So I guess we’ll just get into it then with the first question, what do you do at ACORN?
I moved into my role recently after being an organiser for a couple of years. A lot of it is helping our elected leadership come to positions on various issues, so producing reports and briefings to help them make decisions on where we stand on things, what our priorities are, etc.
And then once that’s been decided by leadership, then a big part of my role is trying to influence decision makers in one way or another to promote our positions.
And then I also do support for national and local campaigns as well. With research, I represent us in coalitions. It’s quite a varied workload, really.
So what motivated you to join?
Me personally, like a lot of people in the union, were quite involved in the Corbyn movement up to 2019, and I had been a member of ACORN prior to that, but obviously Labour took up a lot of my time, and ACORN was appealing because they were doing impactful stuff that got results on the ground, but also with a long-term political vision, which is a nice balance to strike, I think.
The thing about Labour is we sort of put all our eggs in the winning elections basket, and when you do that and you don’t win, you haven’t achieved anything. Whereas with ACORN, we are immediately improving people’s lives in the day-to-day.
If you do that without a longer-term political vision, then really, you’re almost helping the system, because you’re sort of alleviating its worst aspects, not trying to structurally change it. So I think it’s that balance of very immediate and long-term strategy as well.
So how is ACORN helping people who’ve been affected by the housing crisis?
In the most immediate sense, we have what we call member defence, which is basically where individual members or groups of members, households, or whatever, if they’re being mistreated by their landlord, be that social, be that private – ACORN’s a vehicle through which you can be supported to come together and take direct action against that landlord, and in order to get your issues addressed further, whether that’s you getting evicted, repairs done, rent hikes, whatever it is.
We’re a self-defence organisation of the working class, but then if you become a member, you can also get involved in national and local campaigns that try and change the rules of the game so people don’t end up in the position they’re in.
So on a local level, that might look like campaigning for landlord licensing or other sorts of local measures councils can implement to protect renters a bit. And then on a national level, we campaign for private rental reform, so that the conditions people rent under are more favourable to tenants.
And things like social housing, council house building and the sort of things that long term, can actually alleviate the housing crisis.
How have things gone with some of the issues you’ve tackled, like landlord licensing?
We successfully fought in several places to have landlord licensing introduced – I know they’ve done it in Leeds. I’m not sure about Manchester though, I haven’t worked too much in Manchester, to be honest with you.
Excuse my ignorance, but with landlord licences, it’s kind of like on a book is it? It becomes law on a on a case-by-case basis, so to speak, on a city-by-city basis, is that how it works?
Yeah, and even within cities, it’s just certain areas. So a council could introduce it under its own volition, under a certain threshold for, say, percentage of the city covered, but then above a certain threshold, they need Secretary of State permission.
But yeah, it’s an extra measure that can be introduced at council level where there’s particular issues. So, if in this ward or that ward, there’s particular issues with housing standards; for example, that the houses are particularly low quality, then councils can introduce selective licensing schemes so they can regulate the private rented sector in that area.
Apart from landlord licensing, what other causes has ACORN taken on?
We are a community union. So the bulk of what we work on is definitely housing. That’s what we’re known for. But we fight on all sorts of issues that affect working class communities, whether that’s public transport, access to leisure and exercise facilities, you know, a whole range of issues.
I guess one of the proudest things, and this is housing related, is we had a big campaign in Bristol where there was a series of fires in these tower blocks. Someone sadly lost their life, and the tenants weren’t being treated properly.
There wasn’t a proper plan in place for what to do about this. And tenants were getting really worried that there was going to be another Grenfell in Bristol.
You know, we organized the tenants of those blocks, had big community meetings, got loads of press attention, really built up loads of local leaders, and got the council to commit £100 million to fire safety in those blocks. Got them to replace the cladding, install sprinkler systems and have round-the-clock fire wardens until the improvements have been made.
It was a really great example of community power, people coming together, standing against a council that was dragging its heels and trying to sort of brush things under the carpet. So a significant, massive result.
In terms of austerity, how has that affected some of the issues that ACORN represents, like, what’s been the impact on the housing crisis, for example?
The most obvious consequence is that councils’ budgets are not what they were, and they’re very stretched. So you see a real lack of things like housing officers and environmental health officers. You see a total lack of council housing getting built.
Now that’s a little bit more complicated, because that’s also due to Right To Buy and that sort of thing. But it’s very hard for councils to build social housing when you see councils struggling to maintain their existing budgets.
Now, I don’t want to let councils totally off the hook here. It’s a little balance you have to strike. Councils could be doing better and should be doing better, and their priorities are often not in the right place.
At the same time, it’s important to acknowledge that they are in a very difficult position. Austerity has left them with very little, often literally not enough money to keep the lights on.
