Finding a decent affordable place to live can be a nightmare today.  1.6 million people in Britain are on council waiting lists – but this is only a proportion of those in need.  Tens of thousands in the Northern Region have been told they may have to hang on for 8 years.  And even when people find a place - social or privately tenanted - they face exorbitant rents while repairs and essential improvements simply don’t happen.

Many families have been forced to consider buying, simply to have a roof over their heads.  But it’s not an escape from the crisis.  The end result of the rental shortage has been massively inflated house prices - now on average 8 times the average annual wage.  For many young people, this means staying with parents, or else postponing having a family for years to come.

Some tenants have opted to buy their council homes.  They have been spun the tale that it is cheaper - and indeed it may have been in the past.  However, the era of cheap credit is coming to an end, and more people will find it hard to get a mortgage - or indeed to keep up the payments.  Already, repossessions are up 30% over 2006.

The sale of council homes has not solved the basic problem that not enough social housing is being built for rent.  In many communities in the North, the last council house was built in the 1980s.  Across the whole of England, only 277 were completed last year.  This situation flows directly from the Thatcher government’s drive to recreate the housing market as a source of super-profit.  But it’s a Tory policy of scarcity also carried out by New Labour.  It has led to immense fortunes being made out of land sales and speculative development.

Since 1997, New Labour in government has actually privatised most social housing.  Denied central funds for repairs and modernisation, many councils have been forced to transfer their homes to so-called ‘social’ landlords or Arms-Length Management Organisations (ALMOs) - a halfway house to complete privatisation.  Rents are being jacked up to ‘market levels’.  The decision of the Labour Party Conference in favour of a ‘4th option’ to retain council housing with the necessary funds has been blatantly ignored.
 
Gordon Brown has promised to raise the target for building affordable and social housing by 20% to 240,000/year by 2016.
 
In the first place, this is simply not enough.  Secondly, it leaves private developers in the driving seat - and they are unlikely to share working people’s idea of ‘affordable’.  They prefer to build at the luxury end of the market and for buy-to-let speculators.

Under Brown’s plan, councils will still be powerless to build and run social housing - this will be left up to a central government agency.

Communists say: something as important as housing can’t be left to the market.
 
Councils must immediately be granted the “4th Option” - allowing them the right to own and maintain social housing, while accessing government funds to bring houses up to the ‘decency’ standard.

The government must make sure that sufficient funds are available to overcome the enormous backlog of repairs and improvements, and to hold rents down, so that council renting becomes an attractive option again.

Where council homes have been transferred to ALMOs or other organisations, tenants must be given the right to return to this improved council ownership.

The revenue from selling council homes, currently held by the government, must be returned to councils, and topped up, so that councils can start building homes again with a target of 240,000 new properties of their own each year by 2012.

Banks and building societies need to be regulated, and if necessary taken into public ownership, to prevent the sort of speculation that led to the Northern Rock crash and to halt the endless spiral of inflating house prices.