t disagree with Hill’s suggestion that the loss of a chronically ill individual’s home was “a hard price to pay” – before going on to say, “nor do I agree that the government should be using £350 per week, £18,200 per year, of public money to house someone.” The price is a tough one, then, but it is one that Pollitt is perfectly willing for Glennon to bear.

He is right, of course, on one count: £18,200 is too much for anyone to pay to rent a two-bedroom flat off the Euston Road. The capital is in the midst of a rent crisis; a crisis that will become one of the primary factors shaping the lives of Londoners in the coming years. Affordable housing in the private rented sector is virtually impossible to come by. It will be a thing of the past in council housing, too, once local authorities begin charging 80 per cent of the market rate.

Yes, £18,200 is too much. But the logic that says it is people like Glennon who should foot the bill, people with specific needs but without the ability to pay to have them met, is no logic at all. It is classic ‘whatabboutery’. “Yes,” the argument goes, “I know it’s bad that those with the least should suffer the most. But what about that rent! That’s more than I earn in a year!”

Pollitt is right: we should be talking about rent. Prices are rising, tenants’ rights are being eroded, and landlords are becoming ever more brazen in their exploitation. We need strict rent controls, a complete rebalancing of the tenant-landlord relationship, and a city-wide programme of conversion to turn London’s empty buildings into decent, affordable accommodation.

Pollitt is looking at the wrong side of the equation. He should be calling on the government to restrict landlords’ ability to set prices that high, not cheering the misery of thousands of Londoners who will be forced out of their homes. By focusing on the amount Glennon ‘costs’ the public purse, he provides cover for a government that intends for the economic and social burden to be shouldered by those who are least equipped to bear it.

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