The debate about building ‘the homes we need’ has to go beyond numbers

Big numbers abound in housing debates and rightly so. Two-hundred thousand new homes – the number the Labour frontbench has committed to building annually – is a response to the housing crisis that is starting to approach the scale we need.

But the debate about building ‘the homes we need’ has to go beyond numbers. To make the point, look at the extreme case of ‘buy-to-leave’ homes that are bought off-plan as investors’ latest fancy and sit there empty in many parts of London. No matter how many thousands of them get built, they’re certainly not the homes we need.

That may sound obvious – but it underscores the fact that getting the homes we need means building the right homes in the right places. We need to make sure new homes help people who need somewhere decent, affordable, and secure to live.

So how can we do this? There are going to be different solutions for different parts of the country, different tenures, and so on. But here’s an example from my borough: when we’re building new council homes on existing estates in Islington, people already living on the estate get first chance at them.

That means we offer the homes first to people who need a more suitable home, then to people who just want to do a like-for-like swap. People still of course have questions about what we’ve got planned, but it’s transformed local support for a lot what we’re building. And because all the homes that get freed up by people moving go to the full waiting list, people across Islington benefit from these new homes being built too.

These new homes are a world away from ‘buy-to-leave’ assets. Whilst the latter have little or no connection to the local community, our new council homes can help directly solve the housing crises that nearby people are facing. This approach has helped to build trust that the homes we’re building will make a difference.

And we’re also building trust through a firm commitment to genuinely-affordable council rents – an antidote to the twisted definition of ‘affordable’ promoted by a government who wants them to rise to near-market level, and a Mayor of London who seems to think £2,800/month could be ‘affordable’.

A YouGov poll in April this year asked Londoners how we should take on the capital’s housing problem. The top proposal, supported by two-thirds of respondents, was for councils to build more social housing.

Maybe this is because people have an inkling councils are essential to help raise the capital’s homebuilding levels, as the postwar record attests. But it’s probably also that people can trust council housing to stand a chance of being genuinely-affordable and of helping to meet the capital’s housing crisis.

Of course, no solution to the housing crisis is simple. Although the approach I’ve set out works for council housing in Islington, there will be different approaches in different areas – and alongside homes for council rent, we also need to help people struggling to buy a home, which has to include a look at whether shared ownership and similar approaches need an overhaul. And of course no discussion about the homes we need would be complete without us taking on the private rented sector that is not fit for purpose.

But central to these arguments is a challenge for us to explain how hundreds of thousands of new homes will help meet the housing problems that individual people and their families face.

Without sounding flippant, people looking for their first home, or a stable home, or an affordable home, just need one. And so we can build people’s trust, and we can offer them hope, if we have the ideas of how we’ll meet that goal.

James Murray is the Executive Member for Housing and Development on Islington Council. Join him and over 60 other speakers at Class conference tomorrow.