Disgusting Tory Britain: UN Housing Expert Attacked After Telling Government to Axe the Bedroom Tax

Well, what a lovely place Britain is these days. For the last two weeks, Raquel Rolnik, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on housing, has been visiting the UK to “monitor and promote the realisation of the right to adequate housing,” visiting London, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Belfast and Manchester, where, as a UN press release explained, “she met with government officials working on housing issues, various human rights commissions, academics and civil society.” She “also carried out site visits, where she heard first-hand testimonies and discussed with individuals, campaigners and local community organisations.”

However, when she dared to criticise the deteriorating state of Britain’s social housing provision, and to call for the “bedroom tax” to be scrapped, she was laid into by senior Tories, and by the right-wing media, in a series of vile and hysterical outbursts that ought to be a disgrace to any country that claims to be civilised.

The “bedroom tax” is a widely reviled policy dreamed up by the millionaires in the Tories’ cabinet, which provides financial penalties for people living in social housing and in receipt of benefits who are deemed to have a spare room. It is forcing many people to move from homes they have lived in for decades, even though there are very few smaller properties to which they can move.

As well as being despicable because it treats people in social housing as sub-humans who don’t deserve the right to regard their homes as homes, the policy also attempts to shift the blame for a lack of social housing onto the poor, rather than admitting that it is the fault of successive governments since Margaret Thatcher, who savagely cut the supply of social housing through her “right to buy” policy, and, more importantly, by her refusal to allow councils to use the money earned to build new social housing, a policy largely maintained by every subsequent government, whether Conservative or Labour.

Ms. Rolnik, who is an academic and a former urban planning minister in Brazil, was described as a “loopy Brazilian leftie with no evidence masquerading as a serious UN official” by the Tory MP for Peterborough Stewart Jackson (who, in May, was being “sued by parliament’s expenses watchdog after refusing to pay £54,000 he is alleged to have made in capital gains on his publicly funded home”), and was also criticised by housing minister Grant Shapps and Iain Duncan Smith, the work and pensions secretary, who claimed that she had failed to meet with ministers. As the Guardian put it, Shapps said “he had written a formal complaint to the UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon demanding and investigation and claiming Rolnik had not met relevant ministers or officials to discuss the policy. He demanded that she withdraw her report.”

In response, Rolnik told Inside Housing that, although she had visited 11 countries in her role, this was “the first time a government has been so aggressive.” She added, “When I was in the USA, I had a constructive conversation with them accepting some things and arguing with others. They did not react like this.”

She also refuted Shapps’ claims, stating, “I have met officials from many departments, and the details of these meetings are all listed within my report.” Inside Housing reported that it was “understood that as well as meetings with Eric Pickles, secretary of state at the department of communities and local government and under secretary Don Foster,” she “also met with several other officials including the head of housing policy at the department for work and pensions.”

Raquel Rolnik’s analysis

So what had Rolnik done to earn such appalling treatment from the Tory bully-boys? In a statement on September 11, preceding a full report to the UN Human Rights Council next March, she “expressed serious concern about a deterioration in the enjoyment of the right to adequate housing in the United Kingdom,” and “warned against the combined impact of various official measures, recent and past, that ‘have eroded and continue to erode one of the world’s finest systems of affordable housing.'”

She added, “The UK has had a long history of providing affordable and good quality housing, and it should take pride in having placed this human right at the centre of its policy priorities.” She also stated, “For generations, being poor in the UK didn’t necessarily equate to being homeless, or to living badly housed and in permanent threat of eviction.”

“Unfortunately,” she remarked, “the system has been weakened by a series of measures over the years, notably by having privileged homeownership over other forms of tenure.” She added that, “Most recently several reforms to the welfare system topped with cuts in grants for housing provision ‘appear to compromise the realisation of the right to adequate housing and other related human rights.'”

Turning to the bedroom tax, she stated, “The so-called bedroom tax has already had impacts on some of the most vulnerable members of society. During these days of my visit, the dramatic testimonies of people with disabilities, grandmothers who are carers for their families, and others affected by this policy, clearly point to a measure that appears to have been taken without the human component in mind.”

As the UN press release noted, she “acknowledged that times of economic crisis allow for difficult policy decisions to be made,” but warned that “international human rights standards on the right to adequate housing clearly call on governments to avoid jeopardizing the protection of the most vulnerable in the face of fiscal pressures.”

