Affordable Housing: London

Andy Slaughter Excerpts

Tuesday 14th June 2016 Westminster Hall

[Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir David. I apologise to you and to the Front Benchers, because I have to leave before the end of the debate. Notwithstanding that, I wanted to take part, because the issue is important to my constituents; that, indeed, is why we have debates on affordable housing in London regularly.

I thank my neighbour and hon. Friend the Member for Brentford and Isleworth (Ruth Cadbury) for introducing the debate and for setting out the problems so clearly. I also thank the right hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mark Field), although he has gone now, for turning up. He always turns up for these debates, and he is usually the only Tory London MP who does. Perhaps it is not surprising that five of the MPs who turned up represent central-west London constituencies, because although the problem is London-wide, it is particularly intense in those areas of high property values.

To illustrate that, in Hammersmith and Fulham, 58% of average monthly salary is now taken up by private sector rent, and the multiple of annual income represented by house prices—now pushing up towards £1 million, on average—is 20.5, the fourth highest in London. That shows how stark the problems are. That means that, for many people, social housing—council and housing association housing—is the only affordable type of housing. We obviously need a comprehensive solution that includes other forms of subsidised housing, whether those are traditional methods such as shared ownership or newer methods such as controlled rents and discounted sale.

There are a variety of schemes; it is simply that in recent years they have not been implemented. As my hon. Friend the Member for Brentford and Isleworth mentioned, the previous Mayor’s record was appalling, to the extent that the last year of his reign for which figures are available was the worst for affordable home delivery since records began 25 years ago, with fewer than 5,000 homes built. As she said, his record was about 13%, which simply makes a bad situation worse.

To give an example of what is going wrong and the opportunity cost—I mean that literally—there are more than 30 opportunity areas in London, and three of the biggest are in my geographically rather small constituency. We are told that, over a number of years, those three together will probably provide 40,000 homes. The failure in each of those areas is stark. On the one hand, we have the White City area, where the target for affordable housing was reduced by the previous Conservative council from 40% to 15%—and it is barely hitting that—which is encouraging high-value developers such as St James into the area. Many small penthouse and two-bedroom flats on the BBC television centre site, for example, are going for millions of pounds in what is the poorest part of my constituency and the area with the greatest housing need.

Worse still is what is happening in west Kensington and Earl’s Court, where permission was granted for 8,000 homes, which include not one additional social rented home and only 10% of any type of affordability. Effectively, those 23 acres of prime land owned by Hammersmith Council were given away. Notionally the cost was £90 million, but in practice once the council had the responsibility of buying out freeholders and leaseholders on that site, it was little if anything—it may even be a negative sum. That is beyond negligence. The whole of that site—some 80 acres—is public land owned either by the council or by Transport for London. The new Mayor will obviously take a strong interest in that, because although half of that land has already been disposed of, half of it—the Lillie Bridge depot—remains to be dealt with. Perhaps we can hope for something better, but again that shows the missed opportunity.

Most significant of all is the area that is now the Old Oak and Park Royal Development Corporation, which is zoned to provide more than 25,000 new homes. Again, that has been earmarked as one of the key areas for starter homes—in other words, homes that will go for up to £450,000 each, which are not affordable by anyone’s definition of the term. I fear for what will happen in that development because of the combined mismanagement of the previous Mayor and the Transport Secretary, who at the end of 2014 discovered that the construction of HS2, Crossrail and other rail projects in that area was being done in such a way that, as Sir Terry Farrell pointed out, it has prevented the decking of that site so that homes could be built above that work. Therefore, unless the new Mayor can work miracles, the prospect of building thousands of homes on that site has been lost for at least a generation, and perhaps permanently. What appallingly short-sighted planning, and that lies firmly at the door of the previous Mayor of London and the Government combined.

That is not good news. What is good news is that we now have a Mayor who has pledged to do his best to build not the 25,000 homes in London that we have seen, but the 50,000-plus that we need, and half of those will be genuinely affordable. I wish him luck. I will do everything I can, as will my local authority, to ensure that that happens, but it must be said that that is against a background of a Government doing everything through legislation to prevent people from having a secure, affordable home.

The vindictiveness of policies that enforce the sale of housing association properties by means of the subsidy from the sale of high-value council properties beggars belief. Boroughs like mine will be most affected, with up to 50% of council properties having to be sold over time. Why do we want to create insecurity for people in housing? That has all sorts of detrimental effects on people’s lives, and not just on their housing conditions, but on their health, the education of their children and so on. We have pay to stay; we have benefit cuts that are forcing people out of London; we have short-term tenancies, so people can no longer feel secure in their family homes; and, as Crisis said in its briefing for the debate, we have had a doubling of street homelessness since the coalition Government came in. It is now commonplace to use the term “social cleansing” to describe what is happening in my constituency. That is not an exaggeration, and it is no longer an emotive term but practical Government policy.

Yesterday I went to the funeral of a woman called Kathy Dolan whom I have known for many years. For many years beyond that, as tenants’ leader, she effectively ran the small, very nice Wood Lane estate, just next to the BBC television centre and opposite White City station. She made sure that people on that estate lived comfortable lives—she sorted out their problems and she dealt with the council—but in recent years she also had to fight developers. At mass yesterday, the priest was able to talk about the threat to established communities from developers. What an indictment.

We have strong communities in Hammersmith, as I am sure colleagues do around London, and we have many people who, like Kathy, work incredibly hard for no money and little recognition to sort out problems. They do not need the additional burden of vulture-like developers who have their eyes on their homes and want to make profit out of them, assisted by politicians who should know better.

Yes, there is a crisis in London housing. It can be resolved, but it requires us all to work together in the same direction to ensure that the people who work and live in London and have done for many generations can continue to do so. I am afraid that the policies the Government are pursuing are doing exactly the opposite.