Profiting from the housing shortage

The rent racketeers     1.








       " These people can't afford to live in Hampstead.   They just don't have enough money.     I'm going to sell the flats, they are worth a lot now".   Tidy properties they were,  a little square of well-tended flats with small gardens, one of them occupied by a local postman.     The new owner was quite young but well aware of the profits that might be made in Hampstead if its ancient tradition of mixed income housing could be broken up.        Further up the street, a row of houses built for local workers and traders in 1890, had already been bought up and the families living in them, usually three to each house with a flat on each floor,, evicted.
        Not so very different, then, from the recently publicised couple, obese and self-satisfied, who declared on Channel 4 television news their intention to evict hundreds of tenants who were having  rents paid by housing benefit.       The only difference was a separation of 50 years between the two events.    
        There was a happy ending for the 1960's flat dwellers.   The Guardian and other papers carried stories about it, pointing out that the flats could be compulsorily purchased by the local council.    This was done.   The tenantss were able to stay in their homes.  This would not happen now.
            There are few happy endings today.   In the 'sixties, I covered Rachmanism for my paper.  I spent hours trudging round the now-fashionable and then slummy Notting Hill (earlier I had carried out the same function in the slums of Leeds).   You could stop anyone on a pavement, explain what you were looking for, and almost certainly be taken to living conditions so appalling that you could not believe that even higher rents were being demanded for them.   The worst were the hundreds crowded into St. Stephen's Gardens, where one flat can now be worth millions but a place I still cannot look at without a shudder of remembrance.     The mother in the kitchen with the ceiling falling down, the rain coming through, nothing to cook with, the children crowded into one bed, the freezing cold, and tales of the cruel landlord coming round with fierce dogs to demand ever-higher rents, in pain of eviction.   Going back to a warm, spacious house was simply to experience shame.       Two tenants I still remember were asking for my help to get the landlord to let them keep their inadequate home in a garage from which he was trying to evict them..    The main organiser of the evictions, Rachman, became so infamous that he gave birth to the term "Rachmanism" as a symbol of ruthless exploitation of tenants.   In later years, I met him briefly, complacent about his actions.
      He first became known during the trial of Stephen Ward after the political scandal of the M.P. Profumo who had been having an affair with the same girl, Christine Keeler, as a Soviet agent.  I covered some days of the trial.   A witness, Mandy Rice- Davies, in the course of her evidence, spoke of a ruthless landlord involved  in this world and gave his name - Rachman.    The Insight team from editor Harold Evan's Sunday Times followed this up and  exposed  the shocking conditions of tenants  which no journalist seemed to have been aware of before.   I went to Notting Hill where many of the tenants were newly-arrived from the West Indies, as they were then known,      The affair of the overcharged and evicted tenants throughout the country became a national scandal, even though the night chief subeditor groaned "Not another story about broken lavatories, please."   No, there was nothing cheerful about the story,, and it was all much grimmer than non-working lavatories.
        But this , so long ago, had a good ending.   Rents were restricted.   No one could be evicted without a court order, and it meant most tenants were now safe from "rack renting" as it was known and the profiteering landlords, and from being turned out on to the streets.    Rent tribunals were set up and  the new Labour government, under its housing minister Dick Crossman  started on one of the most ambitious housing programmes the country has ever known.    Modern flats were built in Notting Hill near the old slums, where they still stand in contrast to the millionaire residences in St. Stephen's Gardens.      All over the country, modern flats were going up, high rise, often aesthetically unappealing, but giving safe and comfortable shelter instead of slums.
          An ambitious housing target has now been set by the Coalition government.   But meanwhile, as in the 'sixties, greedy, unscrupulous landlords are making huge profits out of the housing shortage, putting up rents and evicting tenants who cannot pay, forcing them to join the huge ranks of the homeless.   What is being done about this?   Will the government dare to start rent controls  and now they are having to foot the bill in benefits for higher rents which was not the case in the long-ago past  and stop it being an investment free-for-all?   Many  evictions are still required to have court orders before they can be carried out.  Two tenants I know spoke of the courts usually finding for the landlords, and there are a multiplicity of  rules for different kinds of  tenancies.
          The importance of a large-scale housing programme has now been recognised as more urgent than the last government's priority of getting more people to university.     People need jobs and somewhere to live.   The scandal of the high rents and eviction culture, the encouragement of buy-to-let investment has to stop.   The traditions of the post-war idealistic Attlee government need to be brought back.  Then we can be proud of our country again.