Housing policy in Hammersmith & Fulham is a scary example of how off-the-scale ideas can find their way into the mainstream. It started with some musings on ConservativeHome about how difficult it was for the Tories to win seats with high levels of social housing. Wouldn’t it be easier if some of those awkward Labour-voting tenants and leaseholders disappeared?
Enter Stephen Greenhalgh, the leader of Hammersmith & Fulham, who suggests: why don’t we just declare the estates ‘not decent neighbourhoods’ and knock them down? So, in June, he published the council’s 20-year plan which proposes doing just that to 3,500 good quality family homes. But where do the people go? Greenhalgh, in the pamphlet Principles of Social Housing Reform, says not our problem, and calls for the abolition of social housing by a future Tory government.
Rents to rise to market levels, no security of tenure, no right to buy, no duty to house the homeless, no capital investment in housing. Like Daniel Hannan’s NHS, this is a vision of housing without the state. Over drinks and canapés he sells it to shadow housing minister Grant Shapps, who holds the only Tory seat with more council housing than Hammersmith & Fulham. Estates are ‘barracks for the poor’, their residents ‘hard to get rid of’, so ‘knock it down and start again’.
How this must appeal to David Cameron. But will he buy it? If he does, the lives of 8 million will be thrown into chaos in an act of social engineering and gerrymandering of which Shirley Porter could only dream.