Journalists usually refer to August as the silly season. It
is in that context that we have the latest madcap idea to come from the Con-Dem
coalition. According to plans leaked by the Guardian newspaper, council housing
tenancies will no longer be ‘for life.’
The idea is to let people have a council property only for a
limited time, say five years, after which they will be "re-assessed" and if they
are considered to be too “well-off” – and you can guess what that will mean –
they will be booted out and told to get accommodation in the private sector. In
addition families who are considered, due to changing circumstances, to be
"under-occupying" a property may be forced to shift to a smaller one so that a
larger family can have it instead.
The idea is to help increase social mobility. The reality is
to make council housing as unattractive as possible. In the 1980s Thatcher
introduced the Right to Buy scam in which council house dwellers would be
invited at a heavily subsidized rate to buy their own council house thereby
becoming a property owner and, we were told, more responsible members of the
community. That turned out to be total twaddle and is no longer being
mentioned. Instead we will now see stable families, who in the past would have
formed part of the bedrock of local communities, being pressured out of the
estates, which in turn will become in effect giant dosshouses. The only people
left will be those at the bottom end of the income scale, a transitory
population without roots or hope. Council estates will become more rundown,
starved of funding and support, increasingly just a dumping ground for the
unemployed and the most vulnerable. Drugs and crime will become the defining
tone of these potential hellholes.
For those who are “invited” to enjoy the benefits of the
private sector, things will not be much better. Slum landlords will have a good
time of it as, with housing benefit being slashed, they will be the only ones
offering accommodation – however shabby – at prices which working people can afford.
The
reality is that, yet again, the problem of the severe shortage of social
housing is not being addressed. To believe that the private sector can solve
the issue is sheer fantasy. Only by a concerted programme of mass council house
building can the housing crisis in this country be resolved. But this is not
possible from capitalism, which looks only for profit. Land and the housing construction
industry needs to be nationalised and put to work in the service of communities
as part of a socialist plan of production. There are enough builders and
plumbers and electricians around and enough people needing quality affordable
housing – both supply and demand! – yet big business can’t do the job. That is
why we need socialism.
