Posted in Housing

Tenants excluded as social housing flogged off in billionaire investor bazaars

mipimuk-2014MIPIM is the name of the sales fair to flog off Britain. This is the latest extravaganza of market fundamentalism which is now sweeping Britain. It is being pitched at this moment is a huge hall in London which brings together property developers, billionaire investors from all over the world and, incongruously, local council officials from over Britain. Their common interest, though from very different concerns, is public housing. The property developers want to make a mint from knocking it down and putting up luxury flats in its place. The investors are motivated by a juicy return on capital if they invest in a must-win bonanza.

And the local councils – and here’s the rub – are there because they are broke and have no other means of raising serious money. The only people who aren’t there are the tenants of the public housing which is about to be demolished before their eyes. Their homes, which many have lived in for 30-40 years, are about to be turned into someone else’s speculative asset without their even being consulted, let alone given a chance to impose a veto on a process which literally destroys their livelihood. Continue reading →

A safe, secure, affordable home is a right

Green plastic monopoly houses, by 123rf.comThe following is the text of Unite Assistant General Secretary Steve Turner’s speech to Labour’s conference in Manchester 

We welcome Labour’s policy statements and the clear commitments contained within it to build more homes – and we equally welcome Ed Miliband’s comments yesterday. However, we must never forget that a – safe – secure and affordable roof over your head is a human right – as fundamental as the right to life – to vote or for food on your table.

Many of our challenges pale into insignificance compared to the millions who make up today’s generation rent – and more so – the growing obscenity of families forced from their communities into insecure private rental or bed and breakfast emergency accommodation. Continue reading →

35,000 low-cost homes lost last year by government’s open market policies

A dream home becomes just a dreamThe government’s latest housing policy is to force social landlords who receive government funding to build new homes to convert a proportion of their existing social rented homes into the Tories’ new ‘affordable rent’ tenure. ‘Affordable rent’ in government-speak actually means the opposite. It means pricing rents at up to 80% of local average open market rents which puts them beyond the reach of most of the country’s poorest households. Indeed the UK Housing Review figures show that nearly three-quarters of tenants who have moved into so-called ‘affordable ‘rented homes have had to apply for housing benefit to pay for the cost.

This has had two perverse results. Landlords have agreed under government pressure to convert nearly 100,000 social homes to ‘affordable’ rent since the policy was introduced in 2011, meaning that more and more housing in the social rented sector has now become increasingly inaccessible to households in the lowest quartile. Second, the policy has had contradictory and adverse impacts on the public finances. DWP is trying to curb the social sector’s housing benefit costs, but at the same time Pickles’ DCLG is pushing up housing benefit costs through the use of affordable rent. Continue reading →

Private tenants caught in a rent trap – and sinking

There are so many repositories of destitution and hopelessness in Britain today that adding another does not evoke the horror it should:

  • There the million or more persons who have been ‘sanctioned’ – deprived of all their benefit income by DWP for 4 weeks for some trivial (or invented) infringement of the benefit rules, then for 3 months for a second breach, and 3 years (!) for a third, without in many cases being told why.
  • Then there is a large proportion of the 1.6 million moderately or severely disabled persons on Incapacity Benefit who are being told after a cursory interview that they are fit for work even there is no work available in the local area that they could possibly do, even if they had the right skills, and even when their mental or physical handicaps ruled them out in competition in the local labour market – yet their benefit is still cut drastically.
  • There are the million or more frail elderly, often with Alzheimer’s, who are now deprived of essential care they need because of the £2.7bn reduction in the social care budget.
  • And there the helpless and vulnerable mentally ill who are desperately in need of greater support to survive, but who are bullied,intimidated and tricked by DWP into giving up the benefits they’re entitled to.
  • But there is still another group who are fast growing in number and caught up in a rent trap from which they cannot escape.

Continue reading →

Government figures show bedroom tax is not working

Oppose the Bedroom taxAs Jo Moore infamously emailed at the time of the 9/11 catastrophe in the US, “now is a good time to release bad news”. The Tory government has clearly taken this to heart. Having built up an enormous fanfare to the elevation of women in the reshuffle which captivated the headlines, the Tories then used this cover to distract from two very unpleasant news items they dealt with on that same day, last Tuesday (15 July). One was ramming through the Data Retention & Investigatory Powers (DRIP) Bill on mass surveillance on one day in the House of Commons, and the other was releasing the figures for the impact of the bedroom tax in the first 6 months of its operation (summarised by CLASS here). Both were certainly activities of government which they were desperately keen to hide, and for good reason. Continue reading →