North Devon Socialist Party branch meeting report 25th November

The main focus of the latest North Devon branch meeting was the housing crisis.

Introducing the discussion, JL noted the dramatic increase in housing repossessions, which seem to be particularly acute in North Devon. He gave background about the cause of the crisis which has resulted in soaring private sector rents and mortgages, and the decimation of social housing.

He outlined the importance of the neo-liberal measures brought in by the Tory government of 1979-1997, most notably the Right to Buy scheme, the attacks on the unions and the restructuring of the economy away from manufacturing and mining and towards financial services.

The move towards financial services and the increasing lack of social housing resulted in a house price bubble, where house prices rose to ridiculous levels. These prices are now declining due to the banks being much stricter in their lending since the so-called sub prime mortgages came to light and paralysed the financial 'industry' with fright. This, combined with rapidly increasing unemployment is resulting in the elevated repossessions. As GS noted in the discussion afterwards, the situation for people repossessed now is worse than it was 40 years ago, when there was more of a social safety net and more council housing.

It was agreed that as socialists we need to put the political arguments forward for nationalisation of the banks and construction industry under democratic workers and for a house building programme to be initiated and for repossessions to stop.

It was also agreed that practical support needed to be offered, and pressure put on the council to improve its provision of housing benefit and help for those threatened with, or victims of, repossession. A housing campaign will be established, and contact made to other organisations and interested individuals to help kick-start and build that.

In the discussion on organisational matters, a new branch programme was agreed, and the forthcoming regional conference debated. In industrial reports, DL outlined the 12% pay rise over two years the Appledore shipyard workers had achieved, and looked forward to Robbie Segal's forthcoming election campaign in the USDAW union.

New service for housing and debt advice + useful contact information

In a timely move, Ilfracombe Citizens Advice Bureau has established a team of specialist legal advisers on housing, mortgage and debt problems at the Ilfracombe Centre. Anyone who is experiencing problems including rent and mortgage arrears, or other housing or debt problems is encouraged to make an appointment. The phone number is (01237) 479222 (the specialists are provided by Bideford Citizens Advice Bureau).

Below is a list of Citizens Advice Bureaux across Devon, with their addresses and phone numbers. If you live outside Devon, the search facility on the Citizens Advice Bureau website can help you locate your nearest one.

As Citizens Advice is a charity, many of them rely on volunteers and have limited opening times, so please check opening times and whether you need an appointment.

Axminster - Lea Combe House, Lyme Close - 01404 44213

Barnstaple - Ground Floor, Belle Meadow Court, Albert Lane - 01271 377077

Bideford - 28a Bridgeland Street - 01237 473161

Brixham - Brixham Town Hall, New Road - 01803 297803

Bude and Holsworthy - Neetside, Bude - 01288 354531

Crediton - Council Office, Market Street - 01363 778410

Dawlish - Tunnicliffe, Barton Hill - 01626 864110

Exeter - Wat Tyler House, 3 King William Street - 0844 4994101

Exmouth - Town Hall, St Andrews Road - 01395 264645

Holsworthy (also see Bude and Holsworthy) - Manor Offices - 01409 253372

Honiton and East Devon - Honiton Library & Information Centre, 48-50 New Street, Honiton - 01404 44213

Ilfracombe - The Ilfracombe Centre, 44 High Street - 01271 377077

Ivybridge - The Town Hall - 01803 862392

Newton Abbot - Bank House Centre, 5b Bank Street - 01626 203141

Okehampton and West Devon - The Ockment Centre, North Street, Okehampton - 01837 52574

Paignton - 29 Palace Avenue - 01803 521726

Plymouth - 2nd Floor, Cobourg House, 32 Mayflower Street - 0844 826 717

Sidmouth - The Community Partnership, Mill St - 01404 44213

South Molton - The Library, 1 East Street - 01769 572342

Tavistock and West Devon - Kingdon House, North Street - 01822 612359

Teignmouth - Teignmouth Library, Fore Street - 01626 776770

Tiverton and Mid Devon - The Town Hall, St Andrew Street, Tiverton - 01884 234926

