The Labour Party came to power on a wave of optimism from all sections of the working class. The hopes and promises given at the time have been sadly dashed to the ground one by one. The 1965 Rent Act is an example of a measure that is thought by many to be progressive, working in the interests of the tenants. Those who believe this are not those directly affected by the Acts: the tenants themselves know better. On paper the powers of the landlord may have been curtailed - in practice the status quo remains as it was before the Act came into being.
THE TIMES (July 2nd) spotlighted some actual instances of landlords victimising and terrorising tenants, with the full knowledge of the local authorities and the police, It cites the case of a woman of 64, living in Islington, whose rent was cut by successive tribunals from £3. 5s a week to £1 15s. "As a result of these cuts she was harassed first by (the landlady) and then by her husband. The electricity supply to her room was cut off last August and the light fitting torn from the flex. Her gas was cut off at the end of February because the landlord omitted to pass on the sixpences she had paid into her meter. Her room is damp, the whole house needs repair." The tenant in question has also been threatened with physical violence, and she was forcibly evicted last November. "The local tenants association called the police....but a police inspector pointed out that he had no power to act. The woman has had no electricity for the past eight months and has had no gas for the past four months, The local authority says it can do nothing to help her."
Another tenant, a seaman aged 72, living in the same area, was so badly harassed that he was too scared to sleep in the house and slept on a sofa in another house.
A bus-conductor, again living in Islington, earns a basic wage of £15 a week. He has six children another on the way. "They live in two rooms. One is partitioned with a double bed and a cot in one half, and five children sleep in the other. The second room has to serve as a kitchen, living room . id playroom...... The walls of the room are damp and stained, The plaster is rotten and has crumbled away in many places,
LOCKED LAVATORY
The rent was cut to £2. [illegible] from £5 a week by a rent tribunal. A post office worker, paying £2 3s 3d a week (originally £4), lives in two rooms on the ground floor of the same house with his wife and two children, "The house has two [illegible]. One is kept locked by the rent collector, [illegible] the ground floor and is frequently blocked, It overflows into a basement inhabited by another tenant.
Both tenants have been offered a number of inducements to quit, including cash, The post office worker was offered £250 for a deposit on a house which turned out to be a dilapidated slum with tenants already living there. Only one room was vacant.
Complaints about the condition of the house have been made by both tenants on a number of occasions to the town hall, The bus conductor's wife told them "that the house was walking alive with mice, They agreed that we were a desperate case, But they said they had far worse on their books."
Bad housing and evasion of the Rent Act affect all areas, Last year in Deptford, Hackney, Hammersmith, Islington, Kensington, Paddington, St. Marylebone and Wandsworth, more than one-third of all complaints made to the Citizens' Advice Bureau concerned housing or rent matters. In Battersea, Lewisham and Pimlico the figure was roughly one-quarter of all complaints.
"A landlord in North Kensington added a 10s a week charge for electricity to the rents in a 20-roomed flatlet house. This works out at an annual return of £520 a year. Non-payment of the charge was counted as arrears of rent, Although it is an offence to make false entries in rent books held by unfurnished tenants, this rule does not apply to furnished tenants,"
POLICE THREATEN TENANTS
"A woman living in Brooke Road, Hackney was turned out on the street with her two children, The tenants association called the police, and invited them to reinstate the woman or to stand by to maintain the peace while she was reinstated by other tenants, The police officer reported that unless the tenants dispersed at once he would arrest them all for causing a disturbance, After the woman was eventually reinstated, he then forbade the tenants to restore her children on the grounds that this might lead to a breach of the peace."
And so it continues - victimisation of tenants by landlord, Under the terms of the Act, it is possible to prosecute the landlords but even in the few cases where this is done and the landlord is convicted, tenants do not want to stay on in the same house, for fear of retaliation, So the landlord has gained possession for the price of his conviction,
The solution lies with the tenants themselves - tenants associations must be more militant and more of an action group than they are at present, They must realise that they are not going to get any help from either the police or the local authorities, They must realise than an individual tenant's fight is every tenant's fight. They must expose the total inadequacy of the 1965 Rent Act by fighting the landlord on his terms and if the tenants are forcibly evicted, then the struggle must be on the street itself, with all sections of the labour movement uniting together in the [illegible].