No Shelter for Poor Under Tories Policies

The Tories are planning to kill off council housing altogether. The Housing Bill is just the latest in a long line of attacks on decent, publicly provided, cheap housing.

In 1979, 42% of us lived in council homes, now it is just under 8%. This process was not reversed by governments of all three main parties. Many were able to buy their homes, but millions more cannot afford it. This particulary true of the young – ‘generation rent’. A huge rise in private rented accommodation has gone along with higher rents, often subsidised by the taxpayer in the form of housing benefits.

The Tories have just voted down an amendment to ensure that homes are unfit for human habitation, showing whose side they are really on.

The number of MPs who serve as landlords has risen by a quarter since the last Parliament: with 39% of Tory MPs now acting like so many lords of the manor.

UKIP are no different. Their current housing spokesperson is a property tycoon who receives around £800,000 a year in housing benefit from his struggling tenants.

During the PM’s Question Time, Jeremy Corbyn correctly pointed out how research from Shelter, the housing and homelessness charity, now suggests that even people on the new “national living wage” will not be able to afford to buy their own homes in 98% of areas.

Cameron  now says he will demolish decrepit tower block estates, but not in order to build publicly owned social housing available for rent. No, instead Cameron is subsiding private developers to build homes on public land – no doubt mostly luxury flats.

Working class communities will be forced out of the areas in which they live, so that dwindling (truly affordable) council houses can be sold off to the private sector.

This profitable scheme is being overseen by former Tory minister Michael Heseltine. But while papers like the Times and the Metro bolster his credentials for the job by claiming that he oversaw the regeneration of Liverpool in the 1980s, the opposite is the case!

Neither Heseltine nor the Thatcher government can say they sorted out Liverpool’s slums. It was Militant, forerunner of the Socialist Party, which had a leading influence in Liverpool’s then Labour council that built 5,000 high-quality council houses.

With the active support of the people of Liverpool that the council fought and won back some of the money that had been cut from their budgets in previous years.

Housing shortages can be defeated by providing publicly owned social housing which people can afford to rent.

This “first person” article was published today in the Leicester Mercury (see below).