Cameron's housing policy seems crafted to turn a crisis into a catastrophe, for aspiring owners and the most vulnerable
In a back alley behind a shop on Romford Road, in east London, a family of four sleep in one bed in a tiny room – a sliver of a property without planning permission to be a family residence. The boiler is broken, and the baby and toddler are cold, but no one knows who the landlord is. So Newham council officers step in to fix the boiler, cheaper than rehousing in this crisis time.
Newham, the first authority to try to licence all its private landlords, is prosecuting 134 of the worst. So far 40% of privately rented properties have been identified as "category 1 hazards". The £500 licence doesn't cover the scheme's cost: perversely, the council can't keep fines imposed on landlords.
Last month an absentee landlord who failed to register was in court for putting four families on four floors, the basement family sharing its kitchen with the rest, although the ceiling had fallen in and there had been no electricity for eight weeks. With rent at £350 a month per room, his £6,500 fine was negligible. Another landlord with 50 properties is a serial violent harasser of his tenants. Elsewhere, as more landlords evict those on housing benefits, the third of Britain's children in private rented homes are at constant risk of removal from their neighbourhood and school.
This realm of squalor and exploitation seemed all but abolished by the 1970s after decades of government building under Attlee, Macmillan and Wilson. But Rachmanism is back. The Economist reports on the shrinking size of dwellings as landlords subdivide houses, turn living rooms into bedrooms and put beds in garden sheds – the old Parker-Morris size standard long gone.
This government inherited an acute housing shortage: Labour and Tory governments neither built nor intervened in a market failure where private developers didn't build despite astronomic price booms. But David Cameron's policies seem crafted to turn a crisis into a catastrophe, both for aspiring owners and the most vulnerable. His new Right to Buy gives tenants a discount of up to 70%, causing a stampede. Newham's mayor, Sir Robin Wales, calls it a "disaster". A Newham solicitor tells me she has just helped a tenant buy a council house for £45,000: they can let it out for £700 a month and sell it in five years for four times as much. Over a third of ex-council homes are buy-to-let, some multi-occupied, damaging estates; and rents are on average £230 up on the old rents charged by councils – a bill picked up by housing benefit. What sense does that make? The dwindling number of council tenants may hit the jackpot, but the idea of solid estates with mixed communities has gone.
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