Stuart Hodkinson, an activist and housing academic at Leeds University, focuses on the housing crisis and argues that the problems we face can be traced back to the neoliberal assault on our housing system that began in the 1970s and continues unabashed today. Beth Lawrence illustrates the article with some case studies on Arms Length Management Organisations and campaign group Defend Council Housing.

As capitalism staggers from one crisis to the next, inducing new rounds of bailouts, austerity and privatisation, societies are being dispossessed of public goods built up over generations, generating deepening crises of everyday life.

The crisis
The housing crisis takes many forms, but three aspects stand out. The first is the rising rate of home loss caused by banks’ repossessing as home owners default on their now unpayable mortgages. In 2004, repossessions stood at 8200; by 2009, they had reached 48,000 a year, a 600% increase, and although repossession rates fell back slightly to 36,300 in 2010, a remarkable 12% of all UK mortgages are receiving special support from banks to try to avoid repossession.[1] Lenders are warning of a grim future with one bank chief predicting a “tsunami” of repossessions in the coming years as record low-interest rates disappear, austerity measures and rising unemployment bite further and banks lose patience with their borrowers.[2]

Unaffordable mortgages links to a second major problem across our housing system – the chronic shortages of affordable housing. While average real wage levels have been virtually stagnant for decades, the average price of buying and renting has gone up massively. Between 1995 and 2007, the ratio of house prices to earnings for first-time buyers increased by 250% to 5.4% (3.5 is considered affordable), generating ever larger and riskier mortgage borrowing.[3] Despite a 25% average fall in house prices since 2008 – with the exception of London – first time buyers remain largely locked out of the market (and a move on which family or job may depend) because they cannot raise the large deposits banks are now demanding to access the better interest rates, and because would-be sellers cannot afford to cut their asking prices because of negative equity. Restricted finance and a terrible economic forecast are generating another factor - the low-rate of new house building.

As a result, increasing numbers of would-be owners are remaining in the private rental sector, causing demand to outstrip supply in many parts of the country, not least in London where average rents have risen by 12.2% over the past year, breaking the £1,200 barrier for the first time, while the average tenant salary rose by just 2.4%.[4] New research by Shelter reveals that in 55% of local authorities in England, typical private rents are simply unaffordable for ordinary working families.[5] Against this background, the number officially waiting for a council house or other social rented accommodation has nearly doubled since 1997 to just under two million households. Rising home loss, unaffordable housing and a shortage of a social housing directly feed into a third housing crisis – the growing scale of homelessness and rough sleeping. Official statistics suggest the problem is small - some 100,000 households are homeless with more than 65,000 living in ‘temporary’ accommodation. But these figures are extremely suspect and homeless charity Crisis believes the ‘hidden homeless’ figures could be three or four times that, reflected in the more than three million people officially living in overcrowded housing,[6] including a million children.[7]

Housing privatisation: the forgotten pillar of the neoliberal project

Turn on the news and there’s no shortage of ‘expert’ commentators offering their take on what is causing this housing crisis but rarely do we hear the wider, historical neoliberal journey of privatisation that has taken us to this crisis moment. That journey originated as a post-war ideological project opposed to social democratic collectivism and direct state provision and regulation, and in favour of allowing competitive markets to operate without restriction across society. Ideas once derided as crazy rapidly took hold in the United States and Britain as part of a strategic capitalist response the global profitability crisis of the 1970s, aimed at restoring (finance) capital’s power vis-à-vis labour and opening up valuable public sector services, assets and space to new rounds of accumulation through privatisation and liberalisation policies, rolling-back state intervention (regulations, subsidies, protections, ownership, services) and rolling-out new modes of pro-capitalist regulation and regimes of governance.

The privatisation of housing has played a particularly key role in neoliberalism, wresting the supply of shelter – a basic human need and right – out of the public welfare system and firmly back into the precarious, commodified world of competitive markets, property speculation and self-provision. But expanding home ownership and thus mortgage borrowing was also vital for finding new sources of accumulation for finance capital, which was becoming increasingly dominant over the global economy following the economic shocks of the 1970s.

