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People not profit
JEREMY CORBYN on why Brown must take on private house-buildersTHE Labour deputy leadership election did a lot to push Britain's housing crisis up the agenda.
Dagenham MP Jon Cruddas repeatedly raised the issue, calling specifically for more council housing, a demand backed by the Defend Council Housing campaign.
Their efforts had an effect and the direction of debate turned to how to solve the housing problems faced by so many people in Britain.
When Gordon Brown announced his pre-legislative programme last week, he made it clear that the government saw the housing crisis as a real priority.
Having already appointed Yvette Cooper as housing minister with a place at the Cabinet table, he promised new legislation to encourage house-building and announced higher house-building targets.
In an answer to my question on the need for council housing in inner urban areas and the inability of the vast majority of people in London to look forward to buying anything, Brown's response was hopeful.
The PM also conceded that there are problems in the management and accountability of housing associations and, surprisingly, seemed to acknowledge that the burgeoning private rented sector leaves many people's lives in a position of expensive instability.
Any solution to the housing crisis must acknowledge the fact that the people living in the worst levels of housing stress are the ones on council house waiting lists.
These people are either homeless, living in temporary accommodation or living in a grossly overcrowded situation in the private rented sector.
This is not only damaging to the health and wellbeing of many young people but it leads to the break-up of families, anti-social behaviour and crime.
It is also ludicrously expensive.
With local authorities blocked from building housing and the poor record of housing associations in terms of meeting the housing needs of the poorest people, those who are desperate enough to get on housing waiting lists or who are declared homeless are usually placed in the private rented sector by local authorities.
The costs involved are often three to four times the equivalent of the social rented sector and, overwhelmingly, these bills are met by housing benefit payments.
This means that rents of £300-400 a week are being paid by the general public to keep families in overcrowded and often miserable conditions.
It also acts as a benefit trap, because people living in these conditions, if they are lucky enough to get a job, will then have to meet most or all of their housing costs.
The starting salary of people in this situation would need to cover living costs plus up to £15,000 a year for rent. It is the economics of the madhouse.
We should be investing in good-quality housing rather than subsidising poor-quality landlords.
In 1999, a million households in the UK were on housing waiting lists. That figure has now risen to almost 1.6 million - a 60 per cent increase in the last seven years. Over 100,000 households are now forced to live in temporary accommodation. Thirty years ago, the figure was a mere 6,000.
There is a direct connection between private-sector rent levels, housing waiting lists, social misery and the rate of house-building for secure rent.
Over the years, Labour governments have generally been better than Conservative at house-building.
The Wilson government of 1964-70 produced a total of 200,000 new homes a year. While the subsequent Tory government of Ted Heath cut this figure to 100,000, the return of Labour in 1974 saw house-building rise again to 250,000 a year. Even after the International Monetary Fund crisis in the late 1970s, over 100,000 new council units were being built every year.
In 1979, Thatcher's electoral victory had as much to do with offering the right to buy council houses as anything else. Since then, 1.7 million homes have been sold off, mostly at well below market value and accompanied by huge discounts.
Thatcher's government also slashed the house-building budget so that, by the time she left office in 1990, the number of social units built each year was cut to 70,000.
Ironically, the Tory government under John Major actually increased this figure by around 40,000, before it fell dramatically under Tony Blair. In 2003, Britain saw the lowest number of social units constructed since the end of the second world war.
On the day that Brown became prime minister, I asked a parliamentary question on the number of houses constructed by local authorities in London for each of the past three years.
The total for the whole period was six, all in Hillingdon.
Housing associations constructed all London's new social units and the best-performing borough in the capital was Tower Hamlets, east London, which managed 666 new houses in 2005.
Twice that number of private dwellings were constructed in the borough over the same period.
This pattern is being repeated across London and the country as a whole.
Planning rules encourage over-occupation, consigning many families to housing misery and lowering the national objective of meeting housing demand.
The need for housing has become subservient to the wishes of property speculators and developers.
London Mayor Ken Livingstone has done his best to try to use planning law to enforce a higher level of social provision, but this is bitterly resented by property speculators who, bizarrely, claim that construction becomes "unsustainable" if it includes a high proportion of housing for people in desperate need.
When Labour came to power in 1997, it rightly pointed not only to the crisis in housing supply but also a crisis on repairs, conditions and the management of existing publicly owned stock.
To the government's credit, it introduced the decent homes standards, a measure which all publicly owned housing stock has to reach by 2011.
This has brought real improvements to the lives of many people - new windows, kitchens, bathrooms and better community areas on estates all over the country.
However, the improvements have often had a sting in their tail, as tenants have had to accept either wholesale stock transfer from councils to housing associations, the introduction of arm's length management organisations or a private finance initiative.
If tenants refuse any of these three rather unpalatable options and opt to remain with the council, then their authority is denied either a grant or borrowing powers to improve stock, as the London Borough of Camden has found to its cost.
The campaign for the fouth option of remaining a council tenant with the same access to public funds as any others has gathered enormous momentum and won the support of successive Labour Party conferences. It now looks as though it may, at last, become government policy in the housing green paper scheduled for release next week.
The green paper is extremely welcome and I hope that it will recognise that it is the duty of a Labour government to take urgent action on behalf of the 90,000 vulnerable homeless households across Britain, which include 130,000 children, and the 955,000 children who are currently living in overcrowded conditions.
The government must also recognise that it has to take the bull by the horns and ensure that providing everyone with a decent place to live within the next decade is a national priority.
This can be achieved, but it will be met by fierce opposition from the private-sector housing lobby, which thinks that all available building land should be available to it, rather than those in desperate need.
I represent an area which is an estate agents' paradise. Every day, letterboxes are stuffed with glorious pictures of penthouse dwellings, stunning views and everlastingly sunny living rooms.
This is nothing more than an insult to those who are living in appalling privately rented rooms and flats and have no prospect of living anywhere decent to raise their children.
If Labour stands for anything, it must stand for ensuring that everyone can have somewhere decent to live in the foreseeable future.
Jeremy Corbyn is Labour MP for Islington North. He can be contacted at corbynj@parliament.uk
