TWO reports this week have driven home the message that in the 21st century a bankrupt British capitalist system can no longer provide even the most basic human right of food and shelter for workers.
An investigation by the BBC published yesterday revealed that across large parts of England people are forced to spend over a third of their disposable income on rents. According to the charities Shelter and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, spending more than a third on rent or mortgages means cutting back on other essentials including food.
What the BBC found was that although the crisis was at its most acute in London and the South East it is spreading throughout the country. The average rent of a one-bedroom property in half of all the districts, boroughs and cities would cost more than 30% of take-home income.
In London, renting a studio flat exceeds 30% in every borough – except Bexley. Rent for a studio is over £1,000 a month in Camden, Hackney, Islington, Kensington & Chelsea, Southwark, Tower Hamlets and Westminster. Even renting one room in a house or flat exceeds 30% of income in 15 out of 32 London boroughs, costing on average £607 a month!
The rest of England is fast catching up with London and the South East with rental costs for one-bedroom properties exceeding the 30% threshold in Salford, Trafford and Manchester, Nottingham, Northampton, Warwickshire, Stratford upon Avon, Redditch, Warwick and Birmingham.
These are the figures for just a one-bedroom flat. The average rent for a three-bed home across the country is £867 a month while 30% of the average take home pay is £550 a month. This means that on average a family renting a three-bed house is having to make cuts in spending on basic requirements of over £300 a month.
With the cost of renting skyrocketing at the same time as wages have been systematically cut, workers are faced with the choice of feeding their families or being thrown onto the streets. Compounding the crisis is the rapid rise in people forced into the private rental market.
Earlier this week, a report by the Resolution Foundation revealed that home ownership in England has fallen to its lowest level in 30 years as more and more workers and youth find it impossible to afford the steep rise in property prices and buy their own home.
Thirty years ago was the time when Thatcher’s destruction of social housing through ‘right-to-buy’ came into being and this policy, promoted by subsequent Tory and Labour governments, is now causing misery for millions of workers.
The one section who are making hay out of this crisis are the property speculators and the international mega-rich, who are buying up properties in London and across the country not to live in, but as investments.
Land Registry data published in March showed that 40,000 properties in London, ranging from entire apartment complexes to luxury houses are owned by companies or individuals registered in off-shore tax havens – an increase of 10% in 10 months.
The Tower, a 50-storey skyscraper in Vauxhall has been sold to more than 130 foreign buyers with prices ranging from a flat for £560,000 to £51 million for a penthouse. The response of the new Labour London mayor, Sadiq Khan, was to announce that he wants to ‘persuade’ foreign investors to put their money into building affordable homes!
Begging for help from the speculators is reactionary nonsense – the only answer to the housing crisis is to kick out this Tory government and advance to a workers’ government that will immediately take over all the empty properties held as ‘assets’ and make them available as homes to workers and their families.
This will be followed by the nationalisation without compensation of the building industry, the banks and building societies and placing them under the control of the working class. Profits expropriated from the capitalist class will then be used for a massive programme of council housing building to ensure that everyone has the right to decent affordable home.
Only the socialist revolution can solve this housing crisis, so join the WRP today to organise it!