Rolnik also stated, “I am also concerned about the conditions of private renters, as the reduction in the social housing stock and the credit downturn has forced a higher percentage of the population, notably young people, to the private sector, with substantial impact on affordability, location and tenure security.”

Ordinary decent human beings would find nothing to complain about in Ms. Rolnik’s analysis. The “bedroom tax” is a unforgivably vile policy, for its dehumanisation of people in social housing, its pointlessness, as people who are forced to downsize to properties that don’t exist will end up costing more to rehouse, and — to me — the almost unbearable cruelty of rich ministers obsessing and delighting in obsessing about how to further impoverish the poor. It deserves to be scrapped, as does the government’s blanket benefit cap; the cruel and inept Iain Duncan Smith’s universal credit fiasco; the whole workfare scandal, part of a malignant policy of treating the unemployed as shirkers, when there is still only one job for every five people without jobs; and, of course, the government’s systematic and persistent assault on the disabled.

I hope to find time to write more about these issues over the coming months, as I am aware that I have not covered them as thoroughly as I would have liked for the last six months or so, as Guantánamo once more took up centre stage in my life, even though my anger and disgust at this government’s cruelty is undiminished.

Below I’m cross-posting the latest article from the Guardian by Amelia Gentleman, the 2012 George Orwell Prize winner, whose coverage of social issues since the Tories began their war on the state in 2010 is unparalleled in the mainstream media.

Her article follows Raquel Rolnik on part of her visit, and includes the rapporteur’s powerful observation that “[s]ocial housing is almost a lottery today.” The article is also largely self-explanatory, although I should stress that when a spokesperson for the Department of Work and Pensions tries to claim that the bedroom tax “will help us get to grips with the housing benefit bill which has grown to £24bn this year,” he or she is either profoundly deluded or lying through his or her teeth. It will not save any money, as those made homeless will have to be rehoused, at greater expense, but, more importantly, the great lie is that tenants in social housing have more than the most meagre of roles in that colossal housing benefit bill.

The reason that the housing benefit bill has grown to £24bn is because of the historic lack of investment in social housing that I mentioned above, which has now been ongoing for over 30 years, and the greed of the housing market in general, in which an ever-increasing house price bubble, fostered by banks and the government (and especially by George Osborne’s idiotic “Help to Buy” loans), as well as by countless clamouring greedy British citizens and foreign investors, has made getting a mortgage beyond the reach of more and more people, who are forced into private rented housing, where greed is also driving rents ever upward, and there are no checks whatsoever on what landlords can charge — or for that matter, whether what people are getting for being throughly ripped off is actually habitable.

As always, the government and most of the media ignore the fact that much of the welfare bill is not used by the unemployed, but is to help support working people who are simply not paid enough to live by their employers. However, it is the greed of private landlords that is the main key to understanding the idiocy of the government, and how nothing will bring the bills down until the whole rotten housing bubble is lanced like a boil, and we think about having an economy that is not based increasingly on property, and on the endless and ever-increasing exploitation of those with less money by those with more.

To me, genuinely affordable housing is a right, and the country I currently find myself living in — with its monstrous swaggering greed and its seeming acceptance that more and more people will be forced to work longer and longer hours just to pay the over-inflated rent, or the over-inflated mortgage if they can get on the property ladder — is harsh, callous and immoral, and, in the long run, counter-productive for the health of society as a whole.

A society addicted to a second supposedly endless housing bubble (after the last one, which was so rudely interrupted by a total global meltdown caused by the criminals in the financial sector who have not been held accountable for their crimes) is, it seems to me, technically deranged. We are seeing an insanely selfish policy shift cultivated by callous and desperate people who have ceased to believe in a present or a future for society as a whole, and who care only — and I mean only — about themselves and the narrow group of similarly minded people with whom they identify.

As I mentioned, I hope to be writing more about these topics soon, but in the meantime please find Amelia Gentleman’s latest article below.

