As housing prices continue to soar, we publish here a report from Pete Gilman a Unite and Labour Party member in Islington, London, who looks at how rented accomodation is providing huge profits for big business and their Tory chums at our expense.
As housing prices continue to soar, we publish here a report from Pete Gilman a Unite and Labour Party member in Islington, London, who looks at how rented accomodation is providing huge profits for big business and their Tory chums at our expense.
Ninety families on the New Era estate in Hoxton, East London face eviction if they fail to pay an expected £1200 a month rent increase.
Tory MP Richard Benyon and his brother Edward, two of Britain’s richest men with a combined wealth well in excess of £100 Million, acquired the estate and immediately increased rents from £668 to £796 a month. They have now announced that tenants will have to pay the “full market rent” which for a two bedroom flat in this area is estimated as being £2000 a month at least – and rising fast.
Benyon, a strong supporter of the bedroom tax, voted in Parliament against improving benefits for the disabled. He also claimed £8,000 to rent an office from his Tory pals.
The brothers own a farm that has received more than £2 million in EU subsidies and a recent GMB report revealed that their property company has received hundreds of thousands of pounds in high rents paid for out of housing benefits. However, the great bulk of their wealth is inherited.
Both brothers benefited enormously from George Osborne’s first budget which gave huge tax concessions to Britain’s richest 1%.
Lindsay Garrett, who has lived on the estate all her life, works in the NHS. The local market rent is substantially more than her take home pay.
Lindsay says “people live here who were born here, one lady lived here all through the war and now they’re being asked to leave. Where do they go?”
Debra Cox, who has lived on the estate for eighteen years stated: “this is our home, it’s a community and they’re trying to push us out…This is social cleansing…they just want rid of us.”
Eighty-four year old Ruth Jacobs, who has lived on the estate for seventy years, said: “it is terrible. I got a letter two weeks ago. I don’t know what’s going to happen next.”
Another resident broke down in tears when talking to a local newspaper, asking: “how will I be able to cope, not knowing where I’m supposed to go, with my daughter and disabled mother?”
The Benyons will show no mercy to her disabled mother, her daughter, any of the children on the estate, the elderly, 84-year-old Ruth Jacobs, or anyone else. For two of Britain’s richest men there is a fortune to be made here. To them nothing else matters.
Everyone on the estate is devastated; everyone is terrified of the future; everyone faces losing their home. The rottenness, the viciousness, the callous indifference to the consequences of their actions, but most of all the sheer greed of the Benyon brothers, is in microcosm the epitome of everything this Tory government stands for.
This will be a test case. If the Benyons get away with this, other landlord companies and housing speculators will follow, as will housing associations (HAs), which are changing their role to also become landlord companies and property developers.
Already one HA, the One Housing Group, which has “an unenviable reputation for ruthlessness”, recently announced massive rent increases as its first step to imposing 80% market rents. What is happening on the New Era estate is just the start. Unless we fight back.
The actions of the Benyons and the One Housing Group must be exposed, with maximum publicity and the working class mobilised in defence of the tenants. Local estates whether private, HA or council, must be leafleted. Local tenants associations, trades unions, the Hackney Trades Council and the two Labour parties must get involved. The local radio stations should be informed, and there should even be pressure put on the London TV news to report on this disgrace.
Links must be forged with groups like Defend Council Housing and Focus E15. The “leverage campaign” methods of the trade union Unite must be forcefully employed.
Most of all the local community must be mobilised to physically prevent evictions as workers have done in the past and more recently in Spain where forced evictions were physically resisted by local workers.
We must demand of Hackney Council that it issues an immediate Compulsory Purchase Order to take ownership of the estate.
But ultimately the Benyons, One Housing Group, and their ilk, will only be defeated by the implementation of a socialist housing programme, which includes freezing the rents, ending profiteering at our expense, taking the property of “rogue landlords” into public ownership, and a massive programme of building at least 100,000 council homes a year.
