On Monday and Tuesday, Jeremy Corbyn sat in the House of Commons as Labour MPs rose to denounce him, first for questioning the legal basis of air strikes on Syria, and then for his inadequate response to anti-Semitism in his party.
On Wednesday, his internal critics grumbled that he fluffed his lines about the Windrush scandal during prime minister’s questions – although it emerged later that a killer fact delivered by Theresa May about who decided to destroy the Caribbean immigrants’ landing cards turned out not to be a fact at all.
On Thursday, the Labour leader was on more comfortable ground at the Local Government Association in Westminster, launching a “green paper” on housing that promises a massive, government-funded building programme to address the housing crisis. Flanked by red banners emblazoned with “For the Many, not the Few”, the slogan Corbyn disinterred last year from its Blairite tomb, he said that only state action could put right what has gone wrong.
“When housing has become a site of speculation for a wealthy few, leaving the many unable to access a decent, secure home, something has gone seriously wrong. Luxury flats proliferate across our big cities, while social housing is starved of investment and too many people are living in dangerous accommodation at the mercy of rogue landlords,” he said.
“We need to restore the principle that a decent home is a right owed to all, not a privilege for the few. And the only way to deliver on that right for everyone, regardless of income, is through social housing.”
Sovereign land trust
Under the plan, Labour would build 100,000 affordable homes every year, a level not achieved for 40 years, stop the sell-off of council homes started by Margaret Thatcher, and create a sovereign land trust to make more land available cheaply, partly through the use of compulsory purchase orders.
Crucially, it would change the definition of affordable housing, which is now calculated according to market prices. This means that a house costing £450,000 (€513,000) can be defined as affordable, and that councils define “affordable rent” as up to 80 per cent of the local market rent. Labour would instead calculate affordability on the basis of income, defining an affordable rent as no more than a third of average local incomes.
In 1981, almost one in three English households lived in homes provided by local councils and housing associations, a proportion that has fallen to 17 per cent, almost four million households, today. In a new book Municipal Dreams – the Rise and Fall of Council Housing, John Boughton describes how council homes were once aspirational housing for an upwardly mobile working class.
“Council housing then, social housing now, arose from the duty of the state to house its people well even as the market proved unable and unwilling to do so. Grenfell Tower, at root, epitomises the dereliction of that duty, but the failure of private enterprise remains even as the state has, in recent decades, retreated from its former role,” he writes.
The government spends over £23 billion to help tenants pay rent, with more than a third of that going to private landlords
The problem of housing affordability is felt by everyone except the very well-off, and a report this week by the Resolution Foundation predicted that up to a third of young people in Britain face the prospect of living in rented accommodation all their lives. Home ownership is at a 30-year low and the number of families with children living in rented accommodation has tripled in 15 years.
Private sector
Conservative efforts to address the crisis have sought to encourage more housebuilding by the private sector, but the approach has achieved little, as supply remains low and prices high.
“We know by now that we cannot rely on arms-length incentives for private housebuilders, building for profit to solve the crisis. As they themselves openly acknowledge, it is simply not profitable for them to build houses for the less well-off. We need to do it ourselves,” Corbyn said.
Building a million social homes in 10 years would involve huge capital expenditure but, once they are built, rents from such homes provide a steady income stream to councils. At present, the government spends over £23 billion on housing benefit to help tenants pay rent, with more than a third of that sum going to private landlords.
Corbyn’s message is that housing should no longer be a means of speculation but an obligation the state owes to its citizens.
“As a country, we have lost the principle that a decent home is not a privilege for the few but a right owed to all, regardless of income. Let today mark a turning point, from which we start to get it back. The only way to do it is through social housing,” he said.