Housing answers
JEREMY CORBYN suggests an easy way to solve the housing crisis.
BARKING MP Margaret Hodge's attempt to enter the housing debate last week was a gift to the British National Party.
She suggested that there should be some sort of priority in housing based on long-term residence.
The BNP made the most of her comments, which have encouraged a largely negative debate about the "rights" of people to access scarce resources such as housing when they are legally resident in Britain.
Access to council housing has often been a basis for reactionary and racist debate.
It was used by the fascists in the 1930s, again by Colin Jordan and the fascists of the 1950s and by the racists of the 1960s. Many local authorities operated an allocation system so heavily weighted in favour of long-term residents that it became an effective barrier to black or Asian people gaining decent housing.
But determined action by Labour local authorities in the 1970s ensured that council housing was allocated on the basis of need, not ethnicity.
Hodge herself was a very effective chairwoman of housing in Islington in the '70s, when she very stoutly opposed any discrimination in housing allocation.
The argument then, as now, that the allocation of housing should be based on needs not ethnicity or nationality, is an overwhelming one. To allocate on any other basis is obviously wrong but it is also counterproductive in any rational sense.
Children growing up in overcrowded and unhealthy conditions do less well at school, suffer worse health and do not realise their full potential. The chronically sick who need appropriate accommodation deserve it.
While the responses of the many deputy leadership candidates to Hodge's statement were welcome, some very serious questions need to be asked and answered in this debate.
In the last full year of the Wilson/Callaghan Labour governments, 100,000 council dwellings were constructed and housing waiting lists were going down very rapidly. The target of a genuine choice in housing was almost reached.
But then Margaret Thatcher and the Tories decided to promote sales of council properties at huge discounts. The opportunity to buy and profit from the transaction was, to many, simply irresistible.
Eighteen years of Tory government left a terrible legacy. Billions of pounds was needed just to catch up with the backlog of capital repairs on estates and street properties and there were enormous waiting lists within the shrinking council and housing association sectors.
The government's response since 1997 has been mixed, bordering on the schizophrenic. It set out to meet its "decent homes standards" by 2010. While this and cash for capital repairs are both welcome in principle, there are major flaws in its strategy.
Chancellor Gordon Brown has been an obsessive follower of private-sector methods. He has forced tenants into a "Hobson's choice" of choosing between stock transfer, an arm's-length management organisation or remaining as council tenants. Those who chose to remain with the council were punished by being given less money for repairs and improvements.
The Department of Communities has now gone even further. It has proposed that the lifetime security of tenancies should be scrapped, that rent controls should be swapped for market forces and that, in general, everyone should be persuaded to buy property.
All this "blue-skies thinking" is totally removed from reality.
I represent an inner-city community which is generally not wealthy, has huge social problems and where there is enormous housing demand. About 80 per cent of the population cannot afford to buy property within the borough of Islington. This is a common feature of London and south-east England and it is increasingly the case in other parts of the country too.
The government has promoted schemes for key-worker housing and part-rent, part-buy. While everyone acknowledges that nurses, teachers and care workers are "key," this strategy begs the question, What about the others?
A hospital cleaner is vital to a hospital. So is a plumber. So is a road sweeper. The list is endless.
The part-rent, part-buy schemes are unaffordable to many. Meanwhile, the stress of housing gets worse, as do the tensions surrounding it.
The only realistic way forward for the Department of Communities is to stop playing around with "market solutions" and to look seriously at housing need and how it will be met.
The crisis in London is so desperate that councils routinely place families in private rented flats knowing that they can reclaim the rent through housing benefit.
This means that rents can reach up to £300 per week, more than three times the equivalent council cost. Since this is paid by the benefits system, it becomes a trap that prevents people working and it provides a huge subsidy to the private landlord industry.
How much better it would be to invest in new bricks and mortar rather than subsidising the private sector. Does Brown really want to be remembered as the landlords' friend?
Campaigning organisation Defend Council Housing recently published an excellent pamphlet entitled Dear Gordon.
It opens by pointing out the obvious - that investing in building new housing is the answer to Britain's needs.
There are over 1.5 million people on waiting lists for decent homes and, as Labour MP Austin Mitchell points out in his introduction, "it is largely dogma which stands in the way" of investment.
He writes: "The alternative is clear - ring-fence all money belonging to council housing to finance an investment allowance, create a level playing field on debt write-off and borrowing, meet and maintain a decent homes standard and encourage best practice."
The debate about who should be entitled to housing is in danger of descending into a nasty, divisive and very dangerous argument about race and mobility.
The new Labour never-never land of eternal market optimism cannot provide decent homes for everyone.
After 10 years of tinkering with the market solutions, making landlords very rich and fuelling a crazy buy-to-let market, it is past time to change course and meet the social necessity of decent homes for all.
As the candidates for deputy leader queue up behind Brown, they should be pledging a real change of course.
Jeremy Corbyn is Labour MP for Islington North. He can be contacted at corbynj@parliament.uk
For further details on Defend Council Housing, visit www.defendcouncilhousing.org.uk
