The Housing Act: The Tories go to market
The market leaves thousands in sub-standards hostels. THE TORIES plan to do away with council housing. The timescale is ten years and there are still four and a half million council homes left to go. The successful right to buy' policy of Thatcher's first term has already put them a fifth of the way there; but it is running out of steam.
The Housing Act which will become law next month aims to take the Tories nearer their goal by establishing a free market in rented housing. The mechanisms for doing this contained in the Act are four fold:
• decontrolling rents to produce 'market rents'
• creating new, less secure tenancies.
• imposing Housing Action Trusts (HATs) which will compulsorily purchase certain estates, do them up, and sell them off to private landlords.
• catalysing the privatisation of estates (the misnamed 'tenants' choice proposal) by a combination of undemocratic procedures, squeezing council spending options and tax enticements to
UP. D prospective landlords.
In sum, the act is a developer's charter. But it is not without contradictions. While the Tories will certainly be able to continue undermining local authority housing by forcing changes in its financing which will cause rents to double, it is not clear yet whether developers will risk capital on a large scale on buying council estates who can't afford the rents. Simply, there's more money to be made elsewhere - not least, while the boom lasts, in buying homes for owner-occupation. So far, the Tories won't commit themselves to paying housing benefit at whatever level is demanded by the landlord or "market'. On the contrary, they're committed to paying less.
One obvious consequence of all this will be a dramatic increase in homelessness. Already there are a quarter of a million people officially classed as homeless (double the 1979 figure) and this doesn't include many categories of people (youth, single people and so on) with nowhere to call home. You will see the numbers will double but the figures will halve as the Tories will almost certainly intro-
A duce legislation to redefine homelessness. Just as 16-18 year olds are no longer unemployed, anyone not actually sleeping under the arches of Charing Cross will be deemed to be housed.
And overturning the Homeless Persons Act is not the only thing in the pipeline. Expect further bills soon to change the financing of council housing.
Can a fightback be built? Already the tenants movement is undergoing a significant revival. Meetings in the six areas due for the first HATs have drawn thousands of anxious tenants opposed to the private sector. Certainly at estate level some victories will be chalked up. The onus is on the Labour Party, local authority trade unions and Labour councils to co-ordinate these struggles and lead an attack on the government's policy. Is ittoo late to point outthat a sustained campaign of non-implementation of the poll-tax would be the best basis on which to build it?
Now that barbarism has become an obvious basic plank of government policy it it time for Labour's
A. MOORE/REFLEX leadership to act. Yet, bedazzled by the apparent success of the Tories, the Labour Party has frozen in the middle of the road like a small animal transfixed by the headlights of the Tory juggernaut.
Rather than wait to be run over a socialist policy for housing needs to be developed. The starting point for such a policy is the reform of the owner occupied sector - now 65 per cent of all homes in Britain. Ending mortgage interest tax relief, imposing a capital gains tax on sales and taking second homes into public ownership would slow things down. That should be followed by the nationalisation of the land to make rational planning possible. In addition there is an obvious immediate need for an emergency building programme to house the homeless, cater for new household formations, and to replace the crumbling Victorian terraces against which DIY enthusiasts wage their weekend losing battles. The time to start it is now.
Mick Cattlin
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