UK’s bedroom tax and housing crisis threaten human rights, says UN expert
By Amelia Gentleman, The Guardian, September 11, 2013

Housing in the UK, from a human rights perspective, is deteriorating, argues Raquel Rolnik. ‘Social housing is almost a lottery today’

Carol Robertson has already made plans for how to cope with losing £13 a week because of the new spare room subsidy, and she set them out in detail for the UN housing investigator when they met at an Edinburgh food bank last week. Mostly she thinks she will have to cut the amount she spends on electricity as the nights draw in. “It sounds preposterous, but I think people will save on the electricity and use candles. I won’t put my lights on; I will just buy candles,” she told the UN rapporteur on adequate housing, Raquel Rolnik, pointing out that she did not feel this was a very safe alternative. “There will be fires …”

In the warehouse, where volunteers were sorting crates of potatoes and pots of lemon and coconut yoghurt, abandoned by the food industry, for distribution to the city’s poor, Rolnik listened as Robertson explained how the introduction of the bedroom tax was already causing substantial hardship to her and to her neighbours.

Because she wanted to remain in the two-bedroom flat where she has lived for 37 years, and where she brought up her two children, Robertson has decided to pay the £13.02 spare room supplement, introduced by the government in April to push people out of council and housing association properties that are deemed too large for them.

As a result, she is left with £26 a week to live on, after her rent, including the bedroom tax, is paid. Her next-door neighbour, who is also paying the supplement, is left with £4. “Lots of people [in the block] are suffering, but we are helping each other out,” she said.

She chose not to have central heating connected to her home when it was installed in the council block recently. “I knew I couldn’t afford it. If I get cold, I just put on my jumper.” She started volunteering at the Cyrenians Good Food programme, a local food bank, not least because she receives enough food for one meal to take back with her for each shift she works, which helps with her reduced budget. She does not want to leave the home where she brought up her son and her daughter. “If I moved to somewhere smaller I wouldn’t know anyone there. Anyway, there aren’t any smaller properties for us to move to in Edinburgh, so we have to pay the difference,” she said.

This interview with Robertson was one of several that helped crystallise the UN rapporteur’s concern about the spare-room subsidy, pushing it to the top of her agenda on what was meant to be a wide-ranging study of Britain’s housing crisis over the past two weeks. She will declare that the government should abolish the policy on Wednesday morning, as she makes her findings public.

Appointed to report on human rights problems globally, the UN’s special rapporteurs are more frequently found investigating allegations of human rights violations in crisis zones. But during her tenure, Rolnik, a Brazilian architect and urban planner, has been particularly interested in studying how the global financial crisis has affected housing, and has visited both developed and developing countries on fact-finding trips.

She was vocal in her criticisms of the US government for “ignoring” a surge in homelessness after the economic crisis in 2009. She is likely to be equally tough in her criticisms of the British government when she publishes her preliminary conclusions from her tour on Wednesday, given her conviction that the UK’s previously good record on social housing is rapidly worsening. The causes of the decline stretch back decades, and predate the current administration’s austerity policy, but she argues that welfare reform is making an already difficult situation worse. “You had already problems with affordability, with waiting lists, with security of tenure, and then on top of that you have welfare reform,” she said.

She met government ministers, council officials, housing developers and charity workers, but much of her report is based on interviews with individuals asked to recount in detail how housing policy has affected their lives. She heard from many other council property tenants encountering similar difficulties during her visit to Manchester, where she attended a rally organised on Saturday in protest at the bedroom tax. “I saw the human face of it,” she said.

She was concerned by how individuals who were already on a low income would be able to make the extra payments that would allow them to stay in their homes. “You struggle already to pay for your fuel, your food, with the low payments; but then on top of that if you stay in your home you are going to have a deduction in your housing benefit,” she said.

A case such as Robertson’s, where a person was forced to cut down on heating and electricity in order to pay for accommodation, represented a violation of the right to adequate housing, she said. She was uncertain about whether her report on UK housing and the bedroom tax would have an impact on legal challenges to the bedroom tax. “In many countries, despite the fact that the country has signed and ratified [the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and also the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights], the judicial authorities do not necessarily take that into account. But judges should take that into account.”

Orla Doyle, part of the Cyrenians’ homelessness prevention service, said staff were only just beginning to appreciate the consequences of the introduction of the policy, as tenants who had chosen to stay in their home realised how difficult it was going to be to find the extra money. “People thought they would be able to afford it, but it turns out they can’t,” she told Rolnik.

“It is outrageous the choices that people have to make between heating and feeding themselves. The mental health impact of these situations is under-reported,” another volunteer at the food bank said.The Department for Work and Pensions was both defensive and dismissive in its statement on Rolnik’s findings, reiterating that the bedroom tax was a “useful and important” policy and rejecting the report as insubstantial, “drawn from anecdotal evidence and conversations after a handful of meetings”.

