By Cllr Rachel Burgess
We all know someone who has been affected by the housing crisis.
Whether it’s young people who grew up in Wokingham but are now priced out of the housing market in their home town (where the average house price has reached £520k according to rightmove); or renters in poor quality accommodation whose housing benefit/universal credit goes straight into the pockets of their landlords; or the hundreds and hundreds of people, including many families with children, stuck on Wokingham’s housing waiting list.
Five years have passed since the terrible events at Grenfell Tower, yet archaic and outdated laws remain unreformed, leaving leaseholders and renters without the power and security they deserve in their own homes. Families find themselves subject to the whims of developers who have the right to charge them ever increasing ‘management fees’ in perpetuity.
While in power the Conservatives have overseen a transfer of power to commercial developers, in return for millions of pounds of Conservative party donations. Meanwhile the number of homes for social rent has fallen sharply already, cutting the access to affordable and social housing that so many people need.
The recently announced policy of extending the right to buy to housing association properties is a headline-grabbing ploy by Boris Johnson, solely to please his rebellious back benchers. The ‘plan’ itself has been roundly condemned by housing experts and charities as unworkable, with leading housing associations warning that even with adequate funding, it could take years to build enough social housing to replace those lost through this scheme.
Many of the council houses that were sold under right to buy ended up in the hands of private landlords, who charged their tenants far more than those houses that remained under Council control. The same would happen to sold-off housing association properties, thus continuing the dismal downward spiral of social housing stock, putting the supply of social homes at even greater risk.
At a time when we need many more social homes, Boris Johnson’s plan is to sell them off. Councils need more power to provide genuinely affordable housing, not less.
And perhaps the most frustrating aspect of this policy announcement is that it is a nostalgic, inward-looking ploy to mollify Johnson’s own Conservative Party MPs, whose confidence has been badly hit by the disgraceful ‘partygate’ scandal, rather than being a workable plan that will actually help ordinary people.
Johnson’s local Conservatives have made great play of the amount of affordable homes over which they presided when in office, such as the new development at Gorse Ride. But so-called “affordable” housing costs are pegged against the local housing market – so in Wokingham, where housing costs are so high, they are not really affordable at all.
And the amount of “affordable” housing provided in developments is often a fraction of what is really needed. Recently, there was much criticism that the new Carnival Pool site in Wokingham town did not include any affordable housing element at all.
The Conservative-run Council announced last year that it was going to build the first 11 council houses in over 20 years – this is pitiful when we really need thousands more social homes, genuinely affordable housing in the Council’s control, if we really want to reduce the numbers of people on the housing waiting list and give all young families the start in life that many older families took for granted.
And the knock on effect of a greater level council housing on the wider housing market is also beneficial, as lower Council rents have the effect of dampening down private sector rents, thereby allowing many more people to build up savings for a deposit to buy their own homes, the outcome for which Johnson is supposedly aiming.
Our broken housing system is just one part of an ongoing incompetence stemming from Johnson’s government, presiding over a UK economy that is expected to have the lowest growth in all of the G7 next year; presiding over record numbers of people on NHS waiting lists even before the pandemic; a government that promised 40 new hospitals that turned out actually to be mostly refurbishments that we are still waiting for; and a Prime Minister that said in public he took full responsibility for what happened in the ‘partygate’ scandal – and in private said he would do it again.
But I also look forward with hope to a new era of government – one that would be on the side of the ordinary person and their housing needs, a government that would tackle the housing crisis, that would empower leaseholders, that would give security to private renters, that, instead of filling developers pockets, would prioritise first-time buyers and build the genuinely affordable and council homes that our society, including so many families in Wokingham, desperately need.
Cllr Rachel Burgess is the leader of Wokingham Labour, and ward member for Norreys
