Property owners commit crimes, knowing that local authorities are scraping to keep the lights on

~ Isaac Bell Holmström ~

Overcrowding, infestation, and illegal evictions are just a few of the surprises that the British housing market has in store for tenants. With homeownership levels dropping council housing bulldozed, the private housing sector is tightening its grip. A system where people are increasingly dependent on others to supply and maintain their own homes, growing further and further from any hope of collective ownership.

It is in this climate that a recent press release by Public Interest Lawyers revealed that the institutions in place to protect renters and keep rogue landlords in line, have been unable to do this job. 115 Metropolitan, Unitary, District, London or Welsh local authorities confirmed that “there were no prosecutions at all from April 2019 to March 2024” of bad landlords, with instead “1,267 reported prosecutions across five years, working out at around one per 335 complaints the councils received from concerned tenants”.

In certain cases, this inaction can be attributed to the crossover of landlords and councillors—of the councillors in the 40 boroughs with the highest proportion of rental properties, around one in seven are landlords, or own a second home. But the issues run far deeper than individual bias.

Crimes are being committed by property owners who rest comfortably, knowing that after years of underfunding, the only bodies with the authority to hold them accountable, don’t dare to try. Local councils are left scraping what they can to keep the lights on, unable to stand up for themselves, and hesitant to disturb a system that ensures investment, raises land values and council tax.

On average, central government funding makes up only 50% of the income streams for local authorities, while another 32% of revenue comes from council tax—reliance on council tax (and HMO licenses) has increased massively since austerity. With wildly unequal business rates supplementing these funds for boroughs like Westminster that host the worlds corporations, poorer areas often leave residents with greater need paying more for worse services.

More and more councils are slipping into bankruptcy, prompting a desperate scramble from others to ensure economic productivity—the priority, from which it is assumed that work and wellbeing will, eventually, radiate. But if they dare to send the wrong message to landlords, so-called “small business owners”, the reality of who decides our living conditions would be revealed. Ideologies of growth don’t benefit the people, but only funnel economic gains into the hands of landlords.

The braver councils are beginning to introduce a landlord licensing scheme, but we can’t rely on this. Only 43 councils around England use such schemes, only 13 of the 40 authorities with the highest proportion of private rentals operate one. Selective landlord licensing schemes (those covering a designated area of the territory) are often poorly implemented and maintained—the amount of bureaucracy for councillors to wade through to ask permission from the Secretary of State to impose a full scheme on the entire borough is far too intimidating for most. Even the process of justifying which proportion of the borough is subject to the selective scheme is tortuous—without a watertight legal case, councils can be sued by those same landlords they cannot prosecute.

Central government calls for “devolution” in name only, while funnelling public money into tax havens and palaces—like cutting the head off the monster and seeing two grow back, councils are left to occupy themselves with the symptoms, not the cause. Our local governments are kept under the combined thumbs of institutional landlords and central government, with the voices of renters and those that dream of renting, growing more and more faint.

But putting our faith in central government to reform its own policies towards local authority funding is not the only choice. With councils unwilling and unable to take social housing seriously, we must look to Britain’s (currently painfully small) collection of tenants unions and housing cooperatives, for a model that allows residents to take control of their buildings and take care of their homes. The cartels of institutional landlords can be broken, and “accidental” landlords that inherit a property they don’t care about, can be relieved of it—organisations like ACORN and Living Rent are building structures to redress the power balance in the private housing sector.

Communally organised lawsuits, and self-management of buildings and homes by residents, can free councils from their dependence on untrustworthy landlords and free residents from the prisons of passivity that renters are forced into. Direct action is possible even in prosecution, architecture, in urban planning, in housing supply, those structures so vast that we imagine only a state could protect us—look to rent strikes, to community ownership. As a house is made of bricks and stone, a city is made of its residents, and those residents can take it back.