Dick Crossman, the Minister of Housing, has now published his Rent Bill, It is a serious attempt to tackle the tragic situation, described by Sir Milner Holland in his committee's report, the situation created by the Tory Rent Bill of 1957- A child should have understood that, if you remove rent restrictions in the middle of an acute housing shortage, then landlords will exploit that shortage. With a handful of honourable exceptions they certainly did. Sir Milner may have reported that only a small percentage of landlords were guilty of some of the acts of intimidation he describes, Maybe, but there can be little doubt that the overwhelming majority doubled, trebled or quadrupled their rents as soon as a change of tenant..permitted them to do so,
Half of the solution is vastly to increase the number of houses available. Labour is pledged to a building programme of 400,000 a year as an immediate aim, and of 500,000 subsequently. The other half of the solution is this Bill, It contains several vitally important features:
(1) All tenants (except those in the luxury class) will enjoy security of tenure, and eviction, without a landlord securing a court order, is prohibited from premises of any value,
(2) Harassing or intimidating tenants becomes a criminal offence, punish-~ able by a fine up to £100 (£500 on a second offence) or six months! imprisonment or bothe
(3) For the time being, 2,250,000 families living in properties still under rent control will remain there at controlled rents,
But what is to happen to the houses now decontrolled? What will the new controlled rents for such houses be? (this affects 1,500,000 families right away, plus the other 2,250,000 in due course as they, too, become recontrolled,) This brings.us to the all-important Clause 22. The Government has decided that, in determin’ "#hat it considers to be a "fair rent" rent assessment,committees are to consider "all circumstances, including the age, character, and locality of the house, and its state of repair. Consideration of scarcity is to be eliminated" by assuming there is no scarcity of housing in the area, My fear is that unscrupulous landlords, assisted by skilful lawyers, will drive a coach and houses through this vague clause, in the way they have already done through the Protection from Eviction Act, passed only three months ago.
If they can get one or two favourable decisions through the tribunals (consisting of a valuer, a lawyer, and a third person, who will probably be a man remote from the pressing problems of poor tenants) they will create precedents for raising rents everywhere, . The alternative, I would propose, is this: by all means let the tribunals take into account all the factors mentioned in the clause, but let the main basis be the 1963 rateable value of the property. This would mean an increase of about one-third in the rents of controlled houses in the provinces and about three-quarters in London, That is quite enough, On the present formula I have suspicion that the tribunals will take a rent which has been increased from, say, £2 to £5, knock off four or five shillings, and say "justice has been done,"
As an incentive to landlords to do necessary repairs the tribunals might also be authorised to consider receipts for sums paid out by landlords to their property repairers. What I would insist on is this: Whatever formula is adopted our main aim must be absolutely clear - to keep rents down. Labour M.P.s must stand firm against those gentlemen who talk airily about "rent increases being
Landlords v. tenants continued/
inevitable. Why is that so? That was not what the electors returned us to
Parliament to:‘do. It would be utterly unfair to controlled tenants, who have
already had their rents raised by roughly two-thirds under the 1957 Rent Act,
and also to decontrolled tenants, whose rents have been doubled, trebled, or
quadrupled. It would be political dynamite. It would be doing the Conservatives'
dirty work for them.
If it is argued that the landlords need this money to do repairs, it should
be pointed out there is no guarantee the property owners will do them even if
rents are increased. And most of them are not doing too badly, even after paying
repairs, seeing their properties have, in many cases, been paying rents for 80
or 100 years, If it is argued that the landlords will put up their houses for
sale, and thus further reduce the number of houses to let, many of them will,
in my view, do this in any case. High rents will merely mean that they will
obtain even higher selling prices for their houses.
If it is argued that tax concessions should be granted to landlords (see
the rumours in the Observeree.) then I say that such a policy would be completely
intolerable = particularly after the huge rent increases, Rachmanism, and the
Milner Holland Report. Because the other features of the Bill will be so popular
with the electorate, it puts the Conservatives in difficulty about opposing it
outright. Instead, I think they will try to water it down in the long committee
stage, and in particular they will aim to see that Clause 22 leaves open the
door for big rent increases.
* This article first appeared the April issue of The Foundry Yorker.