Heather Kennedy: ‘As a private tenant, I see the market can’t solve housing need’
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Version 0 of 1. When charity worker Heather Kennedy, 31, moved from Leeds to London four years ago and tried to find somewhere to live, she noticed something was amiss. “I’ve been renting all my adult life, since I was 17, but I was struck by how much more difficult it was in London because the imbalance of power between landlords and tenants was so much more stark,” she says. Feeling vulnerable and trapped in a market seemingly rigged against them, Kennedy, and her friends and flatmates, began researching their legal rights. They wanted to understand exactly what they could do about their situation, and find a way to share information about private landlords with others struggling to find a stable home. “There were three or four of us and we all had some sort of housing problem at the time. I had a completely hopeless landlord, who not only didn’t do any repairs but didn’t reply to any of our phone calls. We just felt completely powerless,” she says. The genie is out of the bottle. People who were in housing crisis are now articulate activists about what is going wrong What Kennedy found out shocked her: “Not only have you got a legal system that totally weighs in favour of landlords, but you haven’t even got power as a consumer. We realised that our housing rights were so few that actually this was going to have to be about calling for change to the system.” Kennedy set up the private renters’ rights campaign group, Digs,in 2012. It now has more than 250 members in Hackney, east London, where she and her friends live and is just one of a network of grassroots activist groups, including Liverpool Generation Rent and Oxford Tenants Union, that are fighting for private renters across the UK. “I got really sick of this idea you’d hear from politicians, and from the media and charities, that private renting was all for students or comfortable young professionals. And yet I was seeing people around me having a really difficult time,” Kennedy says. “Maybe some people are doing it because it’s flexible and it suits their lifestyle, but the things they have to endure as renters are completely unacceptable. “I started volunteering at a local soup kitchen and realised that about a third of the people there were in private rented [accommodation]. It really struck me that the imbalance of power is much worse the lower down you get in the market, so if you are living really at the bottom end of the market, that’s where you’ve got the most exploitative conditions, you’ve got landlords that really have absolutely no respect for the wellbeing of their tenants and it’s all happening completely under the radar.” When Digs first began campaigning it sought to influence housing policy through traditional channels: writing to local MPs, responding to policy consultations, organising meetings with the great and the good. But nothing changed. Digs activists were excluded from conferences and events, many of which cost hundreds of pounds a ticket. Kennedy describes a moment of clarity when, after spending hours putting together a well evidenced response to the Communities and Local Government select committee inquiry into private renting, the group was not called to give oral evidence to MPs. “We thought either they haven’t read it at all, or they have read it and it’s made absolutely no impact on their thinking,” she says. As a result, Digs eschewed lobbying and took up direct action – with great success. When the group launched, the local council had refused to engage with it. Before last year’s local elections, 60 individuals shared with Digs their “galling experiences of renting in Hackney”. The group pulled together a set of demands from these experiences, and staged a protest outside the town hall asking prospective councillors to discuss them. “It was like we were calling the shots,” Kennedy says. “They basically had to listen to us. That spelled a shift in the power dynamic between us and the council. Since then the way they relate to us is completely different. They actively seek our views and demands. We have regular meetings with them rather than having to badger them.” When Digs wrote to the council asking it to boycott the international property fair in Cannes last year, where councils were accussed of trying to sell of British cities to investors, it listened. Kennedy wants to use Digs to help build a local community, a privilege she says private renters are denied by their insecure and peripatetic existence. “You’re moving around all the time, you’re not necessarily getting support from your community and your neighbours, you haven’t got the same kind of stake in your community. It’s very difficult to build connections and solidarity with your neighbours. I think that’s one of the reasons why politiciansdon’t like estates and prefer people living in the private rented sector, because it is very difficult to collectivise around any problems you’re having.” Digs has lent its support to other London housing battles, including the campaign against mass evictions and tripled rents proposed by US investor Westbrook Partners on the New Era estate in Hoxton, and the single mothers fighting for their homes in Stratford. These campaigns, Kennedy says, mark a watershed. “The genie is out of the bottle now. The awareness of groups like Focus E15, and New Era and the broader movement, is such that people have an analysis for what’s happening now, it’s no longer just this incredibly unpleasant very individualised situation,” she explains. “Seeing the way that the mums who have been affected have gone from people who were in individual housing crisis to people who are some of the most articulate activists about what is going wrong with housing in our society is absolutely incredible.” Today’s housing activists are passionate and well networked, so as their numbers grow they present a real threat to the established housing market. The policies on housing outlined in the main parties’ election manifestos have done little to quell the rising tide of anger. Kennedy is opposed to the Conservative policy of extending the right to buy to housing associations and was shocked at the hysterical reaction of the rightwing press to evidence-based opposition to the policy. “That reinforces to me, as an activist, that if you go through those formal polite channels, there’s every chance they will just ignore you,” she says. “It’s very disappointing that Labour hasn’t unequivocally come out and condemned right to buy, as they should. It’s that kind of lack of courage and populism that is part of the reason why I think we’re going to have a low voter turnout, why I and a lot of other people have lost faith in those traditional routes of influencing policy, and why we are going to see many more occupations, eviction resistance and angry demonstrations.” Labour’s commitment to longer tenacies during which rent rises have an annual ceiling does absolutely nothing, she says, to tackle the affordability crisis that already exists. All three main political parties are slogging it out over development numbers – “still completely sold on the idea that the market will solve housing need” – but appear to be blind to the significance of housing tenure. “What’s absolutely crucial is an expansion not just of social housing but, specifically, of council housing, ” Kennedy says. “There was a real sense that people had a right to that housing, that it was theirs, which I came across as someone in my 30s and thought, that’s staggering; we’ve been completely robbed of the idea that we have any right to any form of housing.” Curriculum vitae Age 31. Lives Hackney, east London. Family Single. Education Settle high school; Lancaster and Morecambe College; University of Leeds, BA English and sociology. Career 2013-present: funeral poverty campaigner, Quaker Social Action; 2011-13: network development officer, Ealing Community and Voluntary Service; 2010-11: press officer, Voice4Change England (advocacy for the black and minority ethnic voluntary and community sector); 2009-10: press officer, road safety charity, Brake; 2007-09: support worker, English Churches Housing Group. Public life 2012-present: founder, Digs; 2014-present, Unite union rep. Interests Creative writing. |