Londoners need councils to build homes

Like many London councillors, it didn’t take long for the doorstep conversations I had during the local election campaign to turn to people’s personal experience of the capital’s housing crisis. It quickly became clear that when we talk about what needs to be done, people generally agree that London needs more homes.

But they don’t need just any kind of homes. It’s commonplace to read in the Evening Standard about big new developments with one-bed flats ‘starting at £1m’. We need to do more than simply churn out new flats and also build the right sort of homes to help meet the capital’s complicated housing crisis.

At one extreme, the reviled ‘buy-to-leave’ flats are no help. They often bypass our housing crisis altogether because new flats are sold off-plan and sit empty in gleaming new towers that are dotted across the capital, mocking Londoners in need of a home.

Most Londoners know these flats won’t help their search for a home, thanks to their high prices and overseas marketing. But these new flats are also – as a Future of London report ‘London for sale?’ concluded – pushing up prices of other homes across the capital. If buy-to-leave flats sit empty, while pushing up the prices of other properties it means building these new ‘homes’ could actually be making our housing crisis worse.

People rightly see ‘buy-to-leave’ flats as the most grotesque exploitation of new homes because they become assets rather than places to live. Our recent proposals in Islington to impose hefty fines on new homes left empty chimed with many people’s views. New housing must be about more than just numbers: it is wrong when new homes fail to house people.

But although the media has a lurid fascination with the ‘buy-to-leave’ phenomenon, ending it will only take the sharpest edge off the housing crisis. Beyond this, how do we make sure we’re building the right sort of homes for London? The answers are numerous. Tough planning policies that insist new developments offer affordable housing and genuinely affordable rents are important but it’s also crucial that we have councils building more homes.

If we step back a moment, the postwar record makes clear we need councils to build. The statistics say it all. In the 30 years leading up to 1980, private homebuilders and councils were neck-in-neck: they built just over 4.5million new homes each. But in the 30 years that followed, council home building slumped to a total of just 0.4million. And no-one picked up the ‘gap’ left by councils, private enterprise built 4.9million homes over this period – almost no change from the preceding 30 years – and housing associations contributed fewer than 0.7m.

In the face of such figures, Labour gives us hope for optimism. Today it came out that Sir Michael Lyons, who’s looking into Labour’s housing policy, clearly sees a bigger role for councils in homebuilding. As he put it, there is an overwhelming weight of evidence saying “for goodness sake lift the HRA cap” – a move that would allow councils to borrow more to build homes.

And in the face of today’s challenges, Londoners seem keen for councils to play a bigger role. When a recent YouGov poll asked about tackling London’s housing crisis, the top proposal, supported by two-thirds of respondents, was for councils to build more social housing.

It’s unlikely that two-thirds of Londoners think that they personally will benefit from new council housing, at least in the immediate future. So what underlies this support? It might be partly because we know councils will help raise the capital’s homebuilding. But I suspect it’s also because people feel they can trust that council housing, more than any other form of housing, will be genuinely affordable and will help relieve some of the pressure brought about by the housing crisis.

And letting new homes locally, which for the council’s own developments can mean within the same estate, means nearby tenants have an interest in arguing for new homes to be built. All the existing homes that are freed up by local tenants moving around are then offered to the full waiting list, so the wider population benefits from the increase in housing numbers too.

I saw enthusiasm for council housing on the doorsteps in Islington. While we’ve been winning support for building thousands of new homes, we gain people’s trust when they know what sort of homes they are.

For example, a young mum came up to me at a drop-in event about some new homes we were planning to build on her estate. She knew about our local lettings so she asked me “James, that block’s only going to be five floors – why can’t you build it taller, like seven or eight floors, so I get a better chance at a new home?”

For this woman, these properties were exactly the kind of homes we should be building; they couldn’t be further from all the new flats that get sold purely as investments in London’s so-called ‘global reserve currency’ of property assets.

I also had a conservation with one young man that’s particularly stuck in my mind. He said he worked for a home-building developer, but he had given up any chance of finding anywhere to live in Islington outside of parents’ home. He also explained that wasn’t planning on voting, despite the fact that it was his first opportunity to do so.

His job meant he had been directly involved in building new housing but his despair summed up why Londoners need to know we’re building the right sort of homes. I put to him that we can’t sit back and hope private builders and the market will sort it out – there’s no magic wand, but shouldn’t we build council housing, make sure rents are genuinely affordable, and stop new flats being wasted through ‘buy-to-leave’?

As I shook his hand goodbye, he said he’d think about voting – I don’t know whether he did or not. But what I do know is that he saw the worsening of our city’s housing crisis as inevitable. It’s our job to offer Londoners hope that it’s not.