60,000 HOUSEHOLDS in England face being thrown out of their council houses next year as a result of the Tories ‘pay to stay’ policy.
Under ‘pay to stay’, announced by Tory chancellor George Osborne in his 2015 budget, any family in council accommodation with a collective income of over £40,000 a year in London and £30,000 in other parts of the country will be forced to pay the same inflated rent as that charged by private landlords in the same area.
A family where both parents are each earning £20,000 in London or £15,000 outside the capital would be told either pay private sector rents or be evicted. This is a recipe for seeing thousands of low paid families driven quite literally onto the streets.
The scale of the financial catastrophe that the Tories are intent on inflicting on the low paid has been highlighted in a report into the effects of ‘pay to stay’ commissioned by the Local Government Association.
This report found that in London 27,000 families in council accommodation would be hit and that the vast majority of these would be unable to afford either the increase in council rents or the rents demanded by the private sector.
Across the country the number of households affected is in the region of 214,000. The Resolution Foundation which has carried out research into the effect of the policy in Oxford found that a family with two members working who tipped their joint income above the Tory cut off level of £30,000 (by taking as little as 1 hour paid overtime a week) would have their rent increased by £4,000 a year!
Lord Kerslake, a former senior civil servant who worked on government housing policy until last year, told the Observer newspaper: ‘When this was originally discussed in the coalition government, it was intended to deal with the very small number of high earners on over £60,000. The current proposals will affect a lot more households with earnings of half that.’
Kerslake said he would table amendments to The Housing and Planning Bill when it comes before the Lords for scrutiny this week and called for the Tories to ‘put the plan on hold’ pending pilot schemes to evaluate its effect. In fact the Tories know full well what the effect of ‘pay to stay’ will be.
The whole Housing Bill, which includes forcing housing associations to allow tenants the ‘right to buy’, is designed to smash up the very concept of social housing with affordable rents.
It is designed to drive low paid workers out of council housing and either force them to pay exorbitant rents to private landlords or, more likely, when they cannot afford these rents to move elsewhere.
‘Pay to stay’ along with the bedroom tax, cuts to housing benefit and the forced sale of council and social housing is all part and parcel of a deliberate war being conducted by the Tories to force the working class out of the big cities and make places like London into enclaves strictly for Russian oligarchs and Saudi royalty.
Workers will be left to exist out of sight in slums, only permitted to enter cities to carry out the jobs necessary to keep services running. No amount of tinkering with this bill by the House of Lords will stop this onslaught.
The Tories are determined to smash social housing along with every other part of the welfare state in their drive to pay off the trillions of pounds of ‘subsidies’ they have made to the bankers to stop them from going bust.
Enough is enough, the working class must fight every eviction by forming Councils of Action in every area to unite workers, youth and trade unions to stop all evictions and rent increases through mass strikes and mass pickets.
Above all these Councils of Action must bring forward a new revolutionary leadership in the trade unions that will answer the Tory war on the welfare state with a general strike to bring down the government and bring in a workers’ government and socialism.
