English: Betsham House, Tennis Street, Southwark Typical of the many London County Council tenement blocks in this part of the city. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The London Borough of Southwark, a council based in some of the richest and the poorest areas of inner London, has just sold a council house for £3,000,000. The Labour-run council has sold the dilapidated but listed 6 bedroom house (which is just 1 mile from the City) on the grounds that it could build 20 family council houses with the proceeds, as part of its initiative to build 11,000 new council homes in the borough. It’s certainly an ambitious policy: Southwark has a population of 250,000 (roughly 100,000 households) so to increase the housing stock by 11% in a densely-built city requires creative thinking and vast financial resources. It would also clear the social housing waiting list altogether: something almost unheard of in the UK.
However, many local residents are dubious of Southwark’s plan, saying that it is more likely to use the £3,000,000 to ease budget cuts- Southwark has had its funding cut by one-third- than to reinvest in housing. They say that Southwark is going to asset-strip its housing portfolio, declaring the few valuable houses it still owns too costly to repair in order to flog them off to developers. It doesn’t help that the Labour administration has been flaky in the recent past in securing affordable housing in new building developments. That’s why local activists started squatting in the house in question on Sunday, determined to prevent the sale of what they term ‘useful’ council housing.
I am not hostile to squatters in general. In fact, I approve of them utilising empty houses, provided they do so responsibly. Indeed, squatters provide a service in discouraging property speculation, when the threat of Compulsory Purchase should (but doesn’t) prevent developers leaving homes empty. Alas, squatting of residential property was made a criminal offense last year. However, I’m not sure what the Southwark squatters hope to achieve by occupying a building that is already sold in an attempt to block the release of funds to build 20 new council homes- homes that would go to those who actually need them, unlike so-called “affordable housing” which costs 80% of market rates.
The fact is, Britain is in desperate need of new homes, for both council tenants and owner-occupiers. There are literally millions of families living in substandard, temporary or unaffordable homes because we simply haven’t got enough of them to meet demand. I estimate that, though the Labour Party’s policy of building one million is good, we ultimately need 3,000,000 new homes to solve the crisis- in other words, we need to increase our housing stock by the 11% that Southwark aims to do.
The cost need not be huge: to actually build a 4 bedroom house to high building and environmental standards costs about £100,000, which could be recouped with profits if sold at just one third of market rates. No, it is land and developers’ profit margins that are the greatest costs, and these can both be eliminated if we put the public sector in the driving seat. What is more, we can be imaginative when building them: let’s not try to cram more and more people into existing towns and cities which were designed along outmoded ideas.
We can do away with sink estates: every new street that is built would be mixed tenure. Traffic jams can be avoided if public transport is could and most facilities are a short, safe and pleasant walk away. Comnmunities can thrive if out-of-town supermarkets are not built. Quality of life can improve dramatically in spacious New Towns with plenty of parks, cycle lanes and an end to the artificial pattern of commuting. Furthermore, we could adopt a range of architectural styles to avoid the aesthetically displeasing look of previous New Towns (like parts of Basingstoke). The most advanced knowledge of social sciences and engineering could be used to build organic, (and I apologize for the following hyperbolic-sounding term) ‘people-shaped’ communities.
I know that we’ve tried planning in two generations of New Towns, and it has been only a limited success. But we could get it right this time, and provide a self-financing boost to the economy whilst doing so. What better way of challenging ‘London-centricity’ could their be than building a cluster of New Towns- or even a ‘New City- in the North capable of being an economic hub in its own right? What better way of ‘going green’ than creating homes that are ultra-energy efficient and have their own solar panels? What better way of resolving deprivation than ending the practice of hiding the underclass (and I use the term in its scientific sense) in tower blocks they almost never leave?
It’s a logical and, in my view, inspiring solution. But it can only happen with the political will which has only rarely been applied to housing policy.