By Pete Firmin

Like most other things in Britain, after decades of neoliberalism and austerity, the housing crisis just gets worse, with no real attempt to resolve it by the government.

Government figures (probably an underestimate) for June 2022 say 72,210 households were homeless and a further 33,570 were threatened with homelessness, both figures an increase on a year before.

A recent report said that homelessness may have been a contributing factor in at least 34 children’s deaths in England between April 2019 and March 2022.

And that is only the tip of the iceberg. Those fortunate to have housing use a ridiculous proportion of their income on housing costs – be it mortgage or rent – and are often at risk from overcrowding, flammable cladding, mould and other risks to their health.

It takes a disaster on the scale of Grenfell or the death of two-year-old Awaab Ishak due to chronic exposure to mould for the government to even acknowledge the problems, let alone seriously tackle them. Remember when the Tories voted against a proposal to make all homes fit for human habitation?

`Solutions’ which they have come up with over the years – and often ditched shortly after – have done little or nothing to deal with the housing crisis.

Their starting point is that everyone wants/needs to get on the `housing ladder’, disregarding the fact that, whether they want to or not, the people most in need of housing can’t afford to do so. And even with schemes like `Help to Buy’ – which, incidentally, pushed up house prices – deposits are out of reach of many who do want to buy.

Those who do buy, find themselves paying a huge proportion of their income, and that’s before the effects of Truss and Kwarteng’s minibudget.

Much of the new housing that is being built doesn’t even address the housing crisis. It is built not for those who desperately need housing which doesn’t absorb a huge proportion of their earnings, but for those who can either afford a massive deposit and mortgage payments, or extortionate rents often in shoebox-sized flats.

And then, of course, there are the vast number of empty properties and luxury mansions. Not a week goes by without a report of some multi-bedroomed property going for £18+ million.

Councils have been prevented for decades from building new council housing by both cuts in central government funding to local authorities and rules about how they can spend income from council house rents. Even when council housing is built, it is likely to disappear into private hands because of the Right to Buy legislation brought in by Thatcher and which Labour governments have refused to repeal. Some councils have created special arms-length ‘vehicles’ to build housing, but in several cases these have gone bust with little housing built.

Other councils resort to regeneration schemes, usually involving the destruction of existing – often perfectly sound – council housing and replacement by schemes involving no greater proportion of social housing than existed in the first place, but additional private housing beyond the reach of those in the greatest need. In these regeneration schemes, justified by councils as the only way they can build new housing, property developers have councils over a barrel, insisting that only a smaller proportion of social housing is financially viable than initially agreed.

Meanwhile, most Housing Associations are large corporations paying their CEOs obscene amounts and hardly justifying the term social housing, given their efforts to move away from anything which could reasonably cover the term.

Words like affordable have become meaningless and housing for ‘key workers’ includes architects and planners but not nurses and refuse workers.

Worst of all is the private rented sector, where landlords feel they can charge as much as they want for tiny flats, often in bad condition, with little comeback. Council licensing schemes, welcome as they are, have little impact on this.

To add to the misery, rents and evictions are increasing. Organisations such as Acorn and Renters Unions are helping to fight evictions, but changes to the law are necessary.

Come to the LRC meeting to discuss with two housing activists how socialists address these issues. https://bit.ly/lrchousing

Pete Firmin is a council tenant and member of the Labour Representation Committee