On that note, I know that people say there’s a lack of money, and that’s like a main narrative. But if you scratch below the surface, is it just lack of money? Because I know you said that the council had to play a part in terms of how they’re organized and things like that. Is there anything the council should be doing better off their own back? Is it all just about funding?
No, it’s definitely not all just about funding. Often councils owe much to relationships, cozy relationships with property developers. You’ve seen them waiving the quotas for affordable housing time and time again.
The city plans, the plans for delivering housing in cities, do not meet the needs of working class people. They don’t provide enough affordable housing.
The council should be standing up much more to property developers and not acting like property developers are doing them a favour for building in their city.
And you’ve seen where there is a will, there is a way. Some councils have managed to build council houses. Some councils have taken steps to clamp down on property developers a bit more. You have to be quite bold, you have to be quite radical.
The volume of buildings going up, it doesn’t match the volume of people who need housing, does it?
And you see important parts of historically working class cities just getting demolished and replaced with ugly, cookie cutter luxury developments. And it’s not good for cities, it’s not good for renters. It’s not good for anyone. Apart from developers.
Okay, so, is there a way that the private and public sector could work together to help solve the crisis?
My opinion is, generally, the route to alleviating the housing crisis in this country is mainly council housing, really. That’s the key. Council housing, and, to a degree, helping people own homes as well.
That being said, it’s difficult. We’re not in a situation where we’re going to nationalize housing. That’s not politically on the table. What you need is for government and councils to make the private sector work for people’s needs, not the other way around.
If we’re going to have market forces involved in the delivery of housing, they need to be highly regulated. They need to be able to operate according to what people’s needs are. At the moment, they’re far too often allowed to, for example, waive affordability quotas, because it’s not profitable. It will harm the profitability of the venture too much.
To which the council needs to be able to say, ‘Well, if you can’t profitably deliver affordable housing, then you will not get to do this. You need to find a way to deliver the housing that people need, otherwise, your business model just doesn’t work’.
So councils being a bit more assertive. But is it all the council’s responsibility to enforce the regulations, or are there other parties involved?
It’s a mix, isn’t it? The rules of the game as they exist now, are very favourable to property developers. I mean, they wouldn’t say so, they’d say planning laws get in the way all the time. And that may be true to an extent, but certainly they allow property developers to skirt around their obligations far too often.
So I’d like to see the tightening up of regulations from Westminster. I’d like to see a publicly owned national construction agency that’s responsible for delivering affordable housing. People talk about the government being afraid to borrow money, but borrowing money to build housing that’s going to pay itself off is just sensible economics. And you know, they should, as a last resort, use the private sector, whatever.
But we need massive investment in public house building, basically, and to stop handing out contracts to the private sector, who then don’t deliver what we need and make massive profits in the process.
You mentioned areas with a lot of council housing, that have been levelled in order to build these cookie cutter housing developments. But is there a positive side to gentrification?
I think that if you look back at the post-war period, leading up to the 1980s you saw huge construction of social housing, particularly council housing, but also the procurement of it by councils. So councils were buying up private stock.
And where you saw slum clearances happen in that post-war era, people often moved into affordable, decent quality housing. You had new, newly built social housing.
What you see now is people getting priced out of areas or moved out because the housing is getting demolished. And if they’re a council tenant, they might be sent halfway across the country to move into somewhere. If they’re a private tenant and they’re priced out of an area, then they’re just going to move to another equally run down area elsewhere.
So improving and making an area more affluent, because the workers there are getting more wages, or there’s generally investment, or the housing’s been made more affordable – that’s good. If you’re just taking out the poor people, moving them to another run down area, and bringing in a bunch of rich people, you’ve just moved the problem around, really, haven’t you?
There’s nothing wrong with improving the quality of housing. Our housing stock is in a terrible state. I’d like to see as much of it refurbed as possible, partly for environmental reasons, but there are times where you need to demolish stuff and rebuild it.
But, you know, people need to be housed, rehoused locally, in good quality housing. Far too often, you’re not really seeing that.
With Labour getting in, what would you hope that they’d do with housing?
Our position is first of all, what we need is massive investment in council house building and buying. Ultimately, the best protection for any private renter is a council house.
You know, all the things we campaign for in the private sector are better, not perfect, but better in council housing. So, you know, we’re campaigning for better affordability. They’re more affordable. We’re campaigning for better security of tenure. It’s very, very difficult to evict someone from a council house, much more so than a private tenant.
And, you know, standards, obviously, standards are more iffy, but standards are still better in council housing than they are in the private sector. But obviously that’s something we’ve been campaigning to improve in council housing.
