Background to the Labour Campaign for Council Housing

These are the notes of a speech by Carol Hayton, founding member of the Labour Campaign for Council Housing, given to Witney CLP.

Formed in 2019 by a group of Labour members who were concerned about the housing crisis and the lack of political will, on the part of successive governments, to take any meaningful action to address the crisis. Which is still with us. It has resulted in so many people in need of a home to rent finding themselves in accommodation that is :

• overcrowded or
• Insecure or
• Unaffordable or
• Poor Quality

and often it is all of those things, and in some instances those at the sharpest end of the crisis are without any kind of housing at all.

There are a number of things that have contributed to what has now been described by the Department of Housing, Communities and Local Government as “the worst housing crisis in living memory”.

Although it’s interesting they have expressed it in those terms, for some young people, this is a crisis that has been there throughout their living memory, not something that has just emerged and taken us all by surprise.

This is a chronic crisis. There are several reasons for the crisis. Chief among the contributors is the sell-off of council housing under ‘right to buy’ and the failure to provide government funding to ensure, not only that those homes are replaced, but more council housing is built to meet the increased demand as house prices, and rents, in the private sector increase beyond the means of so many.

Another contributor is the failure to regulate rents in the private sector in a way that will increase affordability there, and affordability of so-called affordable rents in the social sector, which are linked to market rents. In my own town of Horsham, the rent for a one-bedroom former council flat is around £1,100 a month, that’s the lower end of rents. An affordable rent would therefore be in the region of £880 a month. The Local Housing Allowance for a one-bed property is £858. 00 a month. So even homes that are offered with ‘affordable rents’ by housing associations in Horsham are not affordable to many of those who need to access them.

So going back to the Labour Campaign for Council Housing, we believe these key contributors could and should be resolved by the government with the investment in and delivery of a large-scale council house building programme, or, more accurately in view of the current level of demand, a massive scale council house building programme, which will ensure that there are homes that are available at a social rent for those that need them.

We also believe that housing should be, as was intended by the post-war Labour government, as much a pillar of the welfare state as education and health care. This was to a certain extent the case from the post-war government until the early 80’s with the introduction of Margaret Thatcher’s ‘right to buy’ scheme, which has, to date, seen over 2 million council homes sold. There has been a net loss of council homes every year since 1981, despite commitments from the Tory government in 2012 that every additional home sold would be replaced on a one-for-one basis. This was never achieved and last year for example 6000 homes were sold under right to buy and only half that number were replaced.

The right to buy was the first indication of the government policymakers’ view that direct provision of social housing was not the role of local or national government. This continued under the last Labour government with a strategy to transfer that responsibility to housing associations, with the view that these organisations could leverage in money from the private sector to match government funding, but the reality was that the housing association sector did not have the capacity, or even necessarily the inclination, to take on such a huge task. When this began to be evident the Labour Government suggested that the private- rented sector should play a larger role in the provision of homes to rent. And that became increasingly the case. As the social rented sector declined in size, the private rented sector grew and took over as the second largest around 2010.

Currently Owner occupation is the largest tenure with 65 % of households in this category, down from a peak in 2003 of 71%.

The private rented sector has 19% of households. This has doubled in size since the early 2000’s. And with that increase, we have seen an increase in the unaffordability of rent, a lack of security in the rented sector, and a decline in standards in some areas.

And social housing is now the smallest sector with 16% of households, of which only 6% are in council homes. In the late 1960s 30% of households lived in a council house or flat. This massive change in the availability of council housing contributes to:

• the huge increase in the numbers on council housing registers, currently 1.3 million households,
• and arguably the huge increase in the numbers of homeless,
• record levels in temporary accommodation, 123, 100 households across the country,
• huge levels of overcrowding,
• and a record amount now being paid in housing benefits to private sector landlords.

As mentioned, the Labour Campaign for Council Housing believes, as do many other bodies, that the government can and should take action to resolve this crisis by:

• investing in a large-scale council/ social rent house-building programme,
• And ending the sell-off of council homes to stop the decline in the badly needed council housing stock.

In 2019, lobbying the Labour Leadership team for a solution to the housing crisis was particularly vital as it seemed a Labour government was imminent. It turned out to be not quite as imminent as we had hoped, which was a shame as Labour had responded to the campaign with some very clear commitments around council house building in the manifesto. As Labour didn’t win that election we continued to lobby, urging the Labour Party to make similar commitments in future election manifestos and to make council house building a central part of its campaigning. Our housing motions to the conference have been very well supported by members. We have written letters and met with shadow ministers, and over recent years we have seen a growing call for the kinds of policy we are proposing, being called for by local government, the housing sector, and homelessness campaign groups, as the crisis has become more acute. But we have to say the response we have received from the Labour Party shadow and now ministerial team has been, lukewarm at best.

