During the First World War, in the overcrowded tenements of Glasgow, a key battle in Britain’s labour history was taking shape. The Glasgow rent strikes of 1915 were part of an emerging phenomenon that came to be known as Red Clydeside – a period of industrial and political militancy in the factories, slums and shipyards around the River Clyde. Housing shortages had accompanied rent increases in wartime. In response to the eviction of a tenant in arrears, campaigners across the city organised protests and mass non-payment. Tenant activists became known as “Mrs Barbour’s Army”, named after a leading organiser, Mary Barbour, a carpet printer from Govan.
The government paid attention. Rent controls were introduced soon after the strike began. Although today’s free-market right casts these types of regulations as a counterproductive constraint on housing supply, they were in place in various forms until 1980. This covers a period in which enormous levels of housebuilding were routinely achieved, and during which housing was often much more affordable.
A century after the Glasgow rent strike, tenant activism has re-emerged. Few with recent experience of renting will be in any doubt about what’s driving it.
“I think it’s just a response to, well, a confluence of factors”, says Isaac Rose, an organiser for the Greater Manchester Tenants’ Union, and author of The Rentier City, a critique of Manchester’s model of private-sector-led regeneration.
“There’s post-crash effects”, he says, “both austerity and the financialisation of housing that came out of that.” Since 2008, UK rents have roughly doubled while real wages have stagnated.
Housing policy over the last 14 years has seen a revolving carousel of 17 ministers taking responsibility for the brief. Each has presided over sub-par housebuilding figures and a growing bifurcation between housing costs and people’s real incomes.
On the ground, that means families living in overcrowded rental accommodation, unable to move on to the property ladder. It means young professionals being forced into houseshares well into their thirties. At the extremities, it means rough sleeping and the harrowing expansion of the hidden homeless. The latter includes evicted couples couch-surfing with no permanent abode; over 100,000 families allocated B&Bs, budget hotels and bedsits by local authorities without the housing stock to satisfy an everexpanding waiting list; tenants living in extremely low-quality, slum-like conditions, fearful of raising maintenance issues with a landlord who is benefiting from years of an ultra-tight, sellers’ market.
Kat Wright is all too familiar with this world. She is a field director at Acorn, one of the largest tenant unions, which started in 2014. “I’ve lived in well over a dozen different rented houses with a lot of bad landlords,” she tells Spotlight. “I had been illegally evicted before, and had lots of experiences of just being really powerless in that landlord-tenant relationship. But then I found out about Acorn and helped start a branch in Manchester.”
The union has organisers in 11 cities across England and Wales and branches in 30 cities and towns. Wright runs their organising department. “We’ve got members in Liverpool, Manchester, Bristol, London – the big cities – but also places like Wigan, Stoke, Falmouth… which sometimes get forgotten about and left behind,” she says.
“Our model is based on doorknocking and asking people what they care about, and asking people what they want to see change.” The union doesn’t exclusively focus on housing issues, but they do take up the bulk of its activity. “We have run campaigns that have won free school meals for tens of thousands of families across Norfolk,” says Wright.
“We’ve got Manchester City Council to stop using bailiffs to collect council tax debt from people on benefits and put over a million pounds into debt relief, and we’ve just done the same in Brighton.”
Short of full rent strikes, which are rare, unions like Acorn run campaigns that can escalate from petitions to occupying council buildings.
“We’ve occupied Manchester City Council,” Wright tells me, “we have disrupted council meetings. We’ve got a brilliant member called Viv. Bailiffs knocked on her door and were really abusive to her in front of her and the kids that she cared for. When one of our organisers spoke to her, she was like, ‘You know what? I’m sick and tired of being treated like this all my life. I didn’t know there was anyone fighting back’.”
