Why we need to Raise the Roof for Housing

Left Unity principal speaker Felicity Dowling writes.

We each of us need a home. Left Unity from its very first conference pledged to build a campaign on housing rights. We want to raise the roof for housing: the case for housing needs to be a top political and social issue. Housing rights are more important than the money market.

Each and every one of us needs roof over our head and somewhere to be warm and safe. It’s a human right. Yet 90,000 children in the UK will be homeless this Christmas according to housing charity Shelter.

Think of the impact on health on happiness on education of this level of homelessness. In some areas 1 in 36 households could face eviction because of mortgage problems.

Homelessness stretches from street sleepers, to those who sofa surf, to those who live in local authority organised homeless accommodation. But the housing crisis is far greater than the brutal sharp end of homelessness. Council housing has been reduced to a shadow of its former provisions.

Many people now live in privately rented accommodation with few rights, insecure tenancies, and repair issues. The BBC reported: “The number of people made homeless when a private tenancy ends has trebled in the past five years. It is now the single biggest cause of homelessness in England and most have been thrown out by private landlords.” Tenants in Britain have far fewer rights than tenants in Germany, for example, where landlords have to give notice of up to nine months.

Here the price of houses is beyond the reach of many and it is thought that there will be a majority of tenants in many constituencies within the next decade. Most young people now just cannot afford to buy houses because the government has used house prices as a tool for political manoeuvres.

The average home in England cost just over three times local median salary in 1997. Now it is just short of ten. That problem is coming home to roost. Social housing, where people had decent homes in secure tenancies, now seems a flight of fancy – but generations of socialists were able to build just such houses.

We want not just housing being built and being allocated according to need; we want to plan it ourselves, ordinary people having a say as was demanded over a century ago at the founding of modern workers’ movements.

“It is not the housing of the poor, but the housing of the people by the people themselves, that we must work for – not the herding into slums for the benefit of private enterprise, not the crowding into barracks in order to provide interest for municipal bondholders, but by a feasible honest system and plan.”
Fred Knee, secretary of the Workers National Housing Council in the 1890s.

There are campaigns for housing rising everywhere – for example the bedroom tax campaigns across the country. Campaigners have made housing a major political issue. In London there has been the Focus E15 mothers group, the huge and victorious fight around the New Era estate in Hackney, with action too from Acorn in Bristol and many others.

As the general election approaches we must raise the issues of housing rights ever louder. Left Unity is organising a conference, Raise the Roof for Housing, open to all tenants, housing campaigners, homeless people and everyone else who wants a decent home they can afford to live in.

You can read our housing policy here.
Send us your housing stories. Sign up for the conference here.