THE National Housing Federation (NHF) complains that the government has missed its home-building target for the last seven years and that the housing crisis will continue and worsen.
But the NHF’s demand for private housing will make waiting lists even longer and lead to even higher rents.
The Thatcher policy of privatising, privatising and privatising council housing has led to the situation where, by the Federation’s own conservative estimate, there are 2.5 million people living in overcrowded conditions, as well as 4.5 million on housing waiting lists.
This government has carried on with Thatcherism. In fact, all capitalist parties want to smash council housing and drive the working class to the mercy of private landlords.
The government says it has made £4.2 billion available to local authorities for new building projects.
These are the now notorious regeneration schemes like those pioneered by Southwark Council in south-east London.
There, the council has tried to harass and bully over 1,000 tenants to give up their homes at the Elephant and Castle in south-east London while a giant 40-storey high block of private flats is built on the other side of the road.
But the new homes are not for the Heygate tenants. Instead, they are told to move out of the area and the new (private) homes that were to be built have never materialised!
There has been enormous resistance to the regeneration scheme, and anger in Southwark is growing as the council wants to do the same to tenants on the Aylesbury estate nearby, where there are almost 3,000 council homes.
Councils like Southwark, which is a Lib Dem-Tory coalition, are being encouraged by the government to destroy their remaining housing stocks.
It has now reached a point where the only way that families can be housed in council homes is if the existing tenants are evicted!
The evicted tenants are then driven into the arms of the private landlords, where complaints about the practices of letting agents are soaring.
Security of tenure is ripped up and rents rocket. Average private rents are now £820 a month and in London and the South East much higher than that.
At the same time, housing benefits to people in private accommodation have been cut, driving the poor into even greater poverty.
This is central to the drive to smash the Welfare State and drive the working class back to Jack London’s ‘People of the Abyss’.
But to do this they have to defeat the working class.
However, we are going into a situation where there will be an all-out struggle between the working class and the capitalist ruling class as their interests collide, with huge force.
Workers and their families are not prepared to be driven into homelessness and insecurity and unhealthy living conditions.
They are refusing to leave their council homes and are demanding the repair and renovation of council estates, and support the policy put forward by the Workers Revolutionary Party and our Young Socialists movement to immediately launch a programme to build millions of new council homes.
The capitalist banking crash has exposed the disaster of Thatcher’s ‘property-owning’ vision of ‘people’s capitalism’ – which meant as soon as the banks went bust in 2008 that thousands of homes were repossessed, and ‘100 per cent’ mortgages were abolished and only those who had the money for a massive deposit could get a mortgage in future.
Now even people on middle-class incomes can no longer afford a place to live. Even doctors and teachers are homeless.
This is the crisis of capitalism, turning whole areas into shanty towns and slums. It means the working class must rise up to smash the capitalist state and establish its own government.
The banks, building societies, land owners and building companies must be immediately nationalised and all necessary funds guaranteed to build the necessary new state-owned homes for rent and to employ the young people to build them.