While Keir Starmer U-turned on his leadership pledges to bring water, energy and mail into public ownership, he is re-nationalising 36,347 military homes. The 1996 sell off under Tory prime minister John Major was a massive scam that cost the public purse billions.
As James Schenider, former communications director for Jeremy Corbyn, pointed out on LBC:
In 1996 UK govt sold off armed forces’ housing to a private equity-backed investor.
Almost 30 years later, with billions paid in rent and 2/3 of the homes in urgent need of repairs, the govt is buying them back to upgrade them.
Lesson: privatisation is a scam & must be reversed pic.twitter.com/FJpT26SGF7
— James Schneider (@schneiderhome) June 2, 2025
Hold on Labour, so rent’s a bad thing?
The Labour government says that the deal will save £230 million in rent per year. It continues:
Billions of pounds will be saved by the deal over the next decade, delivering savings for taxpayers and enabling additional investment into homes for military families. The landmark move reverses a sale undertaken by the Government in 1996.
This certainly raises the question why any of us are renting our housing from the private sector, rather than a system where home ownership is provided publicly and paid at cost price. The fact that Real Estate is the most profitable industry in the UK underscores this. Top companies average an astonishing £686,000 of profit per year per employee. That’s a private tax on homes at 23 times the UK average salary, per employee.
Labour’s trumpeting of the nationalisation of armed forces homes also raises the question of why the NHS is renting infrastructure from the private sector. And it raises the question of why we will continue to rent trains from ‘rolling stock’ companies. Labour is only bringing the operating companies into public ownership.
The military homes sell off con
In 2018, the NAO found that privatising the military homes in 1996 cost the public between £2.2bn and £4.2bn more than if the government had maintained public ownership. That’s partly because of rent and partly because of the ever inflating housing bubble. From 1996-2018, UK property prices rose by 284% (this in itself is a major scam maintained by politicians and real estate investors). It’s no wonder the 1996 deal became known as “the goldmine of the decade” for private buyers.
Investors in Annington – the company created to manage and own the properties – received returns of 13.4% between 1996 and March 2017.
On top of that, the military homes did not receive maintenance under private ownership. And the backlog of repairs could cost an additional £4bn.
Speaking about the 1996 deal, Robert Razzell, chief financial officer at UK Government Investments, made plain why privatisation is a failure across the board. The private company did not maintain a basic standard for the homes:
The problem was the MoD as [the] tenant couldn’t redevelop the estate. What tenant could ever redevelop an estate? They were getting a government rental stream. There’s no risk to that. Why would they tear down those units and redevelop them, taking all that construction and development risk? They didn’t have many obligations under the lease. In fact, it’s hard to think of any obligations they had.
This exactly applies to utilities like water and energy, where the companies are guaranteed an income stream from UK households. That’s because everyone needs water and energy everyday. It’s why we don’t see investment in the sewage system and instead see raw sewage dumped in our environment.
So, it’s time for Starmer to go further and nationalise the utilities he initially pledged to. Rent in itself is almost always a scam.
Featured image via the Canary
