OUR GOVERNMENT FAVOURS THE OWNERS V. THE DISOWNED

OUR GOVERNMENT FAVOURS THE OWNERS V. THE DISOWNED

My flat in Soho is rent-controlled. That means that the ‘Rent Officer’ sets the rent. When I moved into the flat in 1954, when my friend Shirley Chubb offered it to me - then a peripatetic or out-of-work actor - as she was going to be living in Paris, the rent, including rates. was £4.3.8d per calendar month. And I remember being uncertain whether I should take it on, the responsibility, my freedom. I was still playing the adolescent, at 32! Thank God I decided ‘yes’! My flat, my home, 22 R St, 22 Romilly Strasse, my geraniums, in the middle of the West End, theatreland, accessible to all, at the centre of town, with Piccadilly Circus just off-centre...

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Until 18 April 2011 my rent-controlled rent – yes, the controlling of rent continues, thanks to our caring government! - was £430 per calendar month. Landlords can have the rent ’reviewed’ every two years, and my rent was thus reviewed, and it went up to £492.50 per calendar month. That’s an increase of £62.50. That means I have £62.50 a month less to spend on living. I worked it out: That’s an increase of 14.534884%, call it 14.5 %: That’s a hell of a lot in 2 years! That bears no relation to inflation. Apparently the rate of increase is arrived at by a new formula, to do with the retail price index, which gives a higher figure, and thus favours owners. The rate of increase two years ago, when the rent was last reviewed, was lower, and the rent went up £393.50 per calendar month to £430 per calendar month, an increase of only just over 9%. Not that I love Labour, (With that war criminal Blair in charge, and that collaborator Brown financing Blair’s Iraq???) but one can see that the Tories are at work today.

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I’m a landlord. I own the bed-sitter flat in Southsea, that I rented as a council flat when I ran the arts and festival in Portsmouth 1975-1979. I bought it on the never never. It was rent-controlled when I lived in it, and for some years after, when I let it. I let it to a now retired coach driver. But I cant raise his rent. He cant even pay the full, set, contractual, rent, even with Housing Benefit! And the government has seen fit to cut his Housing Benefit! It, also, is now being worked out by some new formula, which gives a lower figure,

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It’s been his home for 8 years, since 2003. So I don’t want to turf him out. He’s a mate. I also don’t know what the market is like today. It’s always been easy to let the flat. Simple. Ad in the Portsmouth News. Interviews. Decision. (Sometimes the wrong one!) Basta. It’s a nice little flat, in a block of four flats, intimate, set in greenery, more like a village bungalow; shops, co-op, pubs, cafe, fish and chip shop, the sea, all just round the corner.

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So my expenses go up by £62.50 a month, that’s £750 a year. That means I have £750 less to spend on theatre and music and restaurants and travelling and clothes. But my income doesn’t go up. Correction: My state pension has gone up by £1.1725 a week, which is £60.97 a year...

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But there are other people, thousands of them - or is it millions? - whose now higher expenses and lower subsidies will affect food, heating, and other necessities, and may mean their having to move out of their homes. And they’ll likely be just as attached to their homes as I am after 57 years...

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And what will our kind government’s next steps be?

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18 May 2011