Angela Rayner, the Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and the current Housing Secretary, made headlines earlier this month for her controversial comments about the housing crisis.
‘We can’t have a situation where we have a desperate housing crisis and we can’t build houses’, Rayner said while discussing Labour’s pledge to build 1.5 million new homes.
Her comments were Controversial because the housing crisis is not a crisis regarding the number of houses, as the media reports, at all. What it’s actually a crisis of, however, is price.
Buy-to-let is going through the roof for the few, while buy-to-live remains a distant dream for the many.
Because houses are being bought in their masses by private landlords who are simply out to make a quick buck, house prices are rising (official figures show that rent prices rose by 10% this year), as home quality is declining. Why? Because landlords don’t care. As long as they’re making money out of you, that’s all they’re bothered about, a fact that is emphasised by the number of people who are claiming benefits…
Last year, when 22.6 million people in England, Scotland, and Wales were claiming some form of benefit, more than one-fifth of landlords were making over £1,000 in pre-tax profit on their portfolio each month. It is for this reason that there were over 300,000 people forced onto the streets this year, despite there being more than enough houses for everyone.
And, to reiterate the point again, this isn’t because of too few houses being built, either, it’s because too many houses are being bought for the purpose of making a profit instead of for their actual purpose, to provide a roof over someone’s head.
How can a party which is supposedly ‘for the people’ sit by and let this happen? How is it fair that there are people in the UK who own several houses, while others can’t even afford to rent a house?
The situation is even worse in tourist areas, too, where homes are being bought and marketed as B&Bs, and luxury high rises are taking the construction resources away from council houses in major cities like London.
I never thought I’d see the day when the Labour Party needed reminding that people come before profits, yet it’s 2024, and here we are. Putting profits over people, and people and profits over the planet…
Councils are being ‘pushed into’ building new houses on green belt sites to account for the housing crisis, as outlined in a document by the Ministry of Housing, Communities, & Local Government, despite Labour’s manifesto promising to preserve the green belt.
‘Say one thing to get in power, get in power, and then do the complete opposite’, this is the government’s real manifesto. Like keeping the right-to-buy scheme, which has seen two-thirds of council homes being transferred from public to private hands over the last four decades.
Why are profits always prioritised over people?
Under the labour government of the 1970s, local authorities were buying properties from private landlords and turning them into council homes. When the Conservatives came into power in 1979, however, this all changed with the introduction of the right-to-buy scheme.
The scheme, which was introduced by Margaret Thatcher in 1980, played, and continues to play, a major role in the housing crisis.
While the right-to-buy scheme was brought in to give people in council houses an opportunity to own their own homes, as they increased in value, many people ended up selling them on and subsequently moving on, meaning they are now in the possession of private landlords ( a staggering 40% of former right-to-buy properties are, in fact)…
Unable to afford to buy a house of their own, renters will pay the asking price, however extortionate, because what other choice do they have when council housing is almost all but a thing of the past?…
How can anyone expect to save up to buy a house of their own when they spend all of their wages each month paying their rent?
‘For most people, owning one’s house is a basic and natural desire’, was the argument the conservatives used to justify the right-to-buy scheme when it was introduced, yet the hypocrisy of their logic was (/is) stark.
‘Owning one’s house is a natural desire’ they say, ‘so we’ll make sure that houses are sold to private landlords who will hike the prices up so high that you’ll never be able to escape the hell hole that is renting in the twenty-first century’, they might as well say…
While the right-to-buy scheme worked well for some people on an individual level, (as this article in the Guardian points out, Phil Salter, a 79-year-old retiree, bought his council house in the early 80s for £17,000. When it was valued at £80,000 in 1989, he sold it and put the money towards buying a £135,000 cottage which is now valued at £1.1m), for society, the cost was evidently high…
The privatisation of homes is the gateway to the desensitisation of souls.
To address the crisis in renting then, we must keep homes in the social sector, thus giving councils the ability to properly cater for the demands of its people over the profits of their landlords. Only by doing this will we get to a place where people are not forced onto the streets for not being able to line the pocket of, yet another, money-hungry landlord.