Public housing emerged for a very important reason – the catastrophic failure of private landlordism and the ‘market’ in the 19th and early 20th centuries that had produced the infamous urban slums of Britain. Capitalism in general benefited from state intervention, and many individual private enterprises became rich on the back of public building contracts, but public housing also represented a barrier to capital accumulation in other ways. By the late 1970s, local councils provided decent, affordable homes to 6.6 million households - more than a third of society - while many tenants in the private sector enjoyed the protections of rent controls and long-term tenancies. Public housing and the wider regulatory system were never perfect but they combined to dilute the power of employers to intensify exploitation, dampened property speculation and enabled the working class to live centrally and build local communities. It is rolling back these ‘housing fetters’ on capital accumulation that neoliberalism has been attending to.

The assault on housing began to take hold during the 1970s, mainly in cuts to public spending and investment, but it was forcefully imposed with the election of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government in 1979. Thatcher brought a clever, divisive and thoroughly dishonest discourse to the table: public housing was ‘subsidised’ by the taxpayer and thus should only reserved for the poorest or most ‘in need’ (tenure of last resort); instead, individual home ownership was the ‘natural’ tenure that everyone should aspire to, and was catapulted to the top of government policy. It was accompanied by Victorian-era rhetoric of self-reliance and individual entrepreneurship – Thatcher wanted to break class solidarity and attachments to collectivism by widening property ownership and turning everyone into “little capitalists” whose priority now was to increase the value of their assets and pass on inherited wealth to their children.[8] Looking back from 2011, we can now see a succession of privatisation waves since 1979, each representing either the opening of a new front or a creative reaction to resistance or other blockages, encompassing processes that were not solely about selling public housing to private owners, but generating a change of ethos, culture or organisation along private or market lines.

Privatisation wave#1: austerity and owner occupation

Rolled out during the first half of the 1980s, privatisation wave#1 was dominated by the Conservatives’ flagship policy – the Right to Buy – which allowed sitting tenants to buy their council house at huge discounts up to half of market value.[9] Selling of homes was accompanied by the slashing of housing budgets and ever more draconian controls on local authority borrowing and spending. The result was large rent rises, falling house building and, by 1986, an estimated £19bn repair backlog for council homes and £25bn for private sector homes (Hughes and Lowe, pp.217-8). The more the Conservatives cut and financially constrained, the more attractive privatisation became for both tenants and local authorities. The Conservatives also introduced greater powers for private landlords and liberalised mortgage lending for buy-to-let investment to boost the private rental sector and help to develop major property companies, agencies and estate agents.

Privatisation wave#2: demunicipalisation by any means

It was soon evident that the Right to Buy had natural limits – not least that poorer tenants would never be able to afford or access a mortgage – and although discounts would continue to rise over the decade, reaching 70% of market price,[10] the Conservatives unveiled a second privatisation wave from 1985 onwards that focused on selling council homes en masse to alternative landlords in the private and charity sectors. All manner of initiatives were tried and failed, and through resisting, tenants won the statutory right to be balloted on any privatisation proposals and be able to block them if they lacked majority support. By the late 1980s, however, many local authorities began selling off their entire housing stocks to existing and specially formed not-for-profit companies called housing associations in response to the government’s financial straitjacket and the realisation that they would financially benefit. Housing associations – or Registered Social Landlords as they are known – were regulated and barred from floating on the stock exchange, but they were also private companies that had greater freedoms to charge market rents, evict tenants and build private housing, and had limited democratic accountability.

UK Council and Social Housing Sold off/Demolished 1980-2009[11]

Policy	Homes
Right to Buy Sale	2.75m
Stock Transfer	1.4 m
Demolitions	0.24m
Total	4.39m

