Site icon Inside Croydon

Labour’s Copley calls on councils to build homes for social rent

insidecroydon

A Labour London Assembly Member has called for local authorities in the capital to provide thousands more homes for social rent – what used to be called council homes – and for the scrapping of the Thatcherite Right To Buy policy which has skewed, and screwed, the housing market, creating spiralling house prices, for the past 40 years.

A proposed Brick by Brick tower block. Formed in 2015, the council-owned company has yet to complete a single new home

Tom Copley was responding to to today’s publication of housing charity Shelter’s report, A Vision for Social Housing.

Copley is Labour’s housing spokesman at the London Assembly, and his comments ought to give many councils – including Labour-controlled Croydon – serious pause for thought.

In Croydon, there has not been a single new council home built since 2014. Under schemes put forward by the council-owned house-builder Brick by Brick, a grand total of ZERO homes have been delivered since the company was formed in 2015.

Of those Brick by Brick homes that are being built, using public property and public finance, more than 60 per cent are going for private sale. The rest are to be unaffordable “affordable” homes, offered through schemes such as high-cost shared ownership. None are intended as council homes.

Copley’s remarks illustrate the gulf between progressive social policy as advocated in today’s report by the large homelessness charities, such as Shelter, and what councils are actually delivering in London.

Progress MP for Lambeth South, Steve Reed OBE, greeted the Shelter report with a bleat on Twitter this morning about the hardships caused by the housing market. Yet his constituency includes parts of Croydon where the Labour council is using public open space to build homes for the same lucrative private market.

Progress MP Steve Reed OBE seems to have forgotten about the social cleansing going on in Lambeth, or the poor provision of homes in Croydon

And meanwhile, Reed’s former council colleagues in Lambeth are following through on policies instigated when he was council leader at Brixton Town Hall, conducting social cleansing of hundreds of council homes on estates such as Cressingham Gardens, which are also to be developed for private sale.

So when Copley begins his statement today by saying,“For this Government, social housing has sadly been an afterthought,” he might do well to also consider the practices of Labour local authorities, too.

As Copley points out, fewer than 8,000 social homes have been built in London over the last five years.

“With more and more people being forced into the all-too-often precarious conditions of the private rented sector, it is clear that we need to see a historic renewal in social housing to provide safe, secure and affordable homes to Londoners,” Copley said.

Tom Copley: wants local councils, such as Croydon, to build council homes

“In our capital, we are witnessing the burning injustice of thousands sleeping rough on the streets and trapped in temporary accommodation, alongside a rise in the hidden homeless population.

“Shelter’s plan for social housing sets a benchmark for the level of ambition that we need to turn this dire situation around. The Government must now pull its weight, and work with the Mayor by putting the funding in place to secure the 30,000 new social homes that London needs each year.

“But it’s no good building new social housing only to lose precious existing council homes to Right to Buy. The Government must end this policy, which has resulted in the loss of 287,303 social rented homes in London in the past 40 years.”

Which is, after all, the nub of the predicament.


Exit mobile version