In Lambeth, where I am a councillor, we have over 21,000 people on our waiting list. The average waiting time for a family home for people in high priority is around five to eight years. Private rents have soared and being evicted from a private tenancy is now the number one cause of homelessness in the borough. Almost 1,900 Lambeth families are homeless, meaning 5,000 Lambeth children go to bed in a homeless hostel or temporary accommodation.
That is a situation repeated across London and across the country. What we need is a major affordable housebuilding programme. What we are getting from this Tory government is a housing bill that will gut affordable housing and hit working council tenants hard.
The government has agreed with housing associations to introduce a ‘voluntary’ right to buy. This will see thousands of affordable homes lost without the hope of a proper replacement. The right to buy can be great for tenants who want to own their own home, but the way it is set up makes it almost impossible to replace lost council housing with another council home. This tragedy now extends to housing associations, with no guarantee that a home sold in Lambeth will be replaced in Lambeth or that the replacement, wherever it is built, will be at council rent levels. Housing associations have already started to say that they will not build at social or even ‘affordable’ rent any more.
To pay for the right to buy discount, the government has decided to force councils to sell council homes when they become vacant, instead of offering it to a family from the waiting list. Estimates vary for how many homes each council will have to sell, but in Lambeth we estimate about 120 homes every year will be sold to pay for the loss of affordable housing elsewhere. All the money will go to the Treasury, which will then decide how housing associations should be refunded.
At the same time as council homes are being sold off the government will also stop councils like Lambeth from forcing private developers from building affordable homes. In the past five years Lambeth has secured over 2,500 council and housing association homes from private developers. In the housing bill the government proposes replacing these rented homes with so-called ‘starter homes’. These will be available to first-time buyers under the age of 40 and sold at 20 per cent below the market at prices up to £450,000. Find me a first-time buyer in inner London under 40 who can afford £450,000 and I will show you someone who does not need much help from the government. After five years these homes can then be sold for the full market value. Even the pretence of affordability is fleeting.
In response, Lambeth is building more council homes than we have for a generation with a pledge for 1,000 extra council rent homes over the next few years. This means using all the spare land we have and also rebuilding some low-density estates to increase the number of council homes. It is not enough for us to protest about what the government is doing – we are in a position to do something about the housing crisis and as a Labour council we want to build homes for local families.
But our building programme will not protect tenants from another nasty surprise. While George Osborne trumpets a one per cent a year rent cut for the next four years on social rents (which actually critically undermines crucial repair and investment budgets for councils and housing associations), what he is not talking about is a huge tax on working tenants. The bill introduces ‘pay to stay’ where council and housing association tenants in London on a household income of £40,000 or more will have to pay the difference between their social rent and the full market rent of their home. Council tenants will pay this as a tax directly to the Treasury, and it will not be ringfenced for housing.
£40,000 sounds like a lot, but it is the full-time income of two people on the new London living wage. After tax that means an income of about £33,000. The rent bomb that the Tories will drop on working tenants will all but wipe out that income. For a family in Brixton in a two-bed council house they will have to find £14,000 a year extra for the tax. For a family in the north of Lambeth they could be hit with a bill for almost £30,000. Working families will be forced to choose between their job or their home, and these are the people the Tories claim to be looking out for.
Fewer homes being built, fewer affordable homes available, and a choice between worklessness or homelessness for working tenants. If you thought the housing crisis could not get much worse, think again.
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Matthew Bennett is cabinet member for housing in the London borough of Lambeth. He tweets @CllrMattBennett
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why are you so surprised – thats why they are called CONservatives
Is the housing crisis a national crisis or is it London saying it is a national crisis?
I ask with Liverpool selling houses for £1…
It’s everywhere but concentrated in the south. Yes homes can be bought for £1 in Liverpool and other place in the north of England but they need to be completely refurbished. It has to be understood that London and the south east are a part of an economy that is global rather than national. The mini state that exists with the M 25 and down towards the Channel ports and tunnel is an economy the size of Belgium with a population not dissimilar.
It is here that immigration into the UK mostly occurs because it is here that work exists. This puts pressure on housing and an unsolvable housing problem. Yes, a problem without a solution unless a number of things happen. The first is that the population must be stabilised. In order to begin tackling the problem we need zero population growth for a decade at least. That isn’t going to happen so that even if there was enough land to build houses on, which there isn’t, or the money to do so, which there also isn’t, the problem will get worse instead of better.
Do you realise there is more land used for golf courses than there is for housing
Do you realised there is more land used for golf courses in the UK than there is land with houses on,
I live in lambeth, paying approx 40% of my take home pay to rent a room in an ex council flat, and I am slowly realising there is no long term future for me in London unless I want to be sharing a flat til I’m 50. The depressing thing is I’m not on bad money compared to most of the population, even if the value of it is slowly being eroded away thanks to public sector pay restraint. All this talk of affordable housing is meaningless to me however, as I earn too much to qualify (and as a single man will not get any points on a needs basis) yet not enough to buy or rent on my own.
I’ve now started thinking that expanding help to buy will at least potentially benefit me, if these homes are taken out of the social sector and end up on the private market potentially bringing down private rents or prices. I don’t want to be subsidizing through my taxes people living in areas that I can never afford.
I have no idea how I will vote in the next set of local and mayoral elections having previously always been a labour voter, as labour seem to offer nothing for people like me, with its focus on bedroom taxes and tax credits. My question for lambeth labour is what will it do for those of us on middle incomes? are tehy happy for lambeth to be just for those lucky enough to get state housing or rich enough to buy, not caring for those who earn too little but not little enough?
Tories are unpleasant but not stupid, John. They are, at least theoretically, aiming at ‘people like you’, at the expense of your poorer neighbours (who are most likely working, regardless of what the Tories tell you).
The thing is that the economic model just doesn’t wash. There’s a great deal of difference between promising to stabilize prices and actually doing so: and rent control, as practised in many other European capitals, are not on the cards here, any more than there is any control on the buying market. At the same time, as Matthew points out in his excellent article, Councils and Housing Associations are being dissuaded from building by enforced rent reductions which destabilize their budgets; and there is certainly no legislation around forcing developers to develop at a time that suits Londoners rather than their pockets. So it’s unlikely people like you will actually get what they vote for if they think that Tories will help them into relatively cheap housing.
In defence of the Labour Party being concerned with tax credits and bedroom tax, just because they don’t affect you directly doesn’t mean they don’t matter. Our streets are swept, our shops are staffed, our children are fed at school at lunchtime; each day, dozens of low-paid workers make our lives a bit better in different ways. If they can’t afford to live here, who will do their jobs instead? Labour policy isn’t the bleeding heart the Tories portray it as: it’s enlightened self-interest, understanding that society stops working properly if you don’t treat its poorer members with respect.
The Labour Party I belong to believes in the best interest of all citizens. It may sometimes be hard to see it that way, but that’s how it is. Please read Matthew’s article again, and see the sense in it. He knows what he’s talking about.
Why dont we let people live cheaply? Like you can read about in the D**** M***? See dontlooknow.org