Delivering new council and social homes: turning ambition into reality

Last night I joined Fiona Fletcher Smith of L&Q and my old friends at Labour Housing Group for a timely discussion about making a reality of government’s ambition to build new council and social homes.

It’s difficult to understate the scale of the housing crisis gripping this country, or to avoid it’s the very visible symptoms of our national failure to provide sufficient affordable and secure homes.  In Birmingham, the council I used to lead, 24,000 households are stuck on the housing waiting list, 5,000 households and 10,000 children are living in the limbo of temporary accommodation and £2million a month is being spent on emergency housing alone.  And don’t get me started on the perversity of local authorities having to spend huge sums renting back as temporary accommodation properties they used to own but have been compelled to sell, thanks to a right to buy policy that has long outlived whatever merit it may once have claimed.

This is a crisis that has been years in the making: the direct result of policies that have not just undervalued the importance of council and social housing, but have actively undermined its delivery.  That’s why it is genuinely refreshing to have a Prime Minister prepared to take to the national stage and openly make the case that more council and social housing is the route to fixing our housing problems.

Of course, speeches on their own, whilst being very welcome signals of intent, don’t build homes.  I’m hopeful that the actions that follow will help us to crack on with delivery.  A good start would be to fix council’s housing revenue accounts by rebasing the historic debt they were saddled with by the coalition government’s 2012 self-financing deal.  This would give councils the breathing room they need to maintain the homes they’ve got and start building the ones we desperately need.

We also need to be clear that delivering new social homes isn’t a zero-sum game between councils and housing associations.  As Fiona put it in our conversation last night: there is more than enough housing crisis for everyone to deal with.  Rather than haggling over who does or gets what, now is the time for us to work together to build the decent homes, strong neighbourhoods and better futures that people have been denied for too long. 

If you want to hear the full conversation — including the debate about housing revenue accounts, how to build sustainable neighbourhoods as well as decent homes, and what meaningful democratic control and active participation should look like — the podcast recording is now live here.