by Paul Kershaw, Enfield and Lea Valley Socialist Party
Most of us don’t need figures to be convinced that the cost of housing is a growing problem — but the figures do give a sense of the scale of the housing emergency. The inflationary fallout from war threatens to make it worse; we need a serious fightback.
Housing costs in Britain have risen by an eye-watering 41% over the last five years, according to the property group Savills.
The rise was partly driven by rising interest rates which hit people with mortgages directly as well as driving rents up. It means that housing is now more unaffordable than at any time on record. Further interest rate rises driven by the US-Israeli war on Iran now loom.
By March 2025 rents reached 36.1% of earnings on average, the highest proportion on record, according to the Chartered Institute of Housing annual review. This crisis hits young people particularly hard; 18 to 25-year-olds spend half their income on rent.
The parties of the capitalist establishment, from Reform and the Tories to the Labour government, are absolutely opposed to controls on rents, despite numerous opinion polls showing overwhelming support for rent caps. This year a poll for the Greater London Authority showed that three in four Londoners support rent control. Notably, polls have shown that a big majority of Tory and Reform UK voters support rent control. But when it is a choice of banks and landlords or renters, their leaders know what side they are on.
It is no surprise that homelessness figures have hit a record high. But many workers are barely managing to cover the rent. Employers like to use measures of inflation that exclude housing costs when calculating cost-of-living pay increases, trade unions must expose that and fight for pay rises that match our real living costs.
Social housing
‘Social’ rents, the lowest supposedly affordable rents charged by housing associations and councils, are government-controlled, but Starmer’s Labour government has recently committed to allow them to be increased by more than inflation every year for a decade. That follows lobbying by social landlords who argue that rents need to go up in order to attract investment – tenants pay more in order to boost the profits of banks and financial institutions.
Adding insult to injury, tenants and shared owners face shocking unaffordable ‘service charges’, often bearing no relation to actual services provided.
Research carried out by the housing association tenants campaign group SHAC (Social Housing Action Campaign) shows that more than 63% of landlords were found to be overcharging for services when challenged in a tribunal. Typically, tenants do not have representation at the tribunal, but when they do, they succeed in 80% of cases.
This is profiteering, not just the occasional mistake, and that becomes even more clear when tenants get legal support. Councils should work with tenant and resident groups to support them and arrange advice and legal support to counter profiteering by landlords. Councils’ ‘needs budgets’ should, alongside investment in housing stock, include resources to help residents protect themselves from bad landlords.
For example, the housing association Hastoe has told leaseholders at Harrowden Court in Luton that their service charges will go up by £500 per month from April, to cover fire safety work. Residents talk of “significant anxiety and stress” in a recent BBC report.
The BBC quotes Suzanne Muna of SHAC: “We are seeing increases of hundreds of per cent in some cases. The disregard by landlords for the impact of such increases is obscene – it is driving people into debt and into deep despair because they know the charges are extortionate, they can’t pay, but they don’t know where to turn.”
It is vital that the workers’ movement mobilises to keep down rents and demand the building of genuinely affordable council homes. In the past, rent control, secure tenancies and mass council house building were achieved as a result of struggle.
In Spain, the government has responded to the current crisis by introducing a freeze on rents, the measure has automatic extensions until the end of 2027. That should be a minimum emergency step here.
Before Thatcher abolished rent control in the 1980s, rents were assessed in relation to wages and local rent tribunals could order a rent to be lowered if it was not deemed to be a fair rent. To solve the housing crisis we need rent controls, democratically set by local communities based on wages; a programme of mass council house building, to provide housing for all instead of the current race to the bottom; and for local communities to have real democratic say about what gets built and where, for what we need not for the profits of a few.
The Socialist Party fights for:
- A mass good-quality, energy efficient and environmentally friendly council house building campaign. Councils should use their powers to take over empty properties and use them to provide secure housing for all who need it. Stop council housing sell-off
- Rent controls democratically decided by residents so people can afford housing. For council-run works services and landlord registers to improve substandard and dangerous buildings
- End the commercialisation of housing associations and registration of for-profit providers, run in the interests of big business and hedge funds. Take the housing associations into democratic public ownership. This could include the option to return to council ownership with independent tenant democratic control, or co-ops
- Councils to refuse to implement the cuts now and link up with other councils, building a mass working-class campaign to fight for the financial resources to reverse cuts, fund remedial works and for the public services our communities need. Use the wealth of the super-rich and big businesses for what we need not what makes a profit for a few
- Take the big construction companies, alongside the banks and big businesses that dominate the economy, into public ownership under democratic workers’ control and management, with compensation only on the basis of proven need