Cooking the Books 2 – Another reform stops working
The front page of the weekend edition of the i paper (3/4 August) read:
Thousands of ‘affordable’ homes stand empty despite housing crisis.
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- New homes built under Britain’s ‘affordable housing’ rules remain empty because housing associations do not have funds to buy them under ‘crazy’ system, i is told
- Entire developments are also delayed as potential buyers pull out due to budget squeeze, with major housebuilders unable to find purchasers for 1,000 homes each
- Properties earmarked for homeless families among many vacant for up to three years.’
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So-called affordable housing is not necessarily affordable to all of those who need housing. What it is, is inferior housing produced so that it can be let at a lower than average rent. It is provided for under Section 106 of a housing reform — the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 — which empowers local authorities, when granting planning permission, to make an agreement with a speculative housebuilding company under which the company offsets some of the side-effects of its housing development. One such offsetting measure can be to provide a certain amount of ‘affordable housing’. Local authorities can’t require too much of this, which costs the company money (as they could otherwise build and sell higher quality housing), or the company will walk away and no extra housing at all will be built. But that’s not the problem here.
Section 106 housing is not allowed to be sold to individuals and is normally bought by housing associations and local councils to let to tenants at a lower than average rent (reflecting its lower than average quality). According to the paper’s report, housing associations have not been buying these houses as much as they once did as they are short of money, and housebuilding companies have stopped some housing developments because they are losing money on unsold ‘affordable’ housing.
When socialists say that capitalism cannot be reformed we mean that it cannot be made to work in a way different from how it does — as a profit-making system in the interest of those who own and control the means for producing what society needs to survive. It cannot be reconfigured so as to work in the interest of the majority of the population who are excluded from ownership of productive resources.
This does not mean that within the framework of class ownership and production for profit measures can’t be introduced aimed at dealing with problems that the system continuously generates, for the owning few as for the excluded many. In fact, one of the remits of a government is to introduce measures aimed at solving a problem for the few or at mitigating one for the many. Governments are proposing and implementing such ‘reforms’ all the time.
As far as the excluded many are concerned, the word ‘mitigate’ is appropriate since the problems they face can never be solved within the capitalist system; all that can be done is to soften the impact to some extent. But even this doesn’t always last. If it involves the government spending money, this tends to get reduced in an economic downturn.
Some reforms work for a while but then give rise to another problem. The scandal exposed by the i paper is an example. A reform enacted to help lower paid workers access housing that they can afford is not working as intended. A further reform is required to try to mitigate this new problem. It’s like whack-a-mole. You mitigate one problem and another pops up.
Houses intended for the lower paid standing empty while people need them is indeed crazy, not to say outrageous, but is not simply due to a reform not working as intended. It’s the sort of thing that will keep reoccurring in one form or another when, as under capitalism, houses are built to be sold at a profit rather than just to be lived in.