Presentation by Pat Turnbull to London Tenants Federation members’ meeting, 13.7.24
We’ve just had an election and seen a change of government. The big issues for London Tenants remain the same as they were before the election. The hope is that we can see better results for London tenants in the new situation.
Issue One and the background to all the other problems we face: the social housing sector has been ignored, neglected and underfunded for over forty years. In our responses to consultations we have emphasised that government funding needs to be directed towards our sector. On this we have support from many bodies, including the Chartered Institute of Housing.
This brings me to the second, related issue: the urgent need for repair and refurbishment of very many of our homes. Councils have seen their budgets cut by over 30 per cent in the past 14 years. Housing associations are expected to be self-funding which has led many of them, especially the biggest ones, to prioritise building homes for sale over upkeep of their tenants’ homes. Some of them are reorientating, but late in the game.
The third issue I want to highlight is again related: the ever rising rents and service charges. Councils and housing associations are expected to finance the upkeep of homes out of rental income. This has led them to demand more leeway from the government to raise rents.
But tenants cannot afford these year on year rent rises – seven per cent last year, 7.7 per cent this year – let alone even higher rises.
Then there is the matter of variation of rents. There are London Affordable Rent properties at up to 50 per cent more than social rent. Landlords charge higher rents for new properties. And they have also transferred many social rent properties, once they become vacant, to so-called affordable rent at up to 80 per cent of market rents.
As to service charges, there is no government formula. In the four years when the government formula – as an exception – cut rents by one per cent a year, many landlords compensated by raising the service charges. It can even be hard to find out what a landlord’s service charges are, which makes it harder to jointly contest them.
Our rents and service charges cannot be expected to pay for the upkeep of our homes as well as the decades of backlog of poor upkeep.
This leads me to the next big issue: demolition of council and housing association social rented homes. In what are described as regeneration schemes, housing estates are demolished to be replaced largely by expensive market housing.
In the 2021 London Tenants Manifesto we quote an estimate of 55,000 London council homes on 166 estates having been demolished since 1997. But these demolitions are still going on, with many tenants’ groups fighting brave battles to defend their homes. A contribution to this fight will be to revive the Estate Watch work that we have been doing jointly with the Just Space network of London community organisations.
Landlords justify these estate regenerations by citing the poor state of the housing, bringing us back to the essential question of upkeep.
The last issue I want to highlight is the failure to build social rented housing.
The London Tenants Manifesto points out that between 1980/81 and 2019/20, 311,305 London council homes were sold via Right to Buy. Over 40 per cent of them are now privately rented.
We have recent evidence of the failure to build social rented homes in London.
The 19th Annual Monitoring Report on the London Plan was published by the Greater London Authority in May.
In the year 2021/22 only 3,721 low cost rent (this is the term used in the GLA document) homes were completed in London. The GLA’s 2017 Strategic Housing Market Assessment said that 30,425 low cost rent homes were needed EACH YEAR to meet need.
Our response to the Annual Monitoring Report urges the Mayor and the GLA:
1) To seek every means at their disposal to increase the number and proportion of social rented homes delivered
2) To strongly press the newly elected government to release the funding necessary to greatly increase the supply of social rented homes.
My final point is this.
To make headway on these big issues, we need the voices of tenants. This makes our conference today refreshing our London Tenants organisation very important. And I urge everyone here, and everyone you know, to revive and revitalise our tenants’ and residents’ associations, our area tenants’ panels, our borough tenants’ organisations, and our housing association tenants’ organisations.
We are going to need them all!
Labour Campaign for Council Housing 