Housing - Crisis point
WORKERS, SEPT 2007 ISSUE
Unions at the TUC will draw attention to the UK housing crisis, with average house prices in excess of £200,000, and rising at 11.3 per cent over the year.
The Defend Council Housing Conference in July showed how trade unionists and tenants across England, Wales and Scotland have stepped up the pressure for the "fourth option" agreed at the 2006 Labour conference, but subsequently reneged on. This would allow local authorities to retain and finance their own stock from ring-fenced housing revenue, without the government siphoning it off to subsidise the national budget.
Unions will call for a major programme of investment in affordable homes for rent and for sale, noting that the number of new households continues to outstrip the number of new homes every year. This shortfall helps to create an increasingly overcrowded section of the working class struggling to retain a roof over its head. Homelessness is an economic and political consequence of capitalist enterprise, such as buying to let or for speculation – a fact denied by many with a "caring" conscience in the unions, for whom the dispossessed are simply a naturally occurring social phenomenon.
There will be a council house building programme again after 30 years. Hundreds of thousands of local authority homes are needed annually, yet under Labour just 54 were built in 1999. A target of 3 million new homes has been set by 2020. But Unison in particular will warn that with people priced out of the market right across Britain, with inflation massively outstripping wages, and with increasing levels of personal debt, the Gordon Brown response does not match the scale of the problem. He has already said that he will be relying heavily on housing associations – a form of privatisation.
In August the number of homes repossessed rose to its highest level for seven years – up 30 per cent over the past year. But we have been here before: capitalist economics will never provide enough homes. How refreshing it would be if unions were to start talking about building a working class strategy to achieve this.