Ultimately, we need to build and buy loads and loads of council houses. The waiting list is far too long. There’s over a million people on the waiting list and many more who don’t bother to even apply, because they know they’re never going to get it.
It’s become a housing of last resort. It’s become that only the people with the very greatest need can get a council house; that was never the intention. It was meant to be all different people of all walks of life.
You know, our post-war council house initiative was with cross-party consensus. Everyone believed in it, and it’s almost a sort of utopian idea of community housing that’s been totally done away with, and it’s now just seen as something for those in desperate need.
We need to get back to that. We need to get rid of Right To Buy and give councils money and the confidence to build loads of stuff. In the meantime, there are other things that need to be done, like rent controls.
Sometimes people are scared of rent controls, and there are some examples of it being done poorly. But if you look across Europe at equivalent economies, it’s really just us and Ireland, no, sorry, Ireland have them. It’s literally just us.
I was thinking it’s literally us that don’t have any form of rent control. And by ‘us’ I mean England and Wales. Scotland and Northern Ireland both have some form, and across Europe it’s very normal, so there’s debates to be had around this form or that form, but ultimately the principle has to be that landlords shouldn’t be able to raise your rent by just as much as they want.
We want to see the introduction of better standards for the private rented sector as well. So as long as people are in the private rented sector, there should be higher standards for the condition of properties, but crucially, as well, more funding for local authorities to actually enforce that.
The big problem at the minute is you can introduce whatever regulations you want, but enforcement is ultimately going to lie with the local authority, and they’re not going to do anything they don’t have an absolute duty to because, as I mentioned before, they’re so cash-strapped that they only do what they absolutely have to. So it needs to be a duty, and local authorities given the money to back that up so they can afford it.
And the only other thing that Labour must do, and they’ve been talking about doing, is ending unfair evictions. This is something they said they’re going to do, but it’s very low on detail. Obviously we want to see Section 21 abolished, but there’s other pernicious ways that landlords can do it as well.
A massive rent rise is effectively a no-fault eviction. But also, landlords can evict you if they’re claiming they want to sell a house. And often we see landlords say they’re going to sell a property, and then they don’t actually do it. It’s just a way to get rid of a tenant.
We’ve seen it up in Scotland, where they’ve had a no-fault eviction ban. We want it so that tenants can’t just be evicted through no fault of their own, except in very marginal circumstances.
At the moment, [Labour’s] vision is to ban no-fault evictions, which is promising. It gives us hope, but we really want to see the detail on that so that we can be confident they’re not going to leave it full of loopholes that landlords can exploit.
That seems the most likely policy that Labour will bring in, but are you hopeful that other things might improve as well, like rent controls and registering landlords?
It’s tricky. Yeah, it’s tricky because their manifesto is pretty light on detail. So for example, they’ve said they’re going to look at Right To Buy, look at the discounts on that and that kind of thing. Well, let’s see the detail. Let’s see what they come out with.
We’ll be campaigning to make that as strong as possible. Rents. They’ve said nothing about rents. They said in the manifesto something about renters being able to challenge their rent rises. Again, it’s hard to know what that means in practice. If it means that tenants have to go through a lengthy, bureaucratic process in order to stop their rent being unfairly raised, then that doesn’t sound great.
But what we want to see is a simple set of regulations so everyone across the board, landlords and tenants, knows in advance what a reasonable rent rise is. You don’t want a post facto challenge in the court system. Because a lot of people don’t have time for that.
And who’s got the money to pay for legal support for things like that?
That’s another thing. It’s hard to say without the details on the table, but one thing we’ve talked about a lot is access to Legal Aid for working class people in general, because we just don’t exist in a situation where people have access to justice. That’s the conversation.
Do you feel hopeful that there’ll be an increase in funding for councils with Labour?
What they’ve said, it’s difficult. They said they’re not going to spend any new money, right? However, that doesn’t mean they can’t make more money available to councils.
So without getting into the weeds; the coalition government – Cameron and Clegg and Osborne, that den of thieves – they basically put in a load of rules that made it difficult for councils to spend money on building council houses. When they sell a council house under Right To Buy, that money’s restricted from building new council housing.
One thing Labour can do, and they’ve sort of talked about doing, is making more of the council’s own money available to it, for council house building, while also reducing the discounts when houses are sold under Right To Buy. That would make councils more confident to build. It would mean that they have more money available to them.
I think we need to take this seriously. See it as a national priority, in terms of health, in terms of people, livelihoods, wellbeing, educational outcomes, everything is centred on your house. And the massive provision of millions of council houses over the coming years and decades should be a priority.
If we can hand out billions during Covid, we can spend billions on building council houses. We really need to do that. But whatever government it is, whatever party it is, however big people’s promises are, ACORN are always vigilant, always pushing to make things as good for the working class as possible.
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