We have seen more council homes built and a greater commitment to the state’s role in building council homes and it has been good to hear the talk of council house revolutions and commitment to increase funding for affordable housing through the Affordable Homes Programme, But the government’s commitment to action has not been strong enough. They have not been clear enough about how they will resolve the affordability issue which, in our view is the key issue, or even their definition of affordable homes in many of their proposals. So, we continue to press the government on these points.

So what has the government done or promised to do so far?

The government issued a statement on 18th December which outlines its key points. They have recently announced almost £1 billion of new funding for councils in England this year to tackle and prevent homelessness. This is welcome but is nowhere near enough. Local authorities are under huge amounts of pressure from the increased demand on their homeless services, This funding will help to alleviate some of that by spending more on front-line services that support homeless people. But this is a service area that has received huge amounts of funding over the years and which has not resulted in a significant reduction in the homeless numbers. In fact these figures have increased, except during the Covid period, and this in our view is largely because there is such a shortage of permanent accommodation available for the homeless. And with a record number of households in temporary accommodation, and councils struggling to find and afford accommodation to meet further demand, unless we increase the supply of genuinely affordable homes, the funding provided is unlikely to change much. And we will continue to see councils putting people in totally inappropriate accommodation in B and Bs and hotels and converted office blocks and we don’t think that’s acceptable.

The government says it is committed to the biggest boost in social and affordable housing in a generation. Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner has told us that she will deliver a council house revolution, and let’s hope she does, but it is very unclear how she will achieve that. The extra funding of £500 million allocated to the Affordable Housing Proramme in the chancellor’s recent budget, it was said, would deliver 10’s of thousands of affordable homes across the country. The problem is that we need at least 90, 000 social rent homes a year to resolve the crisis. This funding, with the term affordable housing undefined, will be a drop in the ocean, even if it was all allocated to the building of homes for social rent.

The government is committed to ending no-fault evictions under the renter’s reform bill. This was a policy proposal agreed but undelivered by the last government. It is now desperately needed. I volunteer at Citizens Advice in Crawley where we have private rented sector tenants turning up daily clutching section 21 notices from landlords who want to increase their rents beyond what they know their existing tenants can afford, we need this legislation to go through urgently. The bill was introduced in September, but it is unclear when it will be passed.

The reform of planning, we are told, will deliver more affordable housing but again, affordable has not been well defined and there is no target set for the number of genuinely affordable homes that will be delivered. Even the ‘gold standard’ that was set to be applied to greyfield sites which were to be required to deliver 50% affordable, has been watered down. When we already have a situation where developers go out of their way to reduce the required amount of affordable homes on a development, it’s disappointing that this fell at the first hurdle.

Reforms to the Right to Buy scheme

From November the government reduced the level of discount to pre-2012 levels i.e. ranging from £16,000 to £38,000 The last Labour government reduced the discounts on Right to Buy, which had some impact on the level of sales, but this will not be nearly enough to stop the net decline unless councils can fund replacement and increase stock. Additionally, a future Tory government could increase the discount again as it did in 2012 and quickly eliminate any benefit achieved through the reduction. Only the complete abolition will provide a firm basis for the restoration of stock numbers to enable more of those in need of a council home to access one.

There has been a suggestion that new council homes will not be subject to the Right to Buy, which would be a welcome measure, but it does not yet appear to be included in any official announcements.

The government consultation document on Right to Buy says ‘The Right to Buy provides an important route for social housing tenants to own their own homes, many of whom may not otherwise be able to access home ownership, boosting social mobility and opportunity for families across the country.’ What it neglects to say is that opportunity is only available to a limited number of people and those who are already adequately housed, to the detriment of many more who need a safe secure and affordable home and do not have one.

Rent settlement for social housing will be increased by CPI plus 1%. Apparently to give the providers the stability they need to finance house building. It looks like existing tenants are being required to provide that stability which should be provided by the government.

So there is a long way to go – we will continue to campaign

We are a membership organisation so welcome anyone interested in joining us. We have a website, Facebook page and Twitter account which you can easily find if you google Labour campaign for Council Housing. Included on our website are a number of resolutions that we encourage Labour Party units to submit as appropriate and with the regional conferences coming up we hope that is something you will consider.