It’s a busy week at Southwark’s town hall, with councillors voting on the budget on Wednesday.
There are plenty of eye-catching details in the budget that we have reported on this week, including the £2 million for an anti-social behaviour-busting taskforce over the next four years, the extra £4 million for temporary accommodation and nearly half a million pounds for people struggling with the cost of living crisis.
Southwark Council to spend an extra £4m on temporary accommodation for homeless households
Southwark Council sinks £2m into tackling anti-social behaviour in the borough
The council has also had to make millions of pounds in savings to get the budget balanced amid funding pressures from central government. That has left some services unfunded in the budget like the Early Years Autism Service, although the council has said repeatedly that it will not be dropped – just that funding needs to come from outside.
The budget comes a few months before the local elections in May, and decisions made this week are sure to have an impact on the way people vote. But housing – how much we build, where it is and who lives in it – is likely to be the most important topic in the election.
News emerged this week that the number of new homes for social rent in the borough has actually dropped over the past year, according to the Greater London Authority (GLA) – despite Southwark’s oft-stated aims of building 11,000 more council homes by 2043.
The council disputes the GLA figures, and data also shows that social housing in Southwark went up by nearly eleven percent between 2004 and 2020. Meanwhile we also reported this week on the council’s plan to get 40,000 homes – of all tenures – built over the next seventeen years.
Whatever the truth behind the numbers, there appears to be a clear difference between building these homes and getting people to live in them.
We reported this week on the astonishing fact that Southwark – one of the local authorities with the highest number of empty homes – has not used key powers to take them over once in the last five years. Southwarks claim that this is too costly and time-consuming, and that it wants the government to simplify powers to requisition empty homes.
But when a borough like ours has so many empty properties, it is worth asking two questions: why isn’t the council doing everything in its power to stop that? And what is it about the council’s building policy that is attracting or allowing so much emptiness?