According to the charity Crisis and the New Policy Institute, approximately 400,000 people in the UK are considered to be part of the “hidden homeless”. At the sharp end this figure includes the thousands of people who are rough sleepers on Britain’s streets. But the vast majority are individuals and families residing in bed and breakfasts, hostels and overcrowded environments across the country. Decades of Tory and Labour underinvestment, coupled with the Right to Buy policy, has left councils depleted of their highest quality housing stock, leaving around 1.5 million people waiting for a council house and forcing thousands into substandard accommodation.
Richard Best, of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, found that Right to Buy has yielded around £45 billion pounds since its inception, yet only a quarter of this revenue has been recycled into improving public housing. Instead, the money is being used to offer subsidies for affordable housing that remains unaffordable to many ordinary working people.
In order to address these problems, Labour has sought to incentivise the involvement of the private sector and marketise public housing wherever possible. The government offers debt write-offs and increased investment to local councils if they adopt one of three privatising options. Stock transfers, Private Finance Initiatives (PFIs), and the introduction of Arms-Length Management Organisations (ALMOs) move ownership and control out of the hands of democratically elected local councils to privately run housing associations where there exists little or no democratic accountability.
There is a ‘fourth option’, which would provide direct investment and put local government back in control of social housing supply. But investment is only provided to business-minded ALMOs and Housing Association boards at the expense of more democratic and sustainable alternatives, such as tenant management organisation and housing co-operatives.
Where tenants of local councils elect their landlord, privatisation has no such democratic relationship. The election of tenant board members to ALMOs is a fig leaf behind which a less democratic and marketised housing sector is increasingly being imposed on local authorities and many of society’s poorest and most vulnerable citizens.
Millions of pounds worth of investment is a very hard incentive to resist if an ALMO or PFI is the only way to obtain it. The Government should provide equal finances for the achievement of the Decent Homes Standard for those local authorities who chose to retain their housing stock. Instead, press-ganged privatisation sees rents rise as a direct consequence of stock transfer and increasing pressure on housing associations to maximise their income. Councils, then, are penalised for choosing to keep housing management and stock under democratic control.
These attempts to privatise housing stock through the back door have introduced socially inequitable affects on both tenants and public sector workers. When transferring from the public to the private sector, workers’ salaries, pensions and rights become threatened if there is a “financial, technical or organisational necessity” for them to be cut. It also means that there is no guarantee for future workers to be protected by the welfare benefits that public sector workers have enjoyed for generations.
The Green Party has recently been involved in considerable local success in opposing ALMOs in Oxford and Swansea. It is right that Greens put themselves at the forefront of campaigns fighting and voting against all ALMO, stock transfer and PFI initiatives as a matter of principle. It is, therefore, essential that Greens voice and act upon our polices to provide equal access to housing for all who need it within a housing sector that is more democratic, rather than less, and provides incentives for sustainable development rather than privatisation.
www.defendcouncilhousing.org.uk