Privatisation wave#3: corporatisation, marketisation and gentrification

By 1997, after 18 consecutive years of Conservative rule, home ownership had expanded from 57% to 68% among British households[12], around a quarter of public housing had been privatised,[13] public house building had fallen from 75,000 homes a year to just 290 and a £23 billion repair backlog had built up in the remaining council housing sector.[14] Far from rejecting the neoliberal policies of its opponents, Tony Blair’s government embraced them, blocking new council house building, introducing a market consumerist approach to social housing, and seeking to transfer 200,000 homes a year to the RSL sector under the cover of bringing all social rented homes up to a (very) minimum ‘decent’ standard by 2010.[15] For those local authorities (and their tenants) who found stock transfer politically unpalatable, decent homes cash was made conditional on setting up ‘arms-length’ companies called ALMOs to take over day-to-day management of council housing, many of which are now being fully privatised as Defend Council Housing warned [see boxes on ALMOs and Defend Council Housing]. Most controversial of all was Labour’s decision to experiment with the infamous Private Finance Initiative (PFI) that saw huge sums of public money diverted to corporate banks, developers, and consultants for regenerating and taking over the running of specific council estates for 30 years [see box on the reality of PFI]. This privatisation of ‘place’ was symbolised most graphically by Housing Market Renewal Pathfinder unveiled in 2003 – a £2.2 billion scheme ostensibly designed to help local communities across Northern England with acute housing problems that turned out to be a pump-priming exercise for large-scale demolition and gentrification schemes.[16]

Privatisation wave#4: the financial crisis and the neoliberal endgame

The collapse of the housing market amidst the global financial crisis demonstrated how Labour’s disastrous continuation of the privatisation project made Britain’s housing and economy dangerously vulnerable to market shocks and personal indebtedness. But far from taking the market out of housing, since taking power from Labour in May 2010, the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition Government has moved in exactly the opposite direction, taking the privatisation project to a new, more aggressive and disastrous level.

The Con-Dems overall assault on housing and planning is set out in the centrefold spread of this magazine. Much of the media and political attention has rightly focused on the Coalition’s swingeing cuts to Housing Benefit that will see tens of thousands of households displaced from inner London and other high-cost rental areas because they won’t be able to afford to live anywhere near it. But beneath the radar, the Con-Dems have declared war on the social rented sector of council and RSL providers. Soon after coming to power, they cut back ongoing house building rescue schemes, and then announced a devastating 50% cut in the affordable housing budget for 2011-2015 as part of their wider austerity programme to reduce the national deficit. These are not simply ‘cuts’, however: the government has created a new funding model called ‘Affordable Rent’ that will effectively force housing associations and councils to charge 80% of local market rents on new homes and a proportion of re-lets, and instead of lifetime tenancies, offer as little as a two-year tenancy. There are also proposals to force high-earning social tenants to pay higher rents or be evicted, and the homeless will no longer have the right to a secure council tenancy and will now be forced into the private rental sector including boats and mobile homes. In other words, in the future there will be little to choose between the social housing sector and the private rental sector. Part of this privatisation agenda involves a central drive to identify and sell, auction or gift 'surplus public land' for private house building and private development. To top it all, at the recent Tory Party Conference, David Cameron announced his solution to the housing crisis and low growth - to relaunch the 'Right to Buy' policy, increasing discounts and making it easier for tenants to buy their council or housing association home.

A nightmare future?

The lessons are clear, even for some adherents of capitalism – we need to wean ourselves off private home ownership and the corporate property industry, and create a different kind of housing system that provides decent, appropriate, secure and affordable homes for everyone at the point of need. The present government clearly believes in precisely the opposite solution and is throwing us head first into the slings and arrows of outrageous market fundamentalism. A nightmare future awaits unless we build a genuine cross-tenure housing movement that mobilises at every point of housing precarity – overcrowding, homelessness, unaffordable rents and mortgages, unfit conditions, ruthless private landlords, privatisation, housing and welfare benefit cuts, home owners in mortgage arrears or facing repossession, etc – whilst at the same time creating alternative forms of decommodified housing without undermining what we have already got. It doesn’t sound easy and it isn’t, but, for once I agree with the neoliberals – there is no alternative.

ALMOs

Arms Length Management Organisations (ALMOs)[17] are private companies set up by councils to manage homes, whilst the council still owns the housing stock. They were pushed by Labour in 2000 to enable a more subtle process of privatisation to take place, which was important due to widespread opposition among council tenants to stock transfer. The semi-private status of ALMOs caused splits between tenants, with some getting used to companies running their homes, whilst others opposed any private take-overs. Once tenants had been successfully divided, full privatisation could more easily take place as the potential for collective organisation had been weakened. The so-called 'choice' given to tenants between one of three options – direct stock transfer, PFI (Private Finance Initiative) or ALMOs - was clearly false as all three were essentially privatisation. Defend Council Housing (DCH) (see box on this) has called the introduction of ALMOs 'two-stage privatisation'.[18] Millions of pounds have been wasted on ALMOs, such as on the large salaries of managers, consultants and lawyers. Yet, research conducted by Heriott-Watt University in 2001 found that separating housing management from ownership caused more problems than improvements.

