Housing is a human right

Felicity Dowling writes.

Everyone needs somewhere to sleep, somewhere to socialise, to wash, to clean their clothes to enjoy themselves, to raise their children, care for the elderly, just to live – we need a home because we are human. Housing is a human right recognised in the Universal Declaration of Human rights adopted by the United Nations as long ago as 1948.

We have now the start of a campaign to assert our rights to housing. Fighting for decent housing will need to come as it has in the past from those who need it. Ordinary people have fought for decent housing for all in the past and it’s starting again now.

Left Unity is committed to increased housebuilding, to council housing, to rights for tenants and for an end to the cruel and unnecessary policies implemented by this government and in part by the previous government. We are a new political party that comes out of the struggles for human rights and decency. This is the first of a series of articles about the housing crisis and the fight for homes for all.

Left Unity is hosting a conference on the housing crisis in March. The conference is open to all who care about housing (except those who make money from the crisis or those who support this deliberate situation of housing crisis amongst plenty).

The march for affordable homes in London, the E15 Mothers campaign and the New Era housing estate, the campaigns in Newham and Barnet, come directly from the denial of our human rights to housing. The movements for housing rights, against evictions and against the bedroom tax across the country are just the start of a response to this anti-human policy.

The human right to housing is flouted on a grand scale in this country. This housing crisis was avoidable and is part of the current and previous governments’ overall economic policy. It is not accidental, but is part of what’s called the neoliberal project or Thatcherism. It means passing the wealth from the working class communities to the very, very rich.

Oxfam have written a now famous report on this growing inequality:

“In 2014, the richest 1% of people in the world owned 48% of global wealth, leaving just 52% to be shared between the other 99% of adults on the planet. Almost all of that 52% is owned by those included in the richest 20%, leaving just 5.5% for the remaining 80% of people in the world. If this trend continues of an increasing wealth share to the richest, the top 1% will have more wealth than the remaining 99% of people in just two years… with the wealth share of the top 1% exceeding 50% by 2016.”

These features of government policy knit together to cause this housing crisis in the midst of plenty: propaganda against the poor, the sale of council houses, the expansion of the private rental sector with no regard to tenants’ rights, the housing benefit system, the benefit cap, the use of housing finance as part of the ‘casino capitalism’ that lead to the banking crisis and the use of house price inflation as a sop to people whose wages are stagnating.

1. The political decision to denigrate and demean working class people and communities, as Owen Jones has written, makes it OK to sneer at the working class and the poor. This deliberate hate speech, hate media and anti-benefit claimant rhetoric by mainstream parties provided an excuse for the attacks on social housing. Many of those who work hard for a living still live in poverty and depend to some extent on benefits like housing benefit.

2. The political decision to attack government spending and dismantle the welfare state: dismantling the welfare state means removal of safety nets for ordinary people who have no great savings or wealthy families to bail them out of difficulties. For nearly a lifetime the welfare state, the understanding that no one should be bereft, was common policy amongst wealthy nations, part of what is called the post-war consensus. In this time economic growth was stronger not weaker than today.

3. The deliberate sale of council houses and the failure to replace those that were sold: council houses were the bricks and mortar of the welfare state. The social landlords which replaced council housing were not answerable to elected representatives.

4. The creation of private rental sector in housing with reduced rights for tenants. The creation of buy-to-let as a mini sector of the economy making the already wealthy wealthier. The construction of a housing benefit scheme that bore no relation to people’s ability to pay rent from stagnant wages, but ensured landlords great wealth and secure incomes. The richest MP in Britain made £120,000 in housing benefit – no benefit cap there. The benefit cap has been introduced not to cut what goes to wealthy landlords but to force the poor to move out of areas of higher housing cost.

5. The use of housing costs as part of the casino betting of international finance that lead to the 2008 banking crash and the use of housing cost inflation as a way of disguising fundamental economic problems, including static or falling incomes and wages. In London housing this is crystal clear. In the case of Focus E15 a homeless hostel was sold off to make way for luxury housing. What the Tories and Labour did not expect was that young mothers would start a challenge to the whole Tory housing policy. Similar campaigns are happening in other boroughs and other cities.

Britain has a housing crisis. Never before have we had so many bedrooms per head of population but 90,000 children faced homelessness in Britain last Christmas. That’s the equivalent of two football stadiums full of anxious children. Now these children are in tatty bed and breakfast accommodation, run-down hotels or temporary housing, often damp and unhealthy, sometimes far from school and far from the doctors and from nana’s house.

They are homeless while houses stand empty. There are 11 million empty homes across Europe, and between 600,000 to 700,000 in the UK depending on which measurement is used. 22 million bedrooms are empty each night. This is constructed poverty, poverty amidst plenty.

Homelessness extends from rough sleepers to sofa surfers, from adults returning to their parents’ home, to the families with children. This homelessness is not their fault: it’s structural, built into the way this society has been constructed. Personal debt has never been higher, with personal debt quadrupling since 1990, with many finding they have no choice but to borrow to get by, nor has there been a higher housing cost to wages ratio: in Copeland, Cumbria, for example, house prices have risen by 145% over the past 10 years but incomes by just 5%.

Until the housing “boom” in the early part of this century if you bought a house the mortgage was reasonably affordable and if you rented a council house you had an affordable rent in a secure tenancy. Unless something when very badly wrong you were safe in that house and such houses often passed down from parent to adult child.

Today, tenants of private landlords can be evicted on two months notice if is it is a shorthold tenancy. It often suits the landlord to make someone move on. However if you are evicted it can make it much harder to get another private tenancy, so most people go without a fight. Sometimes, if a tenant complains about damp or disrepair, the landlord will evict them in what’s called a “revenge eviction”. There was a bill in parliament to ban revenge evictions – but two Tory MPs “talked out” the bill in order to block it.

Such is the extent of the housing crisis, we now have beds in sheds across the capital and other areas. We need a major campaign in the coming election to demand our housing rights.

Come to ‘Raise the Roof for Housing’, in Liverpool on Saturday 7 March. Register online here.