Cancel Rent Debt

Shelter has predicted that 230,000 renters are at risk of ‘COVID evictions’ when the eviction moratorium ends next month. Worse still, this is likely an under-estimate of the crisis we are hurtling towards, or indeed the crisis that has long seethed in housing, only now to erupt in colossal rent arrears and thus mass evictions. After all, even before COVID, most tenants were only one pay check away from defaulting on their rent, already trapped on the knife edge of privation, insecurity and squalid conditions, bullied by their landlords as much as exploited by their bosses. Coronavirus spelled catastrophe precisely because of how fragile our livelihoods and infrastructure already were. It was the lost job, the illness, the culminating blow that many had long feared would push them over the brink, magnified in a public health crisis in which those lowest income communities most bludgeoned by austerity once again bore the brunt of its devastation.

It is a grotesque indictment of our society’s priorities that such a looming, unprecedented evictions crisis is not treated as a national scandal, that there is no clamour over hundreds of thousands of people losing their homes on the front pages of our newspapers every day, that the Government’s deplorable negligence around renters has been scarcely scrutinized, let alone challenged. With the furlough scheme tapering off, many will be plunged further into turmoil, as the only buffer against indigence disintegrates. Indeed, with all the dysfunctions of the furlough scheme, the many gig economy workers who have fallen through the cracks, the impossible choices many especially with underlying health conditions have been continually forced to make around work attendance in the wake of employer ruthlessness, renters have suffered disproportionately in and out of the home.

A tension remains beneath this: the Tories have strived to maintain a creaking neo-liberal worldview even under conditions which entirely conflict with a system devoid of collective social imperatives, the consequences of their strong-arming workers’ and tenants’ rights into oblivion returning to haunt us throughout the crisis. Power relations are so lopsided between workers and bosses, tenants and landlords, that even if there were more robust legislation around health and safety and livelihoods rather than haphazard, vague guidance, they would feel little inclination to follow it, and will be determined to cut corners wherever possible to shore up their interests and bottom line. The prevalence of harassment, intimidation and illegal eviction of tenants attests to this: landlords are so confident to exercise their power with impunity because they are accustomed to a system stacked in their favour. The policy route around renting has largely staked itself on relying on the mercy and discretion of landlords: it is no wonder that more and more bouts of redundancies are announced every day when the Tories have opted for a similar route around furlough, just as localized outbreaks in factories and pubs reflect an easing of lockdown that amounted to severe dereliction around worker health and safety provisions.

It is a source of shame that Labour, too, have had little to say on this: just at a moment that demands the radical policies of Corbynism, the party is at risk once again of retreating into melancholic triangulation — as its ghoulish ‘Jobs Jobs Jobs’ and shambling last-minute accompanying campaign reveal. Whether on the crisis of care homes forsaken to the carnage of the pandemic, the lack of working security, protections and rights, or the plight of renters, Labour has not intervened forcefully with the necessary arguments around how coronavirus has exposed the fundamental imbalances in our economy. With noble exceptions such as trailblazers like Nadia Whittome and Zarah Sultana, the response from the leadership has not simply been lacklustre — their perennial critique of the Government — but soulless given the appallingly unparalleled death toll of England.

Thangam Debbonaire’s response to the demands of renters’ unions for rent waivers was a particular disgrace: where once Labour proudly pursued a programme to end landlordism, here she vigorously defended the sacrosanct contractual obligations of private property. In the midst of a pandemic the party was stuck rehearsing debates about universalism as if in the chambers of a University Labour Club, whilst the macabre shocks of the public health crisis wreaked havoc in renters’ lives. When Labour should have been advancing that key argument — why should tenants be shoring up the empires of asset owners with their wages when so few even have wages in the first place — they have been missing in action, hand-wringing and compromising with backdoor cues from the Residential Landlord Association. If one is too meek to make the deeper argument this crisis opens up — why should the rich control access to shelter by extracting the wages of those poorer than them — then at least make the challenge: how can renters possibly pay back arrears over 2 years when they could barely make rent from month to month before, and may now have lost their income entirely? Why should those without any assets who are now at grave risk of homelessness bear the costs of the crisis? Why are landlords guaranteed their profits as a right, but not tenants their homes? The ideological contractions of Blairism have not been relevant since the financial crash: even less so now.

The Government response has tacked to corporatism: purely financial interventions that prop up business and asset owners, but no guarantees for the dignity of workers and renters. The Universal Credit System was shambling and cruel before: at the onset of the coronavirus it tore at the seams, with accessing support near-on impossible. Without the introduction of the furlough scheme, the welfare system simply would not have been able to cope. It is cynical to claim the scheme, then, was a mere matter of pragmatism for the Tories — though they have been loath to govern with any humanity before — but at the very least it was simply to stitch together an economy which had long festered in gaping wounds of food banks, homelessness and poverty. With some figures predicting unemployment will soar to near 10%, we need radical solutions, on an extraordinary scale, more than ever — salvaging a decaying system simply will not be enough.

The non-payment of rent is not merely an ideological supposition: it is the reality of many peoples’ lives today. This is why campaigns such as London Renter’s Union Can’t Pay Won’t Pay have sprung up: a bright revival of age-old ideas, inherited from a long historical precedent of triumphant rent strikes in Britain. It speaks to a deep human need, one intensified in a context where housing is a vital measure safeguarding public health: housing not as a luxury but a fundamental right of the people who live and work in society. Where rents have skyrocketed in London, exerting unbearable pressure on struggling tenants and already pricing many out of their homes through brutal salvos of gentrification, the language of the rent strike is a weapon, a mirror to a class war, a tool of solidarity.

And outside London, ACORN’s Housing is Health campaign has been integral in both forcing the Government moratorium on evictions as much as fighting for rent waivers and defending immunocompromised tenants on a local level. Tenants’ unions have long been forged upon the principle of eviction resistance: it is this proud story and legacy that we will need to draw on to find the reserves of community strength to confront the imminent crisis. Here we can tie together other threads: it is also a national outrage that so many have had to endure unsafe, unhealthy and hazardous homes for so long, asphyxiated by mould as a respiratory pandemic hemmed us in to crumbling and cramped flats.

The fearful limbo of eviction notices, the terror of bailiffs striking at the door, the tyranny of landlords harassing and extorting you for rent whilst you struggle to even put food on the table: these are intolerable degradations of a violent society, fundamental violations of human dignity. And we can only combat them by pulling together to defend one another — whatever it takes, whether blockading courts or blocking bailiffs. No deferral of evictions will suffice, no mere technical adjustment to evictions policy which landlords will always seek to contravene for their profits — only when we assert the right of tenants to their homes, not landlords to their assets, can we change the power imbalance and end the evil of evictions for good. As yet another recession looms, we must push for a bail out for the people: a cancellation of rent debt.