Caucus

There’s been an under-reported, low-level civil war rumbling on sporadically for the last two decades, in towns, cities and rural districts right across the country. The spoils of war are billions of pounds worth of public property – council housing.Why have council housing?

The private sector has never met society’s housing needs adequately, and it was widely accepted after WW2 that council housing, with national and local government combining to invest in decent, low-cost homes for rent, was a sensible solution. Both Labour and Conservative governments were able to build 2-300,000 homes a year throughout the 1950s, mostly of good quality brick-built estates.

The aim was to provide homes for a fairly wide spectrum of society, not just housing for the very marginalised poor. By 1971 about 30% of all tenures were council homes. Tenants valued the security, and the role of local democracy. You elect your own landlord, in effect. Some serious, widely-publicised problems did arise with 1960s’ cheap high-rise flats and system building, but for millions a decent home was provided for an affordable rent.

Then came Thatcher.

Margaret Thatcher’s government of 1979 swiftly binned the former the former ‘consensus’ politics, whereby even Conservative governments had accepted, albeit grudgingly, a serious role for the public sector.

Housing was an early target for a massive encroachment of the private sector, to be achieved initially by the ‘Right to Buy’ (RTB) policy of 1980, forcing councils to sell homes to tenants at massive discounts. From 1980-2005 council housing stock of 6 million had declined by 1.2 million, with very little replacement building allowed – one of the reasons we now have a national waiting list of 1.6 million households.

A raft of measures combined with the RTB to almost cripple remaining council stock. Housing budgets were ‘ring-fenced’ against cross-subsidy from general funds, and capital investment was severely restricted. Councils were obliged, unlike any other landlords, to meet housing benefit costs out of rent revenue, just at a time when unemployment was soaring and the RTB was creaming off the homes of more afluent, working tenants. The effect was to drastically reduce repairs and maintenance capacity. A relentless process of marginalisation was under way, pushing us towards American-style ‘project’ housing, providing homes of last resort for the vey poor.

Along with this process came legislation from 1985 enabling the privatisation of councils’ comlete housing stock, by ‘transfer’ to private housing associations, or to newly formed Registered Social Landlords. Theoretically non-profit making, these are private companies very dependent on commercial finance. Many are developing increasingly commercial subsidiary activities, and merging into larger regional and national conglomerates. They offer less tenant security and have higher national average rents than councils.

Tenants have to be balloted to approve of transfer, but face the twin pressures of crude financial blackmail ( “No cash for repairs unless you privatise” ) plus an expensive Public Relations exercise involving a plethora of professional consultancies. Even so, only about 200,000 homes were transferred under the Conservatives, not least because many Labour councils opposed it, then.

Did things “only get better”?

In 1997, in Cambridge, it was traumatic to hear that, with a newly-elected Labour government, our Labour council had decided to push for transfer. The rationale, endorsed by the government, was that with an inherited £20 billion national backlog of repairs, we’d never maintain our stock properly without private finance. The battle was on, not just in Cambridge, but all over the country.

‘Tenants Against Privatisation’ (TAP) won a ‘No’ vote in Cambridge, campaigning against the long-term dangers of privatising, but many ballots were lost, and by 2005 about 1 million homes had been privatised by stock transfer. Local campaign groups like TAP united loosely to form Defend Council Housing ( www.defendcouncilhousing.org.uk ), which began to help win more ‘No’ votes, including high profile Birmingham and Camden. It has been vital to fight on two fronts; the government has to be challenged to change national policy and allow more investment, and at local level tenants in their unequal contests with council-funded PR consultancies need help. The current stalemate position is that while over one third of the original 360 local authorities with housing have transferred, there are still almost 3 million council tenants left.

OUR homes!

We need to retain genuine community ownership and control of council housing. Ensuring decent homes are available for everyone is an obvious hallmark of a decent society, and private social landlords dependent on commercial finance can’t be trusted with that responsibility.

If you’re a council tenant, don’t be browbeaten into acquiescence. Some tenants have fought and won, despite the odds. If you’re not a council tenant, but know that tenants in your area are facing a privatisation threat, help oppose it in any way you can – they’re your homes too.