Torquay (Specialist Debt Advice - for other matters see Paignton) - 11 Castle Road - 01803 297803

Totnes and South Hams - The Cottage, Follaton House, Plymouth Road, Totnes - 01803 862392

Help workers, not fat cats - save people's homes

Remember the boom years, the 'nice decade' as the Governor of the Bank of England Mervyn King described it? It certainly was a nice decade for the so-called 'masters of the universe', who benefited to the tune of billions from the neoliberal counterrevolution that begun 30 years ago. Meanwhile, real wages for workers froze or declined, and public services were privatised and scaled back. Now, in the death throes of neoliberalism, the ones who made the mess are assured a soft landing by Governments on both sides of the Atlantic.

They will keep their mansions, and holiday homes. Meanwhile, ordinary workers in America and Britain are losing their homes. A report in today's Guardian revealed that the amount of repossessions of homes in the south west has recently increased dramatically. The report states that

"One repossession and eviction court in Penzance, west Cornwall, raced through 50 cases in one morning recently. In Barnstaple, north Devon, the last repossession court heard 26 cases - more than double the number before the credit crunch."

We would agree with Stephen Davis, of Torridge and Bude Citizens Advice Bureau, who blames "lower than average wages and above-average house prices". But the picture is much worse than suggested by even the outrageous ratios of average house price to average wage. The average wage given is heavily skewed by a small number of very high earners.

We have very high house prices in the south west (and nationally) for a number of reasons. Firstly, the amount of social housing has shrunk dramatically over the past 25 years, due to the Thatcher government's 'Right to Buy' scheme, the privatisation of council housing in many areas, and lack of funding and legal oportunities for local authorities to build new houses. Secondly, the availability of cheap and easy credit enabled certain parasites to buy up lots of housing and rent it out to recoup the mortgage costs and make some profit. This has led to the quality of private rented accommodation falling as the cost of it increases. Thirdly, the attractiveness of the area, and the enrichment of a small section of the population in the Thatcher-Major-Blair years has led to a boom in second home ownership, further reducing the amount of houses available, allowing sellers and estate agents to hike up prices.

The lack of availability of social housing and undesirability and expensiveness of private rented accommodation has led many people to buy their own homes. Many will have decided to buy for security, which obviously is absent in the private rental sector. The consequence of low wages, high house (and flat) prices, and the (now ended) willingness of the banks and other financial institutions to lend a large amount of money to people (the so-called 'sub-prime' mortgages), is now that ever higher numbers of people are losing their homes, and are now either living with relatives, in temporary accommodation or are homeless.

The solutions to the crisis will not be found in the City, Wall Street, the US Congress or the Houses of Parliament. The class war was long ago declared dead by the likes of the newly resurrected Business Secretary Peter Mandelson, but the Tories and New Labour have been waging it fiercely, in the interests of capitalists and their rotten system. The measures taken in these early stages of the economic crisis show that clearly. Nothing is done to help people turfed out of their own homes, yet the financial wizards are bailed out. Banks are nationalised as they are deemed 'too important to fall'. Yet MG Rover wasn't. Nor was Ford Dagenham. Or the many other businesses whose closures over the coming months will put thousands of workers out of work.

We must demand that all the banks and financial institutions are nationalised, with compensation provided only on the basis of proven need. People struggling to pay their mortgages will have their debt cancelled, and their house transferred to the ownership of the local authority, who will be obliged to rent the house at a minimal rate to them with absolute security of tenure, and be able to pass on the tenancy to a child. Bureaucratic restrictions placed on council tenants should be scrapped.

The restrictions on councils building houses should be removed. The housing associations, and homes belonging to private landlords, should be nationalised also, and those homes transferred to the local housing stock.

There should be a national council house building programme, funded from central government but carried out by local authorities. Local people should have a democratic say in how the new housing developments should take shape, and community facilities should be provided, including transport links, general stores, a Post Office, GP surgeries, health centres, schools and amenities.

The building and construction industries will need to be nationalised under the democratic control of the workers in that industry and the public as a whole. In a break from current practice, the new houses and flats would be built according to people's various needs, not to make vast profits.

