Beanz Meanz Tenantz

A million tenants every day pick up a tin of beans and say yes that’s me!

As yet another two private registered providers – that’s the correct name of housing associations – announces yet another merger to make a new monolithic feudal landlord today I am wondering when the social tenant became such a mere commodity, a tin of beans, as they are now?

On the same day the Housing Ombudsman announces an 18% increase in social tenant complaints too! … but then is that typical HA … oops private registered provider comms or just an another example that they done give a sh*t (or should that be f*rt) about what they have the gall to call customers in social tenants?

I am especially wondering why the 5.5 million of so parents of voting age that are social tenants in the 4.3 million UK council and private registered provider homes have never mobilised and united as a lobby or power bloc as they would be extremely powerful on the political stage and frighten the you know what out of these self-proclaimed social (sic) landlords who treat the social tenant as a unit, as a commodity?

Who are you social tenant? (And yes Roger Daltry really did this!)

You are feckless. You accept whatever crap your landlord throws at you and they are throwing crap with increasing regularity at you for years and still you remain apathetic and silent.

Yesterday Karen Buck MP re-introduced a Bill to make all homes fit for human habitation and to drag landlords kicking and screaming into the 18th Century never mind the 21st!  How did it ever come to pass that so-called social landlords do not even have to offer up housing that is fit for human habitation!

Why have you social tenant let the wonderful 1948 Welfare State creation of public housing to slay the giant of squalor lapse back to a state of feudal landlords of which 63% of what we laughingly call social landlords are private registered providers aka housing associations – who by virtue of being private have no statutory duties to house and rehouse those most in need?

Yes that’s right 2 in every 3 of what we call social landlords (sic) have no duties whatsoever to house those most in housing need.  Why have social tenants and the unions, the Labour movement, activists and the general public allowed this cancer on the Welfare State to happen?

How can the rest of mainland Europe have far more private rented housing than the UK yet not have the massive housing crisis of affordability that we have in the UK?  They regulate all landlords is the answer yet here in the UK no landlord has to even ensure properties are fit for human habitation!

Hopefully (!) in the context of minority government and the catalyst of Grenfell in terms of the safety of housing this fit for human habitation Bill has a much greater chance of being made law than it did when originally presented and rejected by the last Tory government.  How f*cking disgraceful is it that a chance of the law ensuring where 37% of the UK public live – that is 24 million men, women and children – is fit for human habitation is dependent on the perverse political context we now have?!

Everybody now finally recognises that the UK has a housing crisis (more correctly a series of interlinked housing crises) and is that because the public, the electorate, only see housing as a bricks and mortar investment and not as a place of stability where we can raise our children in health and safety?  There is a plethora of academic discourse going back decades on how much more poor quality housing costs the NHS and by extension everyone’s taxes yet nobody has been frankly arsed to even read it let alone consider and act upon it.

The cost of everything and the value of nothing has been cynically applied to rented housing by all concerned and for too long.

YET …

… the 4.3 million social (sic) housing properties will contain around 5.63 million parents and some adult children eligible to vote and who, if mobilised and united, would become one of THE strongest and most powerful lobby groups we have and would reverse decades of apathy towards all forms of rented housing especially public sector and genuinely affordable housing, and who would frighten the shit out of any government and ensure that our children and their children would have a fit for human habitation and a safe and secure roof over their heads which everyone must agree is a basic human right in the 21st Century!

The answer is there and its way past time for apathy and inaction