It is terrifying to be a social tenant right now. My default mood is a nasty, sickening mix of rage and fear. I have lost any voice beyond a tiny squeaking protest that is as ridiculous as it is inaudible, shouted pointlessly into a hurricane of noise made by giant landlords who need to define my life to maintain their lifestyles.
The debate this year is about which people will be allowed to rent in future. Landlords seem to be favouring those they describe as needy, poor and vulnerable.
I am not seen as an intelligent, educated, thoughtful woman, nor a third sector manager in my early 60s finally stepping thankfully towards retirement after 45 years of work.
I’m a tenant. This is my total identity and means I am beneath contempt. Why involve me in policy or respect my social policy experience and strategic expertise? I am a tenant, a loser by definition and should shut up, be grateful and allow my betters to decide the details of my unimportant fate.
“Tenants” used to refer simply to the millions of households on low to medium incomes, renting homes that were affordable because they were not there to make profits. Housing workers were employed to serve society’s obvious need for decent housing for working class people. Tenants like me rented throughout our working lives and into retirement. We rarely, if ever, met or heard from our landlords. They were paid to make sure the housing was kept in trim, rents were collected and occasional complaints or repairs dealt with quickly.
We tenants got on with our lives. We are nurses and care workers, teaching assistants and caretakers, cleaners, bus drivers, nursery workers, musicians and artists, carers and cared for, retail staff, manual artisans and factory workers. Some of us are also refugees or migrants, the resilient people who managed to get out of war zones or move away from famine, droughts or political persecution. Seeded through are the casualties of the 1980s onslaughts on UK industries, struggling to live difficult lives drained by worklessness, needing new business investments in their neighbourhoods.
Now the housing sector is under government scrutiny, it is shown to be bloated and ugly. Light is shone on hugely paid chief executives heading up top-heavy layers of directorates, their startling wages taken from the pockets of the lowest paid or via housing benefit, from tax revenues. Panic is spreading. What if these unwieldy, expensive and overbearing hierarchies are unnecessary? Quick! To justify the existence of the sector, we tenants must be shown as universally needing control and management.
We need to be pitied, chivvied and managed by the housing professionals, without whom we would descend into feral chaos. No wonder we are not allowed near decision-making or strategic input: we are the detritus of society and should be grateful to be governed.
The housing landscape changes around us. The government dangles home ownership as a carrot, but tenants are getting old: we can’t all take that up now. Housing providers warn that the upcoming rent reductions will impact on their budgets, but do not ask working tenants how this rent money, our money, could be better spent.
I stand tiny and squeaking in my mouse voice that there are other solutions. Exciting ones. Play and create. Develop peer-run co-housing for retirees. Help Generation Renters build classy floating villages on our canals. Cede clusters of social housing to housing co-ops and bring empty homes and flats above shops into them.
But turkeys voting for Christmas, reality check. In what world would we be allowed such control of our lives?
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