One of the arguments used to quell opposition to the introduction of ALMOs was that tenants would have more power over their housing, because they would be on the board as tenant company directors. However, the processes required for the running of ALMOs ensured that tenants had far less power. ALMOs operate like any other corporation: company law means directors have a primary legal duty to consider the interests of the company. Crucially, tenants are the minority on the board, meaning they are not able to effectively represent the interests of tenants, and, they are gagged by confidentiality. The reality of ALMOs is that democratic control of housing management is lost and tenants' power is undermined by the structure of tenant engagement with ALMOs: restricted tenant representatives arguing on ALMO boards against those with more power rather than collective pressure from tenants' associations. The first councils to set up ALMOs had the support of key tenants representatives, which legitimised them but meant there was no real public debate. Almost nowhere did tenants hear the arguments against accepting an ALMO. Unlike stock transfer, there was not a right to a tenant vote before the ALMO was set up.

The government now wants more ALMOs to be fully privatised. Sixty councils currently have ALMOs.[19] Defend Council Housing argue that there should be a democratic debate on the future of ALMOs and that bringing housing management back in house, rather than privatisation, is the solution. There was a successful anti-ALMO campaign in Camden, London, when tenants won the right to a vote and voted no by 77%. Tenants and trade unionists relaunched Camden Defend Council Housing to argue that ALMOs are two-stage privatisation: there is no good reason to force councils to set up a private company unless privatisation is the end game.[20] Camden council admitted they spent £500,000 promoting the ALMO to tenants. Following the decisive ballot result they concluded that neither stock transfer, PFI or ALMO were options and agreed to join with Camden DCH to campaign for a 'fourth option': direct investment in council housing.

Housing PFI: Disaster Capitalism in action

Introduced by the Conservative Government in 1992 as a way of taking public spending off the books while opening up public services provision to corporations, PFI became New Labour’s flagship public-private-partnership approach during its 12 years in power and its disastrous effects on schools and hospitals have been well documented. Far less is known about PFI’s use in regenerating council housing estates, yet between 1998 and 2009, the government promised £4.3bn of investment in 54 social housing PFI schemes across England. Along the way, four were scrapped and in November 2010, the Coalition government cancelled a further 13 schemes under its austerity drive, a cut of over £2bn. Of the remaining 37 schemes, 21 directly involve council housing and have been beset by enormous problems, which we focus on here. Escalating costs: PFI is well known for being a far more expensive way of financing than public borrowing, but the sheer complexity of using it in housing has generated huge additional costs in hiring lawyers and consultants and contract monitoring – average figures range from between £1million and £2 million per scheme – that are taken from local housing budgets meaning less money for services and improvements. PFI’s greater expense is compounded by the problem of escalating costs during contract procurement, most of which will normally fall on the local council, regardless of whether it can afford them. The first seven PFI schemes were on average 88% above initial estimated cost and all requested more PFI credit support from government. A June 2010 National Audit Office report showed the cost of signed-off projects was £694 million more than expected. In order to meet these rising costs, local councils have been forced to cut back on improvements, include more public land in PFI deals and/or transfer money from other services.

Top Corporate winners from housing PFI

Contractors	Finance	Consultants
United House, Rydon, Hyde Housing	HBOS	PriceWaterhouseCoopers
Regenter, Equion, Pinnacle	Dexia Public Finance Bank	KPMG
Lovell, Powerminster	Nationwide	Trowers & Hamlins
Higgins Construction	Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation (SMBC)	Pinsent Masons

PFI takes years to setup: While government expected housing PFI schemes to start within three years of a council bidding for funding, average start times have been between 6 and 7 years. Delays have been caused by numerous legal, policy and technical problems that dogged its early years, and the hugely complex nature of risk transfer and finance that means unexpected changes in inflation, interest rates and markets can force delays while accountants review their implications for projects’ viability.

