Jenny Jones - Labour and Conservatives failing on housing
In an article originally published on Liberal Conspiracy, Jenny Jones, Green assembly member in London, and chair of the GLA's Planning and Housing Committee, talks about housing waiting lists and affordable housing in London:
I was shocked when I found that eight years of Ken as Mayor and ten years of the current government saw the housing waiting lists double and house prices spiral out of control.
But with Boris now in office and cuts to the budget threatening to wipe out the affordable housing programmes, this bleak story looks set to get even worse.
In London, social housing waiting lists have grown by 82% as the stock of homes actually decreased. Right to Buy continued unabated until very recently, with 85,000 homes off the stocks. In the same decade, we only managed to build around 55,000 new homes.
There are now over 330,000 households waiting to be allocated a place that suits their needs - that's roughly 10% of all the households in the city.
For those looking to buy a home in the noughties, the housing bubble - cheered on by enthusiastic journalists - saw the cost rising twice as quickly as average incomes. The Mayor's proposed new threshold for people looking to buy an "affordable" (shared ownership) home is a household income of £74,000. I'm not sure that's a sign of a very affordable market!
The usual response to all of this has always been: "build more houses". Apparently, all would be well if only we could increase the supply quickly enough to meet demand.
Unfortunately the very pro-building Mayor Ken Livingstone fell well short of his targets over his term of office, and even if he had met his targets that wouldn't have contained the inflation-busting rises in house prices. You'd need to build roughly double the number we've managed to achieve that.
If you really wanted to increase house building that much in London - including building more council houses instead of subsidising developers to build unaffordable "shared ownership" schemes - you'd need to pump lots more money into the HCA budget, which comes out of the capital expenditure budget.
Which brings us to the latest Pre-Budget Report, which suggested this would be slashed by 50% over 2011-14. The National Housing Federation has warned that a 17.98% cut - the average across the whole government budget - would result in 500,000 fewer affordable homes nationally.
The other sources of funding for affordable homes are developer contributions, which fell by a third over the past two years from £30.6m in 2006/7 to £21.3m in 2008/9, and discounted or free public land, which both dried up last year.
There are fairer alternatives that don't depend on housing bubbles. The Mayor and the Government could get radical, adopting models such as Community Land Trusts and Mutual Home Ownership.
These create community safety nets that own the land, keep homes permanently affordable, and enable you to buy up a growing stake in your home without having to take on all the responsibility for the debt. We could invest - as communities - in building these homes instead of relying on government handouts and big business. Remember building societies?
It wouldn't be as quick, it wouldn't be as flashy, but it would build the foundations for a housing market more focused on genuinely affordable homes than risky speculative investments.
Share
