RENT, interest and profit. This is the holy trinity of capitalism.

The intelligence that the average rent being demanded across Britain, excluding London, has reached a record £16,380 — up £4,800 in five years — will not come as a surprise for millions.

Factor in that the median income in Britain last year was £37,430, which produces a take-home pay of around £30,000 (and that for millions of renters their income is much lower) and we can see that the housing crisis has reached a new high point.

Over a third of a million people are homeless; 1.3 million households are on waiting lists for social and council housing. This demand is driven by the costs in the private sector where rents have soared above wage growth with the consequence that many working families find affordable housing — that is, with sufficient income beyond rent to provide a decent standard of living — impossible.

London is a special case of extreme housing stress, with rents climbing for a 15th consecutive quarter to hit a record high of £2,712 per month.

With housing construction reliant on the profit-hungry private sector — where land banking and a distorted market make affordable housing for sale or rent less productive of the super-profits developers demand — there is a shortage of affordable new houses and a supply of houses that remain unaffordable to all but those on higher incomes or able to sell an existing house into the distorted market in London and a few other places.

To meet demand Britain needs to build getting on for 100,000 new affordable “social rent” homes every years for the next decade.

It can be done. In the cash-strapped mid-1950s Britain, even under a Conservative government, was building over 200,000 social rent homes every year.

But, if we parse the official government figures for 2024 we find that 9,179 social homes are currently onsite with an additional 15,848 homes at design and tender stage. In Quarter 1 2024, 121 new construction schemes (2,595 homes) were added to the pipeline. In total the Construction Status Report provides details on 43,795 new-build social homes across 2,570 schemes.

Let’s make a bold assumption and accept that that opaque phrase “onsite” actually means homes actually constructed or under construction, and we can see the poverty of ambition of present-day administrations.

Wealth, especially extreme wealth, is vested in property and in a housing market conditioned by extreme shortage rents will rise to the ever greater enrichment of the already rich. In this sense we can see rent as the further appropriation of that small part of the wealth arising from our collective labours that we retain in the form of wages. And if “home owners” paying a mortgage think they escape the money-gouging nightmare that is capitalism, remember that the interest you pay on your mortgage is the third part of the triad of robbery.

Of course, under socialism and working-class state power the land will be held in common. In the meantime we have three things open to us in the event of a government coming into being willing to tackle the housing crisis.

Build hundreds of thousands of new council homes and drive down rent through the competitive processes so dear to our rulers. But also control rents and tax income arising from property ownership at least at the level that wages are taxed.

A political leadership that makes tackling British capitalism’s housing crisis its goal will find an enthusiastic response from millions that will fracture every competing political force that fails to offer policies that meet this human need.