When it comes to building new council homes Southwark is leading the way.
National data published this month shows just how far ahead we are. So how do we compare?
One fact stands out. Of all the new council homes started across the country last year a third are being built here in Southwark. To put that in context there are over three hundred councils in England, yet we started one in three new council homes.
You can spot these homes all around Southwark, as they rise out of the ground on over forty-five sites, big and small. We’ve handed over the keys for over a thousand homes since 2014, with over two thousand more on site being built today.
One estate that is worth a special mention is the Aylesbury, which is now home to the country’s largest council homes building site. With 581 new council homes under construction next to Burgess Park.
These homes are much more than bricks and mortar. One of the joys of my job is getting to meet the people who move into them, and hearing how their low rents and lifetime tenancies allow families to put down roots, make ends meet and get on at school and work.
It’s not just council homes that we are delivering. Since 2010, over two thousand new low rent housing association homes have been built in Southwark. Plus over two and a half thousand other kinds of affordable homes, including shared ownership and shared equity. Few boroughs have come close to these numbers.
We’re also tackling empty homes. Thanks to our Empty Homes Action Plan, the number of unused flats and houses in Southwark is down by a third over the last four years.
The biggest reduction in London and the second biggest in the county. We’ve achieved this by helping owners to let unused properties to local families. As well as charging double or triple council tax to those who allow homes to sit empty long-term.
There is lots to celebrate, but also much more to do.
Rents in the private sector are spiralling ever more out of reach. The average rent in our city is now over £30,000 a year. That is a number that shows just how broken the housing market is.
We need fundamental change. Yet the government has not even delivered on the small promises they have made. In 2019, the Conservative Party said they would end no fault evictions, where tenants are kicked out despite having done nothing wrong. Four years later and nothing has changed.
I’m calling for much bigger change. Government needs to give our city the power to set fair limits on rents, so landlords can’t impose huge rent hikes every year. With new rules that means once you’ve signed a tenancy it can only go up by a fair amount that reflects the reasonable cost to your landlord of looking after your home. It’s something that’s a norm in many other countries, and I’m working with the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, to win this basic right for Londoners too.
It’s not just private renters who are being hard hit. It’s homeowners too. The Conservative Party’s disastrous ‘mini-budget’ last year has pushed thousands of families to the edge, with over £1 billion added to mortgage payments since the Tories crashed our economy.
For families on the lowest incomes it’s worse still. Successive Conservative and Liberal Democrat governments have cut housing benefits so low that it is impossible for a family on universal credit to find a private rented home they can afford locally. As a result we are seeing homelessness rocket.
Now we are seeing house building across the country stall, with brick factories being mothballed, and the government abandoning their pledge to build the extra homes our country need.
It’s clear that so long as the Conservative Party is ruling the country the housing crisis is only going to deepen.
In contrast, Labour has pledged that in government we will build more homes people can afford. So this month I was delighted to welcome Lisa Nandy, Labour’s Shadow Secretary of State for housing to Southwark. To show her the new council homes we are building and to discuss how a Labour government can help us do so much more.
We all need a home. It’s not an optional extra in life. Yet thousands of people across our country have been locked out of having one. In Southwark, Labour is determined to change that. We’re already building record numbers of new council homes, more than at any time since the 1970’s. Now we need a Labour government that shares our determination, so we can solve Britain’s housing crisis together.