Bronterre News

The grinding tyranny of low pay and uncontrolled rents: an uncivilised combination that mustn’t be allowed to continue

WHEN PEOPLE stood on their doorsteps cheering NHS staff they weren’t applauding the resilience of nurses eking out a life on low pay. 

  Perhaps they should have been or, more to the point, maybe they should some time ago have been squaring up to successive governments and demanding a civilised deal for nurses and other NHS workers in a perennial scrabble to make ends meet.

  Consider London, where the average gross salary of a nurse is £26,427. That’s £11,514 less than the £37,941 average for the capital, and £5,034 below the £31,461 UK average.

  On 25 November, chancellor Rishi Sunak announced in his latest spending review that NHS nurses would get a pay rise in 2021, though he didn’t say how much. But the indications for the average London nurse may not be good, given that Sunak went on to say that the “majority” of public sector workers would see a 2021 rise as part of an earlier pledge to boost pay by at least £250 for anyone earning below £24,000.

  That of course would be a shredded teaspoon of chicken-feed, £250 being somewhat less than a cabinet minister would spend on lunch for themselves and a favoured crony, and an indication of even leaner pickings for poverty-line nurses in London – and in loads of other places across the UK – who may – or may not – find Rishi’s largesse will cover the price of a couple of cups of coffee at their hospital’s Costa. 

  A supporting document published by the Treasury says that NHS workers are being excluded from a general freeze on public sector pay in recognition of the “unique impact of Covid-19 on the health service”.

  But it immediately backtracks by adding that, in setting the level of pay rise for NHS workers, the government would need to consider “the challenging fiscal and economic context”. 

  (Yes, indeed. And tell that to former prime minister David ‘we’re all in this together’ Cameron and his Downing Street successor, Theresa May. In 2019, he raked in £836,168 from media and speaking fees, while she made nearly £400,000 from private engagements.)

  Tell it too to the London nurse I spoke to who potentially put her life on the line recently when caring for Covid patients.

  She, with two colleagues, found themselves priced out of renting a modest-sized flat after a fourth nurse dropped out of the joint tenancy and a replacement couldn’t be found.

  Home for her now is a single room in a hospital complex with a shared kitchen and lavatory and an absence of any communal living space.

  For her, Rishi’s couple of extra quid will provide no hope of escape back to a civilised standard of accommodation. As she tells her story, overwhelmingly you encounter positivity and no more than the merest hint that she’s ill-rewarded for her cheerful dedication to the job. What you see is someone in the predicament shared by millions of other low – and close to destitute – workers immobilised in the trap of crap pay and towering rents.

  Average rent for a one-bedroom flat in London – depending on the area – is between slightly more than £2,100 and about £2,500 a calendar month; for a two-bedroomed place between £3,300 and £5,700. Such outgoings would swallow up the totality of, or more than, our nurse’s net salary.

  Beyond London, the figures are slightly different (nurse salaries, on average, are a bit lower, as are rents), but the gap between pay and private sector rents is equally daunting.

  Uncontrolled rents are at the very heart of the problem, and statutory regulation is the nettle politicians in Britain will not grasp, leaving owners with unfettered freedom to charge what they like, restrained theoretically by market forces but in reality aided and abetted by the avarice of fellow landlords.

  Meanwhile, the general taxpayer, as well as the low-paid, is the poorer through forking out for housing benefit or universal credit to help people on low incomes to pay rents.

Berlin’s answer: a five-year rent freeze, and a cap on excess

ONE WAY forward, towards the practical application of the principle that housing is a human right, not a commodity, would be to follow the lead taken by the Berlin Senate, which last October introduced an unprecedented amendment to rent-limitation law, ushering in a five-year freeze on rents in the city and the capping of excessive rents.

  One-and-a-half million flats built before 2014 will be affected, with the imposition of a 9.80-euro upper limit per square metre. Taken into account will be year of construction and facilities and equipment included. The expectation is that a previously rapid increase in housing prices will be slowed and rents reduced to a more socially acceptable level.

  It’s this kind of rent-control model that any civilised society should feel obliged to adopt. It’s also a considerable advance on, to take another example, the Swedish system, under which rents are controlled only during tenancies, but can be raised between lettings, thus ensuring that rapacious landlords merely have to bide their time.