Multiple generations of policy failure have accentuated need, deprivation and crisis in the housing sector. This isn’t a problem with an easy solution or a single cause. Conservative-minded think-tankers point much of the blame at Clement Attlee’s Town and Country Planning Act (TCPA), which they label a “Nimbies charter” and an effective veto over developers. Supply is clearly a factor, but planning is no panacea. The TCPA legislation was in place in the boom-building years of the two Harolds – Macmillan and Wilson – who both presided over 300,000 unit completions a year, a level that hasn’t been achieved since but which Labour now aims to repeat.
The 2024 UK Housing Review noted that the government was now allocating around £31bn towards its housing budget. That’s roughly twice as much as the Treasury allocates to policing England and Wales, and the most the government has ever spent on housing in all its history.
By contrast, in 1975, the government spent just £22bn, adjusted for inflation. In that year – with Jaws in the cinemas, Bohemian Rhapsody in the charts and Wilson in Downing Street – the average house price was around three times the average salary. Today it is seven times the average salary.
The question then arises: where is the record housing budget money going? If the government is spending more on housing than ever before, why are we in the middle of an acute affordability crisis?
The answer will be enough to enrage any struggling tenant. In the 1970s, 95 per cent of the housing budget went towards building, improving or repairing homes owned by local authorities and leased at subsidised, below-market rates. These provided secure, low-cost housing to residents and a steady income to local government. Today, only 12 per cent of the housing budget is allocated to this kind of housebuilding. The other 88 per cent is spent on housing benefit – £26bn every year in rental subsidies, transferred from taxpayers to low-paid tenants, and then, ultimately, ending up in the pockets of landlords. That means we’re spending seven times as much on subsidising tenants and their landlords as we are on actual housebuilding.
What’s more, many of those landlords in the private sector will be renting out former council properties, originally bought at a knock-down price through Right To Buy. Those houses would then have been sold on at a vastly inflated rate, until a new owner leases it out to private tenants paying considerably more than the rental value achieved when the home was a public asset in the public sector.
The House of Commons’ communities and local government select committee found that 40 per cent of council houses bought through the Right To Buy scheme have undergone this bizarre ownership journey, and are now being rented out by private landlords. Many landlords will have low-income tenants, paying rent using the housing benefits with which we have replaced housebuilding investment.
This is just one of the multiple distortions that have been embedded into our broken housing market. We are not building either social or private homes at anywhere near the rate we did in the post-war and inter-war eras. We are limiting building by imposing byzantine planning regulations on developers seeking to complete projects for both the public and private sectors. And we are no longer controlling rents through the kinds of stringent regulations that once limited demand for houses-as-assets.
Today, for many comfortable middle-class Britons, a buy-to-let mortgage and a second or third home is seen as the key to a secure retirement. Property has become the ultimate cash cow, the gift that keeps on giving. One in every 21 people in the UK is a landlord, four times the number of teachers. Most own either one or two properties. The market has been pumped up by deregulated credit, a decade of low interest rates, and quantitative easing after the financial crash.
Supply has not kept up with these long-running demand stimuli, along with a growing population, and policies like Help To Buy. The last of these, the brainchild of former chancellor George Osborne, provided government backed-loans to first-time buyers, papering over the cracks of scarcity and market imbalances but letting the underlying causes fester.
“I guess there’s been a young generation who were politicised after the crash,” says Rose, the author and activist. It’s not hard to understand why. “I’ve got involved in this kind of work. I’m certainly that kind of age, with the Corbyn era, that kind of political cohort. That’s driven a lot of it, as well as working-class tenants fighting policies like the bedroom tax.”
Two million homes have been sold under the Right To Buy scheme, introduced by Margaret Thatcher in 1980. The policy helped create a new base of working class, aspirational voters who leant Conservative in elections. Thatcher’s concept of a “property-owning democracy” was geared towards creating a solid constituency of Thatcherites. In the same way, the housing crisis in 2024 is creating a solid constituency of left-wingers, a “generation left” represented most aptly by millennial graduates, excluded from the middleclass, homeowning lifestyles their parents enjoyed.
The new Labour government will hope to alter that trend and reverse decline, but until they do, the tenant unions are here to stay.
This article first appeared in our Spotlight Housing supplement, published on 29 November 2024.
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