PFI has meant poor quality work in many schemes: Despite a clear specification of standards that PFI consortia must meet to receive payments, there have been a large number of reported problems in PFI schemes. In Swarcliffe (Leeds), poor standards of refurbishment hit the newspapers in July 2008 with the story of the Lockwood family whose eight-week refurbishment actually took eight months due to a string of mistakes by Carillion. This was followed in January 2009 when a former electrical inspector turned whistle-blower revealed that more than 300 council tenants had made complaints about the work. In Islington, the first of its two housing PFI schemes was signed in 2003 to refurbish 1,000 Victorian street properties, many of which are listed buildings. A survey revealed 87% of tenants complained about damage by contractors.

PFI undermines tenants’ rights: Government sets out pages of good practice guidance on how tenants should be involved throughout the procurement and management of a PFI contract. However, in contrast to stock transfer, local authorities are not legally required to ballot tenants on whether they want PFI or not. There is also evidence across the housing PFI schemes that tenants have been denied valuable information on grounds of ‘commercial confidentiality’, or have been forced to sign confidentiality agreements that mean their normal democratic relationship with tenant members has been compromised. In theory, tenants’ rights are not changed when a PFI scheme start, but in reality, tenants lose their ‘right to manage’ – no local authority is going to agree to tenants taking on the management of their estate because of the huge penalty clauses from breaking the PFI contract[21].

Defend Council Housing

Defend Council Housing was founded in 1998, a decade after the fight against council housing privatisation started when Thatcher's Conservatives first tried to bring in 'stock transfer' in 1988. After a few local campaign victories against the privatisation of council housing, local groups joined forces in July 1998 to create the national DCH campaign, which saw the revitalisation and growth of the tenants' movement.[22]

DCH is a tenant led campaign supported by MPs, councillors, trade unions, community organisations and local campaign groups. DCH uses a variety of tactics and always ensures that it provides various ways people can get involved in every area of its campaign activity. It centrally publishes newspapers and pamphlets, as well as supporting local groups to produce and distribute their own material. DCH works with a wide variety of groups and has won unanimous backing at TUC congress and support from a long list of trade union conferences. The campaign works with TAROE (Tenants & Residents of England), Welsh Tenants Federation, Scottish Tenants Organisation and affiliated national trade unions, which currently include the CWU, FBU, GMB, PCS, RMT, TSSA, UCATT, UNISON and UNITE.

The strength of Defend Council Housing is that it does not just go all-out to stop privatisation, but it puts forward carefully considered, reasonable and workable policy alternatives to privatisation. One of its main policy suggestions is the 'fourth option': direct investment in council housing as opposed to the government's three options (stock transfer, PFI and ALMOs) which all involve some degree of privatisation.

DCH has defeated around 1 in 4 stock transfers, despite the huge imbalance in resources and power. The Birmingham campaign is a good model of tenants and trade unionists building a mass determined campaign, organising meetings all over the city, challenging councillors and consultants and arguing against the council's case.[23] In April 2002, shortly after John Prescott had declared the ‘death of council housing’, 40,000 Birmingham tenants voted against stock transfer and demolition.[24] Birmingham has the largest number of council homes in the country and, despite the council's £36m propaganda campaign, over two thirds of tenants voted against them. The campaign was such a big success because it was based in the estates and had wide support from trade unions.[25]

