No Homeland Without Homes

Paul Knaggs writes:

Spain goes to the polls on 29 November. The prime minister announced it on Monday, after Congress rejected emergency measures meant to quell public fury over housing. The announcement came less than seventy-two hours after that defeat, delivered from the Moncloa Palace with a promise to defend housing against speculators and liberties against reactionaries. It is a good line. It is also, measured against his time in office, a late one.

There is a longer charge sheet against this government, and the right has been reading it aloud for a year. Sánchez’s former transport minister was sentenced to twenty-four years by the Supreme Court in June. Separate cases touch his wife and his brother. The courts will deal with all of it, as they should. None of it explains why an 87-year-old woman was carried out of her home on a stretcher. Because the election was not really called by Pedro Sánchez. It was called by María del Carmen Abascal.

How Maricarmen’s Eviction Ignited Spain’s Housing Crisis 

On 23 September, police carried her out of her flat in Madrid’s Retiro district. She was 87, she had lived there for 71 years, and it was the fourth attempt at eviction that year. She had arrived as a girl. Her mother had died in that flat, and she had expected to die there too. She was taken to the Gregorio Marañón hospital, where she remains, being treated for exhaustion. From her bed she recorded a message asking that what happened to her should not happen to anyone else, and that the unjust laws which allowed it should be changed. 

She will be going home. Her lawyer, Beatriz Duro, announced an agreement with the owners days later. Reached after four hours of negotiation and mediated by Madrid’s public housing company, it gives her an eight-year contract at roughly thirty per cent of her pension, about the 500 euros she was paying before. That was the rent until the investment firm that bought the building sought 2,650 euros a month instead. The company disputes the account and says it later offered a lower figure. Note the defence, then note what it concedes. The going rate for staying in her own home exceeded everything she had to live on. 

No bailiff exceeded his powers. No landlord broke a rule. The instrument was a leases act passed in 1994 by the Socialist government of Felipe González, which set a clock running on Spain’s old protected tenancies. A clause lets such a tenancy pass down a second time where the tenant has a recognised disability of sixty-five per cent. Maricarmen’s was assessed at fifty. By that margin she lost her home. In eight years as prime minister, Sanchez has brought forward no proposal to change it.

FIFTY CITIES, AND A CAMP THAT IS STILL THERE

Spain rose anyway. Protesters have been camped in the Puerta del Sol since the eviction, and the tents were still standing on Monday morning as the prime minister spoke. Last weekend brought marches in fifty towns and cities. The government’s own delegation counted 70,000 in Madrid. The tenants’ union claimed 500,000. Whichever figure you take, the placards were not asking for tinkering. The Sindicato de Inquilinas wants rents halved and homes held by investment funds taken off them, and its spokeswoman Valeria Racu says a general strike over housing is coming. Her Madrid colleague Alicia del Río called the government’s emergency package a minimum measure, which is the kindest thing said about it from that side.

She was right. The two decrees would have frozen evictions of vulnerable tenants, tightened the rules on short lets and made leases renew automatically. Useful, modest, overdue. On 2 October the Congress of Deputies threw them out, the first by 172 votes to 178, the second by 166 to 184. The Popular Party and Vox voted against, and so did Carles Puigdemont’s Junts, arguing that protecting tenants would shrink the rental supply and push prices higher.

That argument deserves a hearing, because it is the argument, repeated in every capital where rent has become political. Cap the return and the landlord withdraws the flat. What it lacks is any reckoning with where Spain actually stands. The Bank of Spain counts a shortfall of 750,000 homes between 2021 and 2025, with household formation running at 240,000 a year against 92,000 homes built. Social housing is roughly 3.3 per cent of the stock. The share of young Spaniards owning a home has fallen from 41 per cent in 2007 to 22 per cent. A market that produced those numbers unregulated will not be rescued by further restraint from the state.

A LAW THE RIGHT SIMPLY REFUSES TO OBEY 

And the restraint has been remarkable. The 2023 Housing Act let regions cap prices in stressed rental zones. Five have done so. The Popular Party’s regional governments signed a joint document in 2024 refusing to apply the law at all. Madrid, where rents are highest, has declared not one zone. Andalusia took the law to the Constitutional Court. Bills tabled by the PP in this parliament would delete the mechanism from the statute book entirely. This is the party favoured to govern. 

