The homes we need

By James Murray

Opposition is frustrating. In Islington, we watch the Lib Dem council administration failing to act on the affordable housing crisis with the urgency and conviction we know we would bring to the problem.

There are 13,000 households on the waiting list in Islington. But even numbers like this – not uncommon across the country – do not convey the repeated human cost of the situation for individual families. Having three or four children sharing a bedroom, or relatives in sitting rooms or even in kitchens, puts a stress and strain on family life that is truly unbearable.

The imperative for us is clear: we need greater investment in social housing, so that councils and housing associations can meet ambitious targets of building new homes for social rent.

But after the recent Tory conference, I can say that whatever frustration we find from the Lib Dem administration in Islington, it has now been spelt out just how devastating the prospect of a Conservative government would be for our ambitions to tackle the housing crisis.

In his keynote speech, shadow housing minister Grant Shapps did not once mention investment in new social housing. He offered a ‘right to move’ for tenants – though I can’t help but think this ‘right’ would be largely meaningless when there is such a shortage of social housing to move to.

And this should not distract from the central omission from Shapps’s speech: there was no mention at all of investment in new social housing.

What Shapps did mention was his excitement at the prospect of “dumping pointless Labour housing targets”. He fervently described them as an ineffective “Soviet style” approach and he criticised Labour for “spending all their time banging on about bigger housing targets”.

Well, Mr Shapps, I would like to bang on about bigger housing targets.

Ambitious targets for social housing represent a collective response to the housing crisis. They are absolutely necessary if we are serious about increasing our housing stock.

We cannot, as the Tories would have it, rely on individual schemes coming forward to provide the homes we need. The Tories’ pledge to remove regional targets and rely on local developments alone would kill our hopes of building the large number of homes we need.

This is even before you consider the obvious pressures of NIMBYism in a “bottom-up” planning regime – the Federation of Master Builders has called Tory plans “a charter for NIMBYs”.

I would like to bang on about bigger housing targets because they show how Labour recognises the free market simply does not work when it comes to housing. And the imperative of making sure everyone has a decent home means we have to step in.

The Tory argument that our targets are not always met does not invalidate their use. Getting 90% of the way towards an ambitious target is a success in my book. But set no targets, as the Tories would have it, and by definition you cannot fail.

In London, we have already seen the negative impact of another very important housing target being taken away by the Tories. One of Boris Johnson’s first acts after becoming Mayor of London last year was to axe one of Ken Livingstone’s simplest and most powerful policies – that 50% of all new homes should be affordable. This was a great policy from Ken which I strongly supported.

From the Labour-dominated planning committee I vice-chair, I can give you one example from many instances of how this policy helped us. Though our Liberal colleagues had a reputation for weak enforcement of this rule, for us it was golden.

Take the developer who offered 30% affordable housing on a site on Pentonville Road. He complained to the committee that having to include any more affordable flats made the scheme unviable. But, armed with the 50% rule, we looked him in the eye, and told him to go away until he came back with what we wanted.

Six weeks later he came back before the committee. Despite his earlier complaints about viability, he was now offering 46% affordable. We let him off the last 4% (does this count as a failed target, Mr Shapps?) – but by pushing this rule, we had secured several new homes for people on the housing waiting list.

Apply this policy to scores of planning applications, and you can see how this target made a real difference. But now this 50% London-wide rule is gone. And from what the Tories have been saying, it is clear that bigger housing targets will soon go the same way.

We must make sure the public is not fooled by Shapps’s weasel words about “recognising the importance of social housing”. The mist is clearing to reveal the Tory agenda – and social housing has no place in it. Affordable housing targets would go. What else was Caroline Spelman hinting at when she wrote to Tory councils earlier this year saying that, in anticipation of the Conservative government, they should “put the brakes on elements of regional spatial strategies which they find undesirable”?

Investment in social housing would go too. What else should we gather from Shapps’s failure to mention social housing investment at all? Or from minutes of a secret housing meeting he had with other senior Tories that say “there was a general consensus that bricks and mortar subsidies need to be substantially reduced or eliminated”?

Getting the social housing families need is not going to be easy – we need much more investment to allow councils and housing associations to build homes for social rent, and we need the targets to make sure councils focus on making these a reality.

As I said at the top, being in opposition in Islington is frustrating. But after the recent Tory conference, our suspicions are confirmed of quite how frustrated our ambitions to build more social housing could be under a Conservative government.

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