September 11, 2013
Housing in 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”.
Source: The Guardian
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