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The architects of destruction
The Tories want to end all social housing – and the policies buried deep in their draft law expose these sinister intentions, explains SIMON ELMER
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THE Housing and Planning Bill is one of the most dangerous and far-reaching pieces of legislation to threaten this country in a long time. Yet its true impact has been unreported in the mainstream press and is largely unknown to the people it will most affect.
Far from addressing the housing crisis, it has been designed to bring about the end of social housing in this country.
To call it a “housing Bill” doesn’t do justice to the real scope of its ambitions. The intrusive new measures it introduces for monitoring social housing tenants, and the centralisation of power to ministers, makes the Bill a social engineering plan that will have catastrophic consequences for the people of Britain.
If this Bill had been written to do what the government is presenting it as doing — helping people to get on the property ladder, freeing up existing social housing for those most in need and cutting bureaucracy on planning permission — it would merely be a deeply misinformed piece of legislation that has taken no account of existing conditions in housing.
But it isn’t that. It is, in fact, an extremely subtle and duplicitous piece of legislation that in almost every aspect does something very different, if not the direct opposite, of what it is claiming to do. If passed, the Bill will:
nReplace the obligation to build homes for social rent with a duty to build discounted “starter homes” capped at prices of £450,000 in Greater London and £250,000 across the rest of England. This is, in effect, offering state subsidies for private investors, who may then sell their assets at full market value within five years of their purchase.
nExtend the right to buy to those living in housing association homes, without any provision for their like-for-like replacement. This will effectively oversee the further decline in the number of homes for social rent.
nCompel local authorities to sell “high-value” housing, thereby exploiting London’s exaggerated property values either to transfer public housing into private hands or to free up its coveted land for property developers.
nForce so-called “high income” tenants with a total household income over £30,000 in England (£40,000 in London) to pay market rents. This is targeting low-paid working families, those on the minimum wage or claiming disability allowances who cannot afford either to pay to stay in their existing homes or to exercise their right to buy.
nGrant planning permission in principle for housing estates designated as such to be redeveloped as “brownfield land,” a term usually used to describe former industrial or commercial land that requires cleaning up — but applied here (as it has been by the Housing and Planning Minister and the Conservative candidate for London mayor) to the communities that live on these estates.
nPhase out secure tenancies and their succession to children and replace them with two to five-year tenancies, after which tenants will have to reapply, with such tenancies also being applied to tenants who have been “decanted” for the purposes of the demolition and redevelopment of their estates.
Rather than alleviating the housing crisis, either by building genuinely affordable homes or by increasing provision of social housing, the Bill seeks to use that crisis for political and financial ends.
On the one hand, it forces local housing authorities to implement Conservative housing policy. On the other, it takes planning power away from those authorities. Both these hands will now belong to the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government — currently Greg Clark. Ministerial powers over social tenants, councils and housing associations have reached new heights.
There is absolutely nothing in the Bill for the provision of social housing. Instead, it introduces legislation by which existing social housing is to be either sold into private ownership or demolished to make way for new developments.
The Bill’s model of home building is driven by state-subsidised incentives for private investors that will increase, rather than check, existing speculation on the property market. Under the tattered banner of austerity, the Housing and Planning Bill is actually legislation for the social cleansing — of London in particular — and more generally for the further dismantling of the welfare state by this Conservative government.
- Simon Elmer is a co-founder of Architects for Social Housing (Ash).
- The Housing and Planning Bill receives its third and final reading in the House of Commons tomorrow. Activists and trade unionists will be protesting against the Bill and for secure and genuinely affordable social housing for all. You are invited to join them outside Parliament at 1pm.
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