Council housing policy should be a main battleground issue for local councillors and MPs fighting elections in key London and urban battlegrounds across the country this May. Why? Because the Tories haven’t changed their stance on social housing, and remain locked in the past.

They’re the same old Tories.

Over the last decade major progress has been made to make good the £19 billion maintenance backlog in Britain’s social housing stock bequeathed by the Tories. This is no mean feat. Councils with substantial council estates witness damping, new windows, new heating systems, rewiring, decorating for the first time in two generations.

During these works Conservative councils were at best silent, at worst, wilfully ignorant of the investment at hand. Today, Conservatives have no policies for the modernisation and repair of council homes, bar what is termed ‘estate regeneration’ – plans actually involving selling off even more public housing stock and using the proceeds to build more homes, letting tenants back in on worse terms than before.

In one Tory-controlled London borough, estate regeneration means demolishing 3400 council homes and ending security of tenure. Compare this to Labour boroughs like Hackney, which is starting to build new council homes.

By deconstructing regional housing strategies, effectively ‘localising’ decisions for future build, the Tories will put a nimby block on new social housing, choking even more supply from the market. With lower supply, local prices are squeezed further upwards making it harder for first time buyers already struggling to amass the much higher deposits required by banks.

Two years ago, when the government announced it wanted to build more homes by increasing £2 billion over the next three years to £8 billion, Tory housing lead Grant Shapps was the first to criticise. He says money is not the answer.

As the recession kicked in, stalling the property market, it’s clear the Tories were as wrong about that as they were about stabilising the economy.
Without extra investment in social housing on at-risk developments up and down the country, not only would more social homes be in jeopardy but also the jobs and apprenticeships which come with them.

But if money isn’t the answer to the Tories, neither is the important government target for 50 per cent affordable housing, a policy watered down by Boris Johnson when he gained power in London in 2008 and by practically every incoming Tory council administration voted in ahead of Labour in recent years.

Tory councils in the south east alone acted on this advice: 15 per cent fewer homes would be built between now and 2026 – that’s a figure to be counted next to the amount they would reduce housing by.

Tough measures to move homeless families – often people forced into the system through debt, domestic violence or long-term illness – from unsuitable temporary accommodation were passed five years ago. This was a major progressive achievement, which only came about through the kind of central government target the Tories claim as bureaucratic and want to abolish.

I recall at the time a dispute in Camden, where we moved to secure an old nurses hostel in NW3 – used as short-stay a business hotel – for major refurbishment, including a Sure Start, so we could move literally hundreds of parents with small children out of hostels in King’s Cross and give them a better start. Needless to say, it was fought tooth and nail by the local Tories, who whipped up hysteria about ‘pressures on services’ and ‘floods’ of asylum seekers.

Amazingly, through all of this David Cameron has the cheek to talk of ‘Broken Britain’ when his housing policies repeatedly militate against fostering stable, mixed communities in our inner cities.

If you want to see ‘Broken Britain’ in waiting, then look no further than council housing policy.

Photo: Emma Swann 2008