IN the 1950s and 60s, the name Peter Rachman became synonymous with ‘slum landlord’ and the brutal methods used to drive out tenants whose rents were controlled and replace them with those desperate enough to pay the exorbitant sums he demanded.
Today in 21st century Britain, Rachmanism has a different face but it lives on and thrives under the protection of the capitalist state and its laws.
No longer is there a need for violence to drive tenants out, instead the private landlords enjoy all the protection of the law when it comes to getting rid of low paid or benefit claimants, to make way for those wealthy enough to pay.
The public scandal that erupted when Rachman’s violent tactics were exposed, led a series of laws granting legal protection to tenants from arbitrary eviction and which introduced the concept of a ‘fair rent’ or rent control.
This pro-tenant legislation was thrown out by the Tory government of Thatcher with the passing of the Housing Act of 1988.
Today, private landlords, renting property built after 1989, can evict without any justification – Rachman’s baseball bat-wielding thugs have been replaced by a simple solicitor’s letter.
In January, one of Britain’s biggest private landlords, Fergus Wilson, who owns 1,000 homes for rent, announced that he had sent 200 eviction notices to tenants who were on housing benefit and stated that he would no longer rent to anyone on benefit.
He added that benefit claimants should ‘get a job’.
Under both Tory and the last Labour governments, the privatisation of housing has shot up as a result of Thatcher’s right-to-buy scheme.
According to data from HM Revenue and Customs the total number of buy-to-let investors had increased by 120,000 in 2014 to 1.6 million.
In London, it is now estimated that at least 36% of former council houses are rented out privately and that in poorer parts of the city this number is much greater.
At the same time, a report by a Labour member of the London Assembly, Tom Copley, reveals that average private-sector rents, often paid by tenants on housing benefit, cost as much as £230 a week more than council rents.
As Copley points out, these homes were built at public expense, sold off cheaply by the government and then re-sold even more cheaply under the various buy-to-let schemes, with the result that it has created a vast pool of private landlords leeching off the taxpayer while evicting the unemployed and low paid in order to maintain their lavish profits.
Just how much these leeches are subsidised by the taxpayer has emerged in a report this week by the campaign group, Generation Rent.
They estimate that when all the tax breaks landlords can claim are counted – £1.69 billion for ‘wear and tear’ on properties, £6.6 billion of tax that they are exempt from paying on mortgage interest payments, £9.06 billion tax they do not have to pay on their annual average capital gains and including the £9.3 billion they get in the form of housing benefit paid to low income tenants – today’s private landlords are getting subsidies from the taxpayer of £26.7 billion a year.
This equates to £1,011 for every household in Britain going into the pockets of private landlords.
Alex Hilton of Generation Rent said: ‘While renters have borne the brunt of austerity, landlords have enjoyed their own little economy the size of Morocco’s, supported by subsidies from the UK taxpayer that could be better used fixing the housing crisis.’
In fact there can be no ‘fixing’ of the housing crisis under capitalism – in its crisis, capitalism has been forced to attempt to snatch back all the gains made by workers in the past, including the provision of affordable council housing, in order to put profit in the hands of landlords and the banks who finance them.
The way to fix the housing crisis is to smash the capitalist system through the socialist revolution.
