New Shelter campaign targets Britain’s ‘broken rental market’
Hard-hitting video from housing pressure group reveals the grim fate of families forced into temporary accommodation by soaring rents.
Housing charity Shelter has launched a video campaign reimagining Madness hit ‘Our House’ to expose how Britain’s broken housing market and chronic shortage of affordable homes has pushed thousands of families into slum-like temporary accommodation.
Created by DUDE London and supported by HSBC UK, the campaign uses a 60-second film to juxtapose the lyrics from the iconic 80s hit about a happy bustling family home with the harrowing reality.
In it, a father cleans black mould off ceilings while his daughter shares a bed with siblings in freezing and insanitary conditions, as sirens blare and neighbours argue through paper-thin walls, alongside the strapline ‘Our House is Not a Home’.
Social media
The campaign launched on 3 September and was directed by Milo Blake. It spans TV, online and social media, and aims to raise awareness and drive donations by igniting a national conversation about what truly makes a house a home.
And there are hopes it may also lead to Our House returning to the charts for the first time in 42 years, giving the campaign a considerable boost.
Every day, more families are being pushed to the brink of homelessness because private rents are soaring out of reach of local incomes.”
Mairi MacRae, Director of Campaigns and Policy at Shelter, says: “Every day, more families are being pushed to the brink of homelessness because private rents are soaring out of reach of local incomes.
“With so few genuinely affordable social homes available, many people are forced to make impossible choices between putting food on the table or keeping a roof over their heads.”
The song’s original writers, Chris Foreman and Cathal Smyth, have backed the campaign, saying: “For most, home is a sanctuary. We are proud to support Shelter.”
You can watch the video here.
Shelter do not really want to make conditions better for tenants. Shelter is run by delusional social justice warriors who want to be seen as heroic saviours in a self-righteous mission against injustice. Whatever the facts, Shelter needs to frame the debate on housing policy to justify their ingrained hostility to private housing providers. The private sector is due endless blame, and never gratitude, in their eyes. Shelter’s ideal, presumably, would be for everyone to queue up to live in a Council flat. Their campaigning only makes housing conditions worse. The root cause of the “housing emergency”, as they call it, is the State’s planning controls limiting the creation of new housing and the State allowing hundreds of thousands of immigrants into Britain each year. And then there is the State’s recent disaster of Section 24 tax.
Shelter actually want the State to mess up housing even more. Sadly, for those who cannot find good affordable housing, Shelter have great lobbying power and they are undoubtedly a reason for the impending further worsening of our housing market through the Renters Rights Bill. So instead of addressing the State-induced imbalance of supply and demand Shelter choose to scapegoat those of us who have private businesses trying to actually deliver housing.
The most important driver in recent rent growth is the severe increase in the cost of supplying rental housing, thanks to the State taxing landlords as if their dominant cost, mortgage interest, did not exist. Section 24 drives rents higher. Many landlords now lose most or even all of their net income to tax, because of the State’s untrue definition of their costs. Marginal income from increased rent, however, is taxed at a maximum of 45%. So landlords are compelled to get more of this marginal rent, raising rents as much as possible, simply to make their businesses sustainable. Therefore the State is effectively driving rents higher with Section 24. Shelter are not interested.
Housing is a human right, Shelter says. They could say the same about another essential commodity: food. Would Shelter advocate that the grocery sector gets its own Section 24? Tax supermarkets as if their dominant cost, the stock, was free? Shelter could enjoy a brief Socialist chuckle at the destructive hit on supermarket profits. But, just a minute, don’t you think food prices might rise rather more steeply?