Though Cowards Flinch

Future address of the entire Tory parliamentary party, when their houses are requisitioned by local councils

A few further words to Paul’s previous post, entitled “Home truths about public housing”,  his counter to any Right-wing bloviation that the State or “taxpayers” shouldn’t be subsidising public housing rents for those who can afford to pay.

His premise rests on the notion that the Housing Revenue Account (the balance of income from rent and expenditure on stock and services) currently turns a profit.

That the profit is tiny compared to the amount spent on housing (£194m to £5.9bn, thus Iain Wright on 2008/9 figures) is neither here nor there. It should be nothing short of a scandal that the New Labour government was quite prepared to use money extracted in rent not to improve services or reduce rents for those who produced it, or even to public housing tenants as a whole, but to plug gaps in spending elsewhere.

Complaints about this begat New Labour consultations on what to replace the HRA with. Thus when New Labour were themselves replaced, the Tory/Lapdog-coalition minister responsible arrived to find the “localism” spiel of his boss, Dave Cameron, nicely dovetailing with New Labour’s pre-existing plans, announced in March 2010, to begin allowing local authorities to opt out of the Housing Revenue Account.

While this sounds like a good idea – what could be better than local councils being able to gain popularity by holding rents steady or improving services? – it’s only a small part of a much larger picture. For a start, the “self financing” plans announced by the DCLG involved councils paying the government a one-off fee for the right to opt out of the HRA (p4, DCH March 2009), which they would presumably earn back by increasing rents.

Not only this but a large proportion of councils – under the proposals outlined in Section2 of the previous government’s “Council Housing: a real future” prospectus – will inherit debt from the previous arrangement with the Housing Revenue Account.

Secondly, it puts council housing tenants at much greater risk from their own local authority. The urge to drive down costs by an attack on the jobs, terms and conditions of those who labour to provide services to tenants, or by increasing rents (even while right-to-buy still goes on siphoning off money from public housing, and maintenance and major repair costs continue to be below rental costs, channeling money away from housing) will always exist.

It will exist all the more in difficult economic circumstances – such as when councils go playing in financial markets, where my own Canterbury City Council lost £6m, and this is not the largest figure by a long chalk. In these circumstances normal sources of revenue like car parking fees drop too, but the need for secure, publicly subsidised housing actually increases. What then? For this none of the parties have made allowance.

Meanwhile, undermining the security of tenancy (in blatant contradiction of pre-election statements by Cameron’s “compassionate Conservatives”) is a neat attempt to exploit ignorant prejudices regarding public housing as a cover for the retreat by the Tory/Lapdog-coalition from tentative New Labour steps to build a new council house or two per year, squeezing as much money as possible from the guarantees any civilised society owes its citizens.

One wonders where the Tory battlecries of “choice” and “flexibility” are when it comes to providing a service to those who, thanks to Tory and New Labour reforms, depend on short-term work and a fluctuating income as the best deal they can get? Such smug wonderings on the part of the political class belie just how desperate the situation might very well get, if Guy of Osbourne really is planning to shave billions off what is spent on benefits and public housing.