As three tents appeared in our local park, signifying the development of homelessness and poverty here, I wanted to consider some of the political issues affecting any solution. This is my weekly column, published 9th July 2024, demanding the return to council housing at the start of the new Starmer Government, apparently already to the right of Thatcher.

There are tents in our parks and green spaces across Plymouth. The reason has little to do with the weather. We are witnessing the deepening problem of homelessness.

Britain has been experiencing a housing crisis for decades, the seemingly endless Era of Austerity pushing down income and pushing-up prices to create a huge deficit in affordable homes.

Surely, a roof over your head represents the most basic level of security, if not comfort. In a wealthy country it should be deemed as a right. 

Instead we see tens of thousands of people experiencing forced evictions amidst skyrocketing rent increases or mortgage demands. 

The laws have long been changed to give landlords and home owners tax-perks and almost absolute rights to act as they wish. The notorious Section 21 no-fault eviction law means landlords can evict tenants at 2 months notice without any explanation. Without reason. 

During the pandemic, house builders – for whom house building is about investment and profit, not homes – were given tax relief and development incentives. Such private developments included almost no affordable housing or rentable accommodation, and have driven-up prices.

When general inflation went well over 20%, building materials doubled in price alongside energy, the building firms cutting costs and quality and many going bust.

Working class people face a crisis of not being able to afford rent, bills and food, whilst small landlords moan they are in a “cost of doing” crisis, unable to maintain the buildings. The Office for National Statistics reported that 43% of renters declared difficulties with paying the rent last year, with 14% unable to afford food after paying the bills, almost 4 million of us having to use charitable food banks, in 2024 an additional three-quarters of a million people using food banks in for the first time.

Building houses isn’t the problem – the question is who are they being built for? The homes that are being built are for the already wealthy, the large building cartels forcing-up prices in a market that is based upon investment to sell-on at a profit, or buy-to-rent to ensure someone also pays their mortgage and into their pension pot. 

Almost 3 million council-owned homes have been sold-off across Britain since Margaret Thatcher introduced the “right-to-buy” in 1980, with 40% of these formerly affordable homes now rented out by private landlords, some councils having to rent-back the same properties at exorbitant prices in order to house homeless families.

The racists are quick to suggest these are refugees families taking the homes from white people, quick to dismiss the facts about refugees homelessness and exploitation, prison barges like the Bibby Stockholm or the asylum prisons in rotting disused army camps. 

Refugees are not the cause of homelessness. The crisis has been caused by the free-market unregulated capitalist accumulation of wealth and property in the hands of a few. When rents go up and salaries stay stagnant there is a systematic transfer of wealth from those who work for a living to those who own things for a living. 

The numbers can’t lie, the three-quarters of a million empty houses, mostly second-homes, the buy-up of homes for Air BnB to make a fast buck for the already wealthy, together pushing out people born in the area, and producing a generation of working class young people unable ever to afford to buy. Add to that the overpriced, poorly built apartment blocks owned by speculator hedge-funds gambling on the value in five years time irrespective of occupation all prove that Britain’s housing crisis is systemic, corrupt and immoral.

We are left too few new homes, and inappropriate house building organised to maximise profit, not meet to need. 

One in five of private homes lying on flood plains and now finding insurance against water ingress either too expensive or unavailable. More are being built on vulnerable land because the land is cheap for the builders to buy.

But climate change is creating a double-crisis, not only the lack of housing but the poor housing stock here, very vulnerable to extreme weather conditions. Too hot during our increasingly short summers, far too damp in the miserably long wet spells, and too expensive to renovate without State help. An estimated 13 million homes now need to be climate-proofed in England alone.

So long as housing is seen as an investment to be capitalised upon, so prices will rise, rents will double, and tents on the streets will turn into encampments of destitution. Locals get pushed out, home ownership becomes more exclusive, banks double their profits.

Last week, the Supreme Court of the USA voted 6:3 along ideological lines to allow States to declare homelessness illegal – that is, people who are homeless will be deemed illegal and will be imprisoned, into work camps as slaves. Are we to see this here?

Homes and homelessness is the new political frontline.

What is needed is local rent controls and house price caps – in other words regulation! 

A return to council housing with emergency funding of local councils. Government has to give the money it has stolen back to local councils, councils have to renown their old estates as well as build new ones. The neoliberal doctrine of private home ownership has to end, with the reintroduction of public ownership paid for by higher taxes for the wealthy landlords and corporations. 

We deserve protection, but it looks like we’ll have to protect ourselves with rent strikes and mass campaigns against evictions. Homes for All!