At the start of this month, the bourgeois Holyrood government proved its contempt for the working class by withdrawing rent controls Scotland-wide.
The rent controls, introduced in 2022 as an emergency measure to counteract the (capitalist-created) cost of living crisis, previously protected tenants from capricious rent increases.
Now renters are entirely at the liberty of landlords’ greed, with expected rent hikes of more than 30 percent plunging millions of Scots into further uncertainty.
Already low earners can spend more than half of their income on rent, money which all goes straight into bourgeois pockets. Increased rent will force even more people into either lower quality housing, neglected and mouldy homes without proper insulation or heating, or outright homelessness.
Already, with rent controls, homelessness rose by 4 percent in 2024 and almost 120,000 households are on the social housing waiting list, with the total unrestriction of rent prices this number can only grow exponentially.
But why now? Has Holyrood solved the crisis of bourgeois greed which plunges the people into poverty and makes even the current level of rents unaffordable? NO. They hold only to bourgeois interests, allowing landlords and their whole parasitic class to reach further into the pockets of the working class.
A third of all Scots have no savings; all the value of their labour is leached away. All of society is closing in on the working class, stripping us of everything but our ability to work, forcing us to work longer hours, in worse conditions, for less pay in order to support ourselves and our families.
What is to be done? We must, as Marx says “grasp the root of the problem” which reveals that this rent crisis is only an inherent consequence of capitalist society. The oppressive state mechanisms will only ever act in the interest of the capitalist class.
Only through the complete removal of capitalism can we end the people’s oppression. An organised, revolutionary working class could rip out the roots of this foul capitalist system and plunge a stake into the heart of the vampiric landlords. Get organised, join the RCP!
Homes for speculators, waitlists for workers
Housing support worker, Leeds
I’m a housing support worker in Leeds, on the frontlines of the housing crisis.
Over 6,000 people are on ‘Band A’—the highest priority for social housing—yet they’ve been waiting more than five years for a home. Thousands more don’t even qualify as a ‘priority’ despite desperate need.
I saw a single mother, a school dinner lady with three kids, being evicted. She has nowhere to go. Private rents in the city have skyrocketed beyond her reach. She will become homeless.
I’ve met mothers with children placed in hotels by the council—hotels with no kitchen, no washing facilities. When their time is up, some are simply told they must sleep on the streets that night.
A young woman, a survivor of severe domestic abuse, escaped her abuser but now sofa-surfs in fear for her life. She works full-time as a carer but can’t afford rent while paying off debts her abuser racked up in her name.
Others, including women with children, are forced to stay with their abusers because they have nowhere else to go.
A single father, living in a one-bedroom flat with his three children, all under seven, has been waiting for a bigger home since 2023.
Retired people, evicted by landlords, can’t afford private rents. They remain homeless for years before they can access social housing.
This is Great Britain: homes for speculators, waitlists for workers.
The only solution is to take control out of the hands of landlords, billionaires, bankers, and politicians, and put it where it belongs: in the hands of the people.
Lies, damned lies, and lease holdings
Jo Bunkle, Cambridge
Housing associations across the country have been caught lying to buyers of so-called ‘affordable’ shared ownership properties by slapping on extortionate service charges (as high as 400 percent) after residents have already moved in!
This is leaving residents lumped with massive fees, such as one resident cited in a Guardian article, who was paying £95 per month when they moved into the flat in 2017, and will now be paying an eye watering £706 by the end of April!
Buyers are unable to simply sell their share of the ownership either, as these housing associations maintain the right of first refusal in a sale. Clearly they fear being able to fill vacant properties with fresh victims and would much rather continue to bleed dry their current occupants.
These rate rises are driven by the overall crisis of capitalism, not simply the greed of the housing associations, though we can be sure these ghouls are still getting their pound-sterling of flesh.
Rising insurance premiums and increased costs of building maintenance due to the inflationary crisis means housing associations are offloading their increased costs onto residents.
The government proposes a ban on leaseholds, and plans to replace them with ‘commonholds’. But all this would do is shift the responsibility of maintaining a property onto the residents under the guise of making it “easier for leaseholders to manage their own properties.”
Away with vampiric landlords and profit-driven housing associations! Nationalise construction companies and banks, and abolish for-profit housing.
Housing shouldn’t be left to the market – it should be controlled by the working class!
Massive increases in service charges for home owners and social housing tenants
Richard Davies, Coventry
Anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear are aware that there is a massive shortage of homes for people to rent or buy. When demand far outstrips supply, prices rise leading to building companies and landlords making huge profits.
In recent weeks the mass media has been awash with tales of homeowners facing massive increases in service charges as the property they have already bought falls under a leasehold system which is a feudal relic from the Middle Ages. The system means that if the property you bought is in a building or on land owned by a landlord, you have to pay an annual sum for the privilege of living in your own home.
Some 5 million properties are affected by the system with 70% of them being flats. There are no legal controls over the amount that landlords can charge you for services rendered or for maintenance. Between 2023 and 2024 the average increase in charges was 11% but many leaseholders have faced and are facing increases amounting to £1000s each year.
However, it is not only private owner occupiers who face these increases. Social housing tenants too are being hit with astronomical increases being imposed on them by social housing landlords along with the imposition of new tenancy agreements that severely restrict the democratic rights of tenants to free speech.
