ANOTHER Labour Scandal Blows Social Housing Rent Hikes Wide Open!

Right, so it’s becoming an almost daily matter of new scandals emerging for Keir Starmer’s Labour right now, from security passes for glasses for one Labour donor, to the treasury recruiting a Rachel Reeves donor, to donations from the fossil fuel lobby just as energy bills rise and here we have another one. Starmer’s Labour is coming in for a lot of justifiable attacks right now in light of all of this and more with it’s polling nosediving over it’s mishandling and incompetence of some issues, not to mention political choices that are heaping out unnecessary cruelty. We’ve seen fallout come their way due to the riots, the stripping of the winter fuel allowance from 10m pensioners, just before energy bills rose which pointed out another broken Labour election promise to the nation and of course donations connected to that. There is the keeping of the two child benefit cap, the migrant bashing and racist rhetoric, there is the obsequious creeping to the Israel Lobby who have funded half of the Labour frontbench, there’s the refusal to ban arms sales which has landed the government in court though heavily delayed because they’ve seemingly pushed rioters to the front of the queue, that was convenient wasn’t it? And very much a story I’m yet to cover. All of this though has contributed to dire approval ratings all inside 7 weeks. But a new angle has been presented in regards to another horrible policy being put forward, to hike the rents of social housing tenants to pay for more housing, but there’s another scandalous angle to this story that you might have missed and might actually have a much larger bearing on why Labour and Rachel Reeves are choosing to come after the poorest renters, rather than the wealthy, who so often happen to be landlords of course.
Right, so Labour’s social housing policy. I went over this in a video the other day, spelling out the stupidity and short-sightedness of hiking social housing rents, typically around 40-50% of open market rate, in order to build more so-called affordable housing, which, when the rental cost of that can be double that of social housing, around the 80-90% mark of open market rental rates, is not necessarily very affordable at all. It’s a really stupid thing to do. Levelling up, when the government talks about that, another chronic meaningless soundbite as it is, but when they talk about it, you don’t mean levelling up the lowest rents to catch up with unaffordable so-called affordable rates and say we’ll use that to build more unaffordable housing with! That’ll free up the money to build more housing says Reeves, whilst the reality will simply be housing benefit rates go up, the housing benefit bill will have to rise to pay for Labour’s stupid idea, but maybe there is a big fat ulterior reason for this that nobody is talking about and I have to address the elephant in the room here.
You see, when you think of housing benefit, you tend to think of this money being provided to people, who, for whatever reason, cannot afford to pay their rents. They may be disabled and living in housing adapted for them, they may just be out of work, they may be in work so low paid, that the state has to top up their rent. That last reason in my view is a failure of government. Wages should pay enough to live on, that they don’t is a situation that has been allowed to fester, but equally we can look at rent and rent caps and ask why they haven’t been introduced, as rents become too high, eat up into people’s incomes so much, and are the other side of this societal problem when it comes to housing, it all a matter of low wages and high rents for the most part, wages must come up and rents must be stopped from taking so much of a persons income, they can never save to buy, their disposable income which can be spent in the economy to benefit that, is instead sucked up by landlords.
We know which side Keir Starmer is on in this though, because the desire to bring in rent control has been floated by the anything but left wing Mayor of London Sadiq Khan, who has been pursuing this course of action in the city with by far the highest rents since 2019, and now a Labour government is here, you’d think this would be the time he gets told yes, but instead he has been told no. There are no plans to allow rent controls to stop rental costs rising above what is reasonable, already above reasonable as they are for so many. Khan’s plan has been to set up a private rent commission, which would set the amounts landlords could charge and those landlords can either go along with that, or sell up and free up more property on the housing market, the more housing floating about the more house prices would come down of course, that is the logic anyway. But Starmer has refused him just as the Tories did before, yet still he’s backing rent rises on the cheapest rental homes, rents rising beyond what people can afford, rents rising above a level where they can save, and if they’re even worse off than that, then of course we all see more of our money, public money being used to subsidise what is being charged for that housing, as the housing benefit bill is bound to rise.
