Trying to find somewhere to live?

The last three governments - two Tory, one New Labour, have been handing over housing to the private market with no awareness of the extent of the homelessness this would cause. The overspending on housing benefit has come about because it was a short-term method of preventing the homelessness which is now about to overtake the country. There will be more sleeping on the streets, crowding into the hostels and bed and breakfasts as rents become unaffordable.

New Labour did nothing to stop the sale of council flats, and these were often bought by speculators whose only intention was to sell them on at higher rates. "Buy to let" became a recognised way of making money. As recounted in the excellent Fabian Society handbook "In the Mix" by James Gregory, private developers and the housing associations which took over public housing have used market profit to cross-subsidise public housing. "The collapse of the market has now left us with a complete collapse of public housing supply," he says.

While New Labour concentrated obsessively on encouraging"aspiration" and getting the workers off the jobs vital to the country and into university education, they turned their backs on the need for either a replacement of, or a return to, the old council housing provision. They failed to withdraw the rights to sell council housing. The ludicrously high property prices can be traced directly to the shortage of housing in the country as a whole. This suits landlords and developers interested only in making huge money out of selling homes.

Both the Tories and LibDems now speak openly of places "where people cannot afford to live". Oh - so their parents and grandparents could afford it, but not the present generation? In the 'sixties, a Tory government took all restrictions off rent, and places like Notting Hill became sinister sites of evictions, with dogs and whips being used to turn out residents from leaking flats if they could not pay higher rents. Mandy Rice-Davies, a witness in a case involving the Tory minister John Profumo having shared the prostitute Christine Keeler with a Russian during the Cold War, spoke of her relationship with a Mr. Rachman. This started a deluge of investigations, resulting in the discovery that he was a ruthless rent racketeer, terrorising tenants. There were revelations of housing scandals, published first by the Insight column in the Sunday Times. Eventually, rents were brought under control, Rachmanism was stopped, and new housing, and council flats were built near Notting Hill and other places in London where rents had outstripped people's ability to pay.
Now the squares and streets where Rachmanism flourished are fashionable districts said now to be "too expensive" for low-income people to expect to be able to live in, and where the Prime Minister, who lives in Notting Hill, will be capping the housing benefit payments which enable some still to do so.
The Thatcher period saw the introduction of the idea that to be a proper grown-up, you had to own property, and New Labour did not dispel this.
Probably the best example in London of the new millionaire's bolthole is Hampstead near the Heath, where houses can now be priced at £15m. In the 'sixties, the original Hampstead residents were turned out of the picturesque cottages near the high street, now unaffordable except by the very rich. But there were some consciences around in those days. Both Tory and Labour in the old Hampstead town councils, built large council estates near the centre and preserved the big tenements provided in the previous century by charities. They also offered mortgages to first-time b uyers. The same went for other areas of London, including Westminster. The estates and tenements are still there - but for how long will people be able to afford to live in them? ends