Within hours of calling the election, the government confirmed the sequel. Having lost in a full chamber, it will re-approve the decrees and send them to the standing committee that sits once parliament is dissolved, where the arithmetic is kinder and Junts is not needed. Perfectly constitutional. Also an obvious question. If that route existed on Tuesday, where was it in March?

WINNING THE ARGUMENT, LOSING THE COUNTRY

A survey by 40dB for El País and Cadena SER found 67.5 per cent of Spaniards back limits on rents, including 56.5 per cent of Popular Party voters and 55.2 per cent of Vox voters. Researchers at the Universidad Carlos III found that half of Vox’s own supporters blame investment funds for the crisis. Yet every published projection but the state pollster’s now puts the Popular Party and Vox together between 201 and 213 seats, well past the 176 they need. Asked what should be tackled first, those same voters name immigration.

That is not a failure of public opinion. It is a failure of delivery. People will go on believing that speculation is the problem and still vote for the party of speculation, if the party that agrees with them spends eight years saying so and leaves the statute book exactly where it found it. Conviction without consequence is just commentary, and voters can smell it.

Maricarmen will get her flat back, rescued by public fury from a machine that will process thousands more this year with no camera present. The machine was built in parliament. It can be dismantled there. Spain did not lose its homes to the market. It legislated them away, politely, in daylight, and called it reform.

With that in mind, even The Guardian editorialises:

“To the millions of leaseholders across the country, you have my word. The days of you being squeezed for every penny are coming to an end,” Andy Burnham told the Labour party conference. Only a few hours earlier, his housing secretary, Angela Rayner, had announced that the government would legislate for a new independent regulator and launch a consultation to cap “rip off” administrative fees. While these are undoubtedly steps in the right direction, they are miles away from Labour’s manifesto promise to “finally bring the feudal leasehold system to an end”.

In its modern form, leasehold in England and Wales turns homes into income streams for freeholders. It should be abolished. There are powerful vested interests – billionaires, aristocrats and big businesses – that would oppose this move. But the system of service charges is crippling the housing market because its exorbitant cost puts off prospective buyers. The average annual service charge for a flat in England and Wales is now £2,405, up 32.6% since 2020 and 55.6% over a decade. Owners of flats in high-rise blocks in London are paying service charges of more than £7,000 a year. Little wonder that first-time buyers are increasingly bypassing flats.

The current system sees homeowners enter into long-term leases in which they must pay sums annually to freeholders. These can rise quickly to very high levels. The government proposes a £250 annual cap on ground rents for existing residential leases and limits on fees for requests such as keeping a pet. Ministers are consulting over whether residents could pay less to buy out freeholds. But there is no sign of action on annual service charges for maintenance costs determined by distant firms. Last year, 37% of flats across England and Wales had a service charge that exceeded 1% of their value – making them hard to mortgage and sell. Surely homeowners should not have to buy their freedom at an outrageous price while being charged for years by a management system they cannot realistically change?

The issue of leasehold has become a campaign flashpoint in the Holborn and St Pancras byelection. Six out of seven homes sold in the constituency last year were sold as leasehold. The Green leader, Zack Polanski, who is standing to be the MP, has made the issue a concrete test of Labour’s credibility. The Greens have paired leasehold abolition with rent controls and affordable housing as part of their claim to end “rip-off Britain”, accusing Labour of favouring developers. Labour denies this, but ministers know that housing is a political powder keg that has already exploded in Berlin and across Spain.

It is remarkable that while legislation banning new leasehold properties is expected before the next election, it is unlikely to come into force until after it. Ministers are said to be afraid of being taken to court by freeholders. But government has already won against them in the courts when defending Michael Gove’s housing bill. The question for the government is whether the proposed reforms give the owners of the existing 5m leasehold homes a credible route out of their dependency – or just regulate their continued subservience. Ministers must show how a leaseholder trapped today will in the future take back control – by obtaining the right to manage property, being able to buy the freehold or converting to commonhold. If ministers offer just another complaints mechanism, they will have broken their promise to end an injustice.