And it’s a good point to bring that back into this conversation, because as much as people might think it is a benefit for the worst off, it isn’t not really, it’s handing over public money to a landlord for whatever they choose to set the rent at and as long as it is below the benefit cap still, the monthly rent will be paid in full out of that. If it’s above the cap, the tenant still has to find some money even as the landlord potentially maxes out what they can milk from the state. Housing benefit never goes to the tenant, the housing element of Universal Credit, many claimants of which of course will be in work, does get paid to the tenant though they can choose it not be the case if needs be. If the housing benefit bill rises, it is to supplement landlords. It is in the national interest to keep that low, to not let tenants get fleeced, but Labour has a problem with this, because like most parties it’s riddled with landlords, but now in this parliament, 3 of the 5 biggest landlords are now Labour MPs and in fact the biggest landlord in the house of commons today, is a scandal that goes to very root of what the Labour even stands for anymore.
The Labour Party was of course borne out of the trade union movement, it was created by the unions for working class people so can you imagine the scandal there would if for example Labour ditched a trade unionist in favour of installing the biggest landlord in parliament to replace him? Well this is exactly what has happened!
You might recall the former Labour MP for Ilford South, Sam Tarry. Tarry came into parliament from the TSSA transport union and got himself sacked from the front bench by Starmer for doing what every Labour MP should do when ordinary working class people are taking industrial action and joining them on the picket line. Since becoming Labour leader Starmer developed a sudden and very hardline allergy to standing by working class people taking such action and forbade his ministers from doing likewise. Tarry defied this and off to the backbenches he was sent. Tarry also fell afoul of Starmer’s ire for the crime of being seen as a lefty, which meant he had to go and thanks to a concerted Labour right effort and allegations that the dodgy Anonyvoter was fiddled, Tarry ended up deselected as the Labour candidate in favour of Redbridge Council leader and right winger Jas Athwal.
Jas Athwal was duly elected in the General Election and is now not only the Labour MP for Ilford South, but is the biggest landlord in parliament and there’s no running away from it, because it’s all there in that register of financial interests.
According to the register, Athwal owns 18 rental properties, of which all but three are residential properties, so that is quite the portfolio and quite the interest in not seeing rent controls.
The other two Labour MPs in the top 5 of MP Landlords are also brand new intake Labour MPs, so Starmer clearly has no qualms about landlordism and what that means for tenants in this country and in fact on of those new MPs, is one of those who effectively awarded themselves a safe seat having been on the Labour National Executive Committee beforehand, Luke Akehurst’s sidekick Gurinder Singh Josan, now MP for Smethwick owns 8 rental properties. The other is the new MP for Southend East, Bayo Alaba who owns 7 properties.
The other two in the top 5 are apparently Tories, I haven’t done the legwork on this searching the register, the Financial Times did and they helpfully didn’t name both, but one of them to no surprise is Jeremy Hunt, with nine properties.
Here’s the thing though – even these numbers are probably an underestimate. It’ll be no surprise that there are 85 MPs identified as landlords in the register, with 44 of them being Labour, 28 Tories and 8 Lib Dems, but this could be an underestimate because under the definition of what need to be declared, an MP only need to declare a rental in the register if they make more than £10,000 a year off of it in rent, or £830 a month. If it’s below that – and that is possible in some parts of the country – then it won’t be in the register.
Fundamentally though, the more landlords there are, the more opposition there will be towards pro tenant legislation. Even an ardent Tory like Michael Gove accused landlord MPs of scuppering reform to the housing market previously, voting in their self interests and now there’s even more of them. If social housing rents are being driven up to pay for more housing, that potentially allows the rents of other housing to rise too and any attempts to mitigate that with legislation, could be obstructed by MPs who have a vested interests in blocking such measures. You dirve up rents at the bottom of the market, the rest of the market will just get pushed up too. You end up with more people unable to pay, housing benefit, which just goes to landlords, will go up too, so we’re all paying more for their greed in essence. Another way of looking at this is that social housing providers are councils and housing associations, not private landlords. By driving up their rents, they are giving private landlords a free pass and of course they’d be fine with those rents being driven up because of the aforementioned reason, it benefits them too. Where a source of income to build more housing has been identified, that might play well with some people, ultimately it will cost us all more. Who will build these new houses? Affordable housing doesn’t necessarily become council or housing association property, it genuinely depends who builds the development. If it’s a private development of a certain size, they have to provide affordable housing, but who buys it? How many end up as buy to lets? There is so many holes in this Labour policy and given the number of landlords in their ranks now, the optics are scandalous that this is landlord-centric housing policy and not actually in the national interest at all.
I covered more of Labour’s plans to hike the rents of social housing tenants and how social housing might actually be wiped out as a thing in this video recommendation here, the party that created it now being the party destroying it as your next watch if so inclined and I’ll hopefully catch you on the next vid. Cheers folks.