Around The Houses

Not before time, Labour, the Conservatives and the Greens have a lot to say about housing. Haven't we all?

The blockers are the builders. Property developers are hoarding land so as to maximise prices by restricting supply, thereby also thwarting competitors. Land banking is their business model. The Green Belt was a Labour idea. Look at it, and of course it was. But it is now a giant subsidy to horseyculture and golf. The State decrees and pays that more of Surrey be occupied by golf courses than by housing.

We need a minimum of 100,000 new homes every year for at least 10 years, including council homes with an end to the Right to Buy, with the capital receipts from council house sales released in order to build more council housing, and with councils empowered to borrow to that end. We need a minimum of 50 per cent of any new development to be dedicated to affordable housing, with affordability defined as 50 per cent of average rents. We need rent controls, action against the buying up of property by foreign investors in order to leave it empty, repeal of the Vagrancy Act, and the outlawing of practices such as "poor doors" and discrimination in children's play facilities based on the nature of their parents' tenure. We need Tenant Management Co-operatives.

We need a statutory requirement of planning permission for change of use if it were proposed to turn a primary dwelling into a secondary dwelling, a working family home into a weekend or holiday home; there are signs of progress on that under the previous Government. Since the last century, I have been using the available platforms to call for this. The last Labour Government was completely unresponsive, just as throughout its three terms, it left section 21 in place. Such evictions ought of course to be banned by Statute.

That requirement of planning permission for change of use would set the pattern for the empowerment of the rural working class, assisted both by the Land Value Tax and by a windfall tax on the supermarkets in order to fund agriculture and small business, with strict regulation to ensure that the costs of this were not passed on to suppliers, workers, consumers, communities, or the environment. Rent-to-buy schemes also demand serious attention, and we should be setting up one or more non-profit lettings agencies.

Try to explain leasehold to anyone from almost anywhere else in the world. Yet again, give three cheers for the three-term Labour Government that never abolished it. And note carefully how feudalism has morphed into global capitalism, so that nostalgia for the former does not ultimately provide the basis necessary for resistance to the latter. Leasehold should simply be abolished. People who wonder why I keep up the politics, no one else is saying things like this.

"It is entirely undesirable," wrote Aneurin Bevan, "that on modern housing estates only one type of citizen should live. If we are to enable citizens to lead a full life, if they are each to be aware of the problems of their neighbours, then they should all be drawn from different sectors of the community. We should try to introduce what was always the lovely feature of English and Welsh villages, where the doctor, the grocer, the butcher and the farm labourer all lived in the same street."

In 1979, two fifths of people lived in council housing, an impossible figure for a mere "safety net for the poor". Public provision, by definition, never is such a net. Not the NHS, not state education, not public transport, none of it. As recently as 1980, what is now a breathtaking 20 per cent of the richest tenth of the population lived in social housing. Now, after four decades of selling off the stock and of not building any more, the stringent criteria for new tenants effectively guarantee a large number of single mothers of dependent children who are thus unable to work full-time, if at all, and of people newly released from prison or newly discharged from psychiatric institutions.

Margaret Thatcher's assault on council housing is the one thing that her supporters still feel able to defend unconditionally. But in reality, it created the Housing Benefit racket, and it used the gigantic gifting of capital assets by the State to enable the beneficiaries to enter the property market ahead of private tenants, or of people still living at home, who in either case had saved for their deposits. What, exactly, was or is conservative or Tory about that? Or about moving in the characters from Shameless either alongside, or even in place of, the respectable working class? Shameless began under Tony Blair's model for this Labour Government. The fight goes on.