“These changes will help us get to grips with the housing benefit bill which has grown to £24bn this year, and make better use of our housing stock. We’ve given councils £190m to support vulnerable residents who may need extra help,” a DWP spokesman said. The Department for Communities and Local Government also appeared to downplay the significance of her trip, commenting that Eric Pickles had “briefly” met Rolnik for a 15-minute conversation.

The rapporteur’s visit has already triggered hostility from some Conservative MPs, who questioned whether the UN had a role in commenting on British housing and highlighting Rolnik’s previously stated philosophical scepticism about Britain’s “obsessive” approach to home ownership and the right to buy policy. The Tory MP for Dover, Charlie Elphicke, said in a statement distributed by Conservative party headquarters: “Hard-working taxpayers have to make tough choices of their own about what sort of property they can afford to live in, and they should not be paying for what is effectively a benefit subsidy for empty rooms.”

But Rolnik said the government had been helpful when she first requested to make the inspection last year and had been happy to extend a formal invitation to her to carry out her work.

The rapporteur was struck by the impact the policy has on people with disabilities whose homes had been converted to suit their needs. “I saw a lot of cases of people with disabilities, who have their whole world around them adapted to help them have an independent life, having to move,” she said. “People are asking: ‘How can I pay to move? I don’t have a penny to pay for the move.'”

Rolnik believes the UK is in the grips of a housing crisis. “What are the indicators of that crisis? Problems of affordability, not just for low-income people; middle-income people are also complaining a lot about the price of their mortgages and rent. There is the very high, and rising, cost of renting. There is overcrowding, and the impact of short-term tenancies being offered,” she said. Her report will compare standards in the UK against the country’s own previous record, rather than looking at the relative merits of housing here and in Sierra Leone, for example.

“The UK has set up very high standards for social housing. A third of households in the 1960s were housed in social housing; there was a massive postwar production of social housing and a lot of it well located,” she said.

But housing in Britain, from a human rights perspective, is deteriorating, she argued. “Retrogression is what you talk about in human rights when you go backwards, and that is what we are seeing now. You were much more likely in the 1970s to be able to access social housing than today when it is very difficult, almost a lottery; today in England you have 17% in social housing,” she said.

She was also critical of a “change in status” of social housing “so that it is now seen as something only for the vulnerable, only for the ones that failed to be professionals, able to buy their homes, only for those who live on benefit. It is stigmatised.”

She was also critical of the government for its large investment in housing market stimulus schemes. “The real housing shortage is affordable housing, and the schemes that are being proposed, like the help to buy or the mortgage to rent scheme, they will not provide affordable housing. The bulk of it won’t be affordable,” she argued. She will recommend better regulation of the rental sector as part of the report.

Rolnik, a former minister for urban planning in Brazil’s centre-left Workers’ party, is politically astute and aware that the recommendations take her into highly charged political territory. Asked if she thought the government would adopt her proposals, she laughed and said, “of course”, before conceding that at the very least she would like her report to “raise public awareness of what’s going on”.

Note: Raquel Rolnik’s full end-of-mission statement after her UK visit is here. In it, she also noted severe problems with land speculation. She stated that “several documents and assessments acknowledge that land with permits has increasingly become the asset in itself, rather than an asset for the social well-being of the community. Similarly, it is also of concern that there is no property tax on land, including dormant or vacant land for years. Land value, including in the financial circuits, has escalated in the last decades, yet it is still mostly regarded as a private matter, hence for-profit. I would recommend that the government sets a regulatory framework to avoid this kind of speculation”.

“Similarly,” she added, “selling public land to private developers for the best price can mean that a valuable public resource is not being used as a means to increase the availability of housing for those who need it, in times of housing stress. A significant part of the existing social housing stock in UK was built on local council and other public land. In times of pressure on affordable housing, the mobilization of public land can be an important tool, so I recommend that the government releases public sector land only for social and affordable housing to be built”.

Rolnik also said that she had also received “multiple testimonies on the shortage of sufficient, adequate and safe sites for Gypsy and Traveller communities across the United Kingdom, many of whom feel this is part of the stigma and discrimination they regularly face from governments and society as a whole,” adding, “it is fair to say that leaving local authorities to make their own decisions with no accountability and national process to reconcile the Gypsy and Traveller communities with settled communities remains a source of concern.”

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer and film-maker. He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

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