Is council housing the cure?

Sitting in the meeting about housing at the convention today, I was struck by at how many issues can, in some way or another, be traced back to the lack of council houses. Economic crisis? It all comes back to sub-prime loans: loans that were made to people who couldn’t afford them but took them because council housing is now so difficult to get and villified. The rise of the British National Party? It’s because people can’t get council houses, and the BNP tells everyone who’ll listen that it’s because asylum seekers and immigrants have them all. Poor health? It’s tied to quality of housing. Can’t pay your bills? Private rents being sky-high doesn’t help. And then there’s homelessness, of course, which is directly linked to the issue of security of tenancy.

Shelter is, after all, one of the basic human needs: as important as food or water. Yet there are 1.6 million on council housing waiting lists in Britain, and that’s without counting the people currently housed in sub-standard ‘temporary’ accommodation. The need for council housing might be hidden from the comfortable middle class who populate that other conference ‘down the road’, but it is real, and it is desperate.

Chris Allen, the author of Housing Market Renewal and Social Class, attacked the government’s so-called ‘regeneration’ projects, pointing out that councils are concerned to attract capital and the ‘new middle class’ while forcing out the working class, because their ideology says that’s the way to improve the local economy. He ran through how compulsory purchase orders are used to demolish houses and pass valuable land to private developers for next to nothing, and did the sums on how ‘affordable’ an £100k house is on one development in Liverpool when more than half of the people who live in the area now have a household income of less than £10k.

‘Choice means choice if you have the money,’ he added. ‘This policy is punishing working class people.’

John Grayson, who wrote Opening the Window: the hidden history of tenants’ organisations, responded to Allen’s call for a mass movement to defend our homes by stressing that ‘housing policy didn’t just fall from the sky, it emerged from a struggle’. The government was only forced into building council houses to begin with after the Glasgow rent strikes of 1915, he pointed out, but ‘somehow this history has been forgotten’. He believes Thatcher’s greatest achievement was the stigmatisation of council tenants.

Audience members called for direct action to show how dire the need for housing really is: ‘There are unfilled and unsellable developments all over the city,’ said one, ‘we need to be squatting them, like the CP did in the 40s.’ (Sounds fun – anyone up for it?) Others called for campaigns for land taxes, curbs on buy-to-let landlords, and stronger tenants’ rights to make sure that no-one can be thrown out of their homes, whether their housing is public or private or even if they’ve defaulted on their mortgage.

One good example of a local campaign on housing issues was the Friends of Levenshulme, who have been successfully resisting privatisation in that part of Manchester for two years now. One Levenshulme campaigner who was feeling discouraged about the campaign was reassured by council workers in the room that the council is damn scared of them and that what they’re doing is working to hold back the tide of sell-offs. (And by the way – linking up activists with those ‘on the inside’ struck me as a real example of the kind of difference local left forums could make to these kinds of campaigns.)

On a national level, there was hope too. Lesley Carty from Defend Council Housing told us how they had built their campaign through the unions, gaining the support of around 250 MPs at one time or another, as well as winning a vote for ‘direct investment in council housing’ three years running at Labour’s conference (this year the rules were changed so they couldn’t win it again). The government is under huge pressure on the issue. ‘This is a campaign that we can win,’ she said.

The meeting came up with quite a concrete list of demands: housing is a right, security of tenancy for all, we need new publicly-built housing, we should tax land, and ‘regeneration’ must be for the people who already live here. The only question now is: how do we do it? But that was a question that, as it happened, would be quite ably answered in the evening.