Unforeseen consequences

 

There are always unforeseen consequences to any decision. 'Back in the days' of Margret Thatcher, her sell off of the countries municipal housing stock to already renting residents and the subsequent criminal refusal of governments ever since to replenish the municipal housing stock by allowing and encouraging municipalities to build back their own housing stock for rent, not purchase. This at least would alleviate  the equally criminal destruction of the labour market, first by alienating the workers from any form of collective bargaining or having collective protection against exploitative management which has led to the atrocious wages paid by the avarice of employers to a  transient workforce with no employee rights.

The mantra, "leave it to the private enterprise and the market will do the rest", was the cry, and in terms of housing, "the market will find a price everyone can afford". It deftly avoids the fact that housing, like water is a necessity and people will do without virtually anything to pay the rent and avoid their families being thrown out on the street. We recognise the utility of water, water companies are monitored to restrict price increases but not housing.

The pandemic crisis has revealed the inequalities in our society the dire straights of so many families living a hand to mouth existence when the chief of their worries, after food (food banks came to a timely if shaming rescue) has been paying the rent. Privately rented accommodation is by far the largest stock of accommodation on offer to the poor.  By volume private landlords who themselves have on-going overheads and need the income and are not in a position to carry arrears in rent from a workforce which has been forced out of work by the pandemic. They are not in a position to carry the burden but the municipality can with its access to cheap money and asset rich inventories. Markets can't handle the black swan of a pandemic and, much like the Richard Beechings sell off of the railways in the 1960s, so Thatchers sell off of housing was short sighted. It unbalanced the socially productive asset base for speculative short term gains but that then has always been Tory policy.