Jeremy Corbyn nails what Grenfell means for the marketisation of housing

Former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn has pointed out the broader implications of the Grenfell Tower disaster.

Grenfell: “market domination”

He said the Grenfell fire that killed 72 people in “avoidable” deaths calls into question the commodification of the housing supply:

What we’ve had is the market domination of the whole principle of housing. We’ve gone away from the principle of housing as a human right. We’ve gone instead into a market solution to it all. And you can see the results. The results of several thousand people rough sleeping every night. The results of tens of thousands of people living in grotesquely overcrowded conditions and accommodation.

Since 2010, the number of people sleeping rough has more than doubled. In 2023, there were 3,898 people sleeping rough on any given night.

But that does not include the number of homeless people. Research from Shelter shows there are at least 309,000 people without a home in England.

“Out of control”

Polly Neate, chief executive of Shelter, said:

The housing emergency is out of control. Chronic underinvestment in social homes has left people unable to afford skyrocketing private rents and plunged record numbers into homelessness. It is appalling that the government has allowed thousands of families to be packed into damp and dirty B&B’s and hostel rooms, which are traumatising children and making people desperately ill.

Shelter’s figures do not include adults who are living with their parents, which has risen by 700,000 people in a decade in England and Wales. The total is 4.9 million people including 30% of 25-29 year olds and 11% of 30-34 year olds.

Speaking in parliament, Corbyn continued:

And many people – in the case of my own constituency – a third of them living in the private rented sector, which at present is largely unregulated, insecure and very expensive. I’ve been leafing through the private renters bill that’s just been produced… what I’ve read much of it I welcome. But unless it addresses the fundamental issue of the cost of private renting, instead of leaving it all to the market to set it, then areas like mine will be suffering from social cleansing for a very long time to come

While the Renters’ Rights Bill bans ‘no fault’ evictions, it still has rent prices at the market rate. In the UK, the average monthly rent for just a single room in a shared house is £700. That means a landlord with a four bedroom house creams £33,600 a year in passive income, simply for owning more than one property. That’s near the average yearly salary people working 40 hour weeks get.

Social cleansing, meanwhile, has long been an issue in areas of London. Betsy Dillner, director of Generation Rent, said in 2015 that the housing crisis is:

uprooting families from inner London and stopping others from having children in the first place.

“Take over empty properties”

In the Commons, independent MP Corbyn further said:

If we want to maintain the communities in our inner urban and city areas as we do in all parts of the country then we have to have rent regulation as well as security of tenure and all that goes with it. That does mean public intervention, it does mean building more council houses, it does mean taking the market element out of how planning decisions are made… and instead saying the priority of all our community is a sufficient supply of good quality, well designed council housing… We have the potential to build some wonderful places. We also have the potential to take over many empty properties and convert them into council or social housing…

Converting empty properties into council housing should be a priority. There are over 1.5 million vacant homes in the UK. That’s five times the number of homeless people. The artificial scarcity of market capitalism to inflate prices is in plain sight. Surely, this illogical arrangement can only suggest that the ruling elite is ideologically wedded to a system of class just for the sake of it.

Speaking specifically on the Grenfell report, Corbyn continued:

This report could be the great turning point in the way we deal with housing in our society. Or it could be something that’s shelved and just forgotten in a few years time. The people of Grenfell…will never let us forget that

Featured image via the Canary