References
References
[1] p.25, Bank of England Financial Policy Committee (2011), Financial Stability Report, Issue: 29, June, www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/fsr/2011/fsrfull1106.pdf
[2] Richard Banks, chief executive of UK Asset Resolution (UKAR), the body that runs the £80bn of mortgages bailed out by the taxpayer during the banking crisis, quoted in Treanor, J (2011) ‘Bank chief warns of wave of home repossessions if rates rise’, The Guardian, 27 June, www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/jun/27/house-repossessions-wave-interest-rates-rise
[3] Nationwide First Time Buyer House Price Earnings Ratio, www.nationwide.co.uk/hpi/downloads/FTB_HPER.xls
[4] Hollander, G (2011), ‘London rents hit all-time high’, Inside Housing, 15/9/2011, www.insidehousing.co.uk/ihstory.aspx?storycode=6517769
[5] Shelter (2011), Research Report Shelter Private Rent Watch. Report one: Analysis of local rent levels and affordability, http://england.shelter.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0008/386828/Private_Rent_Watch_Report_1.pdf
[6] www.poverty.org.uk/82/index.shtml
[7] Shelter, ‘Overcrowding blights lives of a million children’, (published online, 18 May 2007), <http://england.shelter.org.uk/home/home-8130.cfm>
[8] R. Stevens, ‘The Evolution of Privatisation as an Electoral Policy, c.1970-90’, Contemporary British History, 18(2), 47—75 (2004)
[9] p.2, Wilcox, S (2008) A financial evaluation of the right to buy, www.assemblywales.org/ah9_-_professor_steve_wilcox.pdf, accessed 6 October 2011. depending on length of tenancy and house type
[10] p.2, Wilcox, S (2008) A financial evaluation of the right to buy, www.assemblywales.org/ah9_-_professor_steve_wilcox.pdf, accessed 6 October 2011
[11] Right to Buy figures: UK HOUSING REVIEW 2010/2011, Compendium, Table 20d Right to buy in Great Britain, www.york.ac.uk/res/ukhr/ukhr1011/tables&figures;/pdf/10-020a-d.pdf; Colin Jones and Alan Murie (2006), The Right to Buy: Analysis and Evaluation of a Housing Policy. Oxford: Blackwell, p.56, and NI Executive Department for Social Development (2010), Northern Ireland Housing Statistics 2009-10, Table 3.16. ww.dsdni.gov.uk; Stock Transfer figures: Hal Pawson and David Mullins (2010) After Council Housing: Britain’s New Social Landlords. Palgrave Macmillan; demolition figures: Wales - http://statswales.wales.gov.uk/index.htm; Scotland - http://scotland.gov.uk/Topics/Statistics/Browse/Housing-Regeneration/HSfS/ConDem; England - www.communities.gov.uk/documents/housing/xls/1991523.xls
[12] DCLG (2011) Live Tables, Table 102: Dwelling stock: by tenure1, GB (historical series), www.communities.gov.uk/documents/housing/xls/table-102.xls (accessed 29 September 2011)
[13] 1.8m council homes sold to tenants, a further 280,000 transferred to RSLs Precise and agreed figures are difficult to obtain due to the varied types and qualities of data recording by local authorities and central government, as well the onset of devolution since 1997. Right to Buy sales between 1980 and 1997 for the UK appear to be around 1.8m but this number includes sales by housing associations in Scotland and unconfirmed data for Northern Ireland (Sources: Sources: Jones and Murie, 2006; DCLG 2010, Live Tables: Social housing sales: Local Authority and Registered Social Landlord stock sold, Scottish Exec (2010), Housing Statistics for Scotland - Sales to sitting tenants, www.scotland.gov.uk/Resource/Doc/1035/0099335.xls, Welsh Assembly Government (2010) www.dataunitwales.gov.uk/housingdata/)
[14] G. Moody, Council Housing – Financing the Future (Coventry: Chartered Institute of Housing, 1998)
[15] Department of Environment, Transport and the Regions (DETR), Quality and Choice: A Decent Home for All. The Housing Green Paper (London: The Stationary Office, 2000). The force of the assault was felt most strongly in England, home to more than 80% of the UK’s remaining public housing as of 2000 (Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland had various degrees of devolved power over housing, although their budgets were tightly controlled by the UK government).
[16] C. Allen, Housing Market Renewal and Social Class (London and New York: Routledge, 2008)
[17] ALMOs as a process/structure also exist in other sectors apart from housing and have been used to force covert privatisation, not just two-stage privatisation.
[18] DCH briefing 'The Case Against ALMOs' 2004, www.defendcouncilhousing.org.uk/dch/dch_infopage.cfm?KWord=ALMO
[19] www.defendcouncilhousing.org.uk/dch/resources/DCHNewspaperSept2011.pdf
[20] www.defendcouncilhousing.org.uk/dch/resources/CamdenNoALMOCampaignReport.pdf
[21] Hodkinson, S (2011) ‘The Private Finance Initiative in English Council Housing Regeneration: A Privatisation too Far?’, Housing Studies, 26:6, 911-932.
[22] www.redpepper.org.uk/Saving-council-housing
[23] Corporate Watch interviewed Eileen Short from DCH who suggested Birmingham was a good example
[24] http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/sr263/birmingham.htm
[25] www.defendcouncilhousing.org.uk/dch/resources/dch_turningtide.pdf