Tenants in Nauls Mill House in Coventry, a social housing tower block managed by Citizen Housing, are facing a service charge increase this year of up to 183%.
At the moment, service charges for most tenants are around £12.12 per week for 48 weeks of the year but will rise to £28.53 over 52 weeks. In real terms that will mean a yearly increase of £901 per year for the same services even before the new rent rises in April, a rise of 155%. Average costs for living in your rented social housing flat have increased by more than 25% over two years.
Citizen Housing claims that the present income from service charges does not cover costs. And its contempt for tenants on benefits is exemplified by Citizen’s claim that the increases will be paid for by the local authority or the DWP.
Tenants have seen, however, that eight service charges, which had previously been paid for out of rental income, have simply been added to the six service charges that were being paid for out of services income. One of the new additions is that tenants now have to pay separately for repairs to the lift in a 16-storey block!
Tenants believe that Citizen are using the pretext of a standardisation of Tenancy Agreements to overcome legal restrictions on rent increases. In social housing, rent rises in April of each year are limited to the CPI figure the previous September plus 1%. However, there are no legal restrictions on service charge increases! So Citizen’s tactic is simple – transfer most service charges from rental income to service charge income and you can increase charges by any amount that Citizen sees fit.
This is not the only battle that Citizen Housing tenants face. The newly imposed Tenancy Agreement contains clauses that remove the democratic rights of tenants. One clause states that tenants can live in their flat without interference so long as they abide by the conditions in the Agreement.
One of those conditions is that tenants must not share information publicly about what Citizen is doing. Another condition removes the right of tenants to go to a Tribunal if they think that the increases are not reasonable. And a further condition removes the rights of tenants to access Sections 13 and 14 of the 1988 Housing Act.
Any violation of these conditions could result in tenants being evicted.
It comes as no surprise that almost half of the tenants are fighting back enlisting the help of the Labour MP for Coventry NW, Taiwo Owatemi, and the three councillors for Sherbourne Ward where the tower block is situated.
Up to now the fight has been restricted to lodging individual complaints with Citizen and publicising the issue with the local paper, the Coventry Telegraph, and the regional BBC, as well as trying to obtain pro bono legal advice.
From what Citizen is imposing, you might think that it has a financial problem. This is far from the case. Last October and November, more than 200 skilled workers in Citizen took 7 days of strike action over a derisory 4% pay offer. By early December they had won an improved offer, gaining a 4.5% increase plus a one-off payment of £500.
During the course of the strike, Unite the Union revealed that the annual salary of Citizen’s Chief Executive, Kevin Rodgers, increased by 6% rising from £264,000 in 2023 to £280,000 in 2024, well above the national average of £193,000 for housing association chiefs. The Chief Financial Officer, Gary Booth, was also earning more than the average with a salary in excess of £200,000. No wonder the striking workers on picket lines held up placards about fat cat bosses.
During the strike it was also revealed by Unite the Union that in the financial year 2023/24, Citizen’s turnover was £192.6m and its operating surplus was £48.3m.
Citizen is not a small housing association. It has around 30,000 properties in Coventry, Birmingham, Hereford and Worcester. Being so big it also has financial clout and access to the best legal advice.
The tenants taking on this powerful giant are like little Davids in the biblical fable. Yet the determination to win is very strong.
This small example illustrates the crisis in social housing in terms of access and costs. In Coventry, social housing was once owned and managed by the city council. However, back in 2000 tenants voted to transfer the housing stock to Whitefriars due to dissatisfaction with the local council’s management of the stock. Whitefriars then merged with others to become Midlands Housing and then further mergers produced this out-of-touch conglomerate Citizen Housing.
What was lost in this process of mergers? Under Whitefriars there were elected tenant representatives as well as local councillors on the management board. Since then the processes of mergers have abolished any vestige of democratic oversight. Tenant voices in Citizen are now appointed by Citizen’s management! We should not forget that one of the main conclusions arising from the Grenfell Enquiry is the absence of a tenants’ voice.
The bigger the organisation has become, the more out of touch it is. There is no mechanism for oversight, no accountability, no transparency.
Housing Associations like Citizen are unaccountable private corporations and are therefore exempt from the Freedom of Information Act.
What are the solutions?
Citizen claims that its income is less than expenditure yet where and how the income is spent is hidden behind closed doors. The only answer is to demand that Citizen opens the books to trade union and tenant inspection.
If it is shown that the figures don’t add up, then Citizen management are incapable of doing their job. The demand should be that social housing stock should be taken out of the hands of fat-cat bosses and private corporations and placed into the hands of local authorities.
The stock should be managed by elected committees of tenants, trade unions and local authority elected councillors. Individuals in management should not be paid more than the average salary that a worker receives, which is at this moment around £35,000 pa.
Social housing should be used to meet the needs of the homeless, of those on low incomes. It should not be a vehicle to pay bloated salaries for people whose last concern is for tenants.
While housing as a whole remains in private hands with a continued shortage of building new homes, home owners and social housing tenants will face ever increasing costs for the basic human need of a place to live.
This can only be overcome by taking into public hands the building companies, land, necessary resources and financial institutions to realise a massive democratically-planned programme of home building to rid society of the plight of homelessness and high prices for homes. Only when supply is greater than demand will prices fall.