Fundamental to all this is the need to replace the profit obsessed system of capitalism, which leads to perpetual crisis, and which on the upswing gives the wealthy all the lolly, and on the downswing, makes workers pay for the bosses folly.

The real housing crisis - low wages, high rents and mortgages

Research published by the Halifax Bank has named four Devon districts as having the least affordable housing in the country. North Devon comes out worse, with the average house prices being 9.1 times the average yearly wage. East Devon, Teignbridge and the South Hams are the others in the top 10 named by Halifax. Devon (and Cornwall, which also figures in the top 10) suffers from a combination of low wages, lack of social housing, and extensive second home ownership.

The shire counties were the test bed for the mass privatisation of council housing via 'Arms-Length Management Organisations' or ALMOs, also known as Housing Associations. The then Tory government thought that it would be easier to push through in rural areas, which generally it was. New Labour has taken this to the large towns and cities, where it has met with a mixture of success and fierce resistance.

An exception in rural Devon (Exeter still has substantial council housing) is Mid Devon, where a local campaign, with significant involvement from a Socialist Party member in Tiverton, stopped the proposed privatisation of council housing stock. Needless to say, Mid Devon is not included among the most unaffordable districts.

Very little social housing is built now, and any that is built is unlikely to make much inroads into the waiting list of 1.6 million people who would like it. This number doesn't include those who don't add themselves to the waiting list, because they know that realistically they will never get it.

Thatcher's scheme of allowing council tenants to buy their homes (Right To Buy) decimated the national council housing stock. Many of the council homes sold have ended up in the hands of unscrupulous speculators who have been part of the 'buy to let' trend encouraged by the years of house price increases and readily available credit from banks. Both of these conditions are now largely a thing of the past, but the vast polarisation of wealth that the Tories and New Labour have helped to increase means that there are still plenty of private landlords out there, renting out rooms in shared houses to individuals families that ten years ago would have been able to live in a three bed semi for the same rent.

We now have a situation where it is incredibly difficult to either buy a house or rent one cheaply from the council, putting more and more people at the mercy of these unregulated landlords. The real housing crisis in Britain today is not the declining house prices, a problem mainly for the middle classes who see where they live as an investment rather than a place to live. It is the countless workers and their families who have to work increasingly harder to pay extortionate rents and mortgages on quite modest dwellings. It is the sheer shortage of housing that in rural areas in Devon mean people cannot live where they grew up or work, and in urban areas mean increased tensions as racist politicians, not limited to the BNP but including New Labour, exploit it to stir up divisions amongst the working class.

Hypocritically, the Tories and the Liberal Democrats have criticised the Government in the wake of the report, but they are equally to blame. The housing policies of the three main parties are fundamentally the same when they have power at national and local level.

The Socialist Party (and it's predecessor Militant) is quite different, as the record of Liverpool City Council in the 1980s, in which Militant councillors played a leading role in a Labour administration, shows. The city's council housing stock was comprehensively modernised, with families moved from tenements and flats to houses with front and back gardens, in addition to thousands of houses and flats being improved.

The demands we have today are very reasonable:

- A mass national house building programme, the homes to be of a high standard, with gardens, and with a range of sizes.

- The houses to be owned by the local council, who will not be permitted to sell them. All income from rents to be ringfenced and used for maintenance, upkeep and the construction of new homes.

- Council lease to allow for the homes to be passed from generation to generation, security of tenure, and for residents to modify and decorate their homes without having to jump through bureaucratic hoops.

- Housing estates and new towns to have dedicated public transport links such as train stations and bus stops and routes.

- Infrastructure such as schools, GP and dental surgeries, health centres, parks, Post Offices and local shops to be built alongside new housing.

- End to council tax rebate for second homes. Nationalisation of any homes that are not the primary house of a person or family, with compensation provided on the basis of proven need.

- Increase the minimum wage to £8 per hour and restore trade union rights to enable workers to fight for better economic and social conditions.

- For the creation of a new workers' party to campaign for these demands, and lead the fightback against neo-liberalism, privatisation and the rule of profit in general.