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 Cllr Chris Naylor |
Why we have to act now to keep houses in order
The Town Hall remains committed to hanging on to its council homes, but it comes at a high price, says Chris Naylor
ONE of the first things I realised when I was elected last year was what real difficulties many of our council tenants face.
I’ve seen at first hand problems with broken drains, rotting windows, leaking roofs and heating that doesn’t work. And as our housing gets older, more and more things go wrong, and we spend more and more on running repairs and day-to-day breakdowns.
Though the council has been making slow progress in recent years, it could still take another 30 to get all homes up to standard.
Other boroughs have already done this, meanwhile tens of thousands of people are living, every day, in council properties that need fixing.
Children are growing up in unsatisfactory conditions. Out-of-date wiring, heating that’s either too hot or too cold, broken or damaged kitchens and bathrooms to name a few. And our latest survey of housing, by independent surveyors, shows the real challenge we face – with tenants in around half our homes living in sub-standard conditions.
Despite already spending millions of pounds every year, we simply do not have the cash we need to give all our tenants a decent home.
I’m completely committed to council housing, and I feel very strongly that we must do the best by our tenants. Poor housing means poor quality of life, and so often leads to poor health and poor educational achievement.
It’s now more than three years since the government withdrew its offer of £283million to fix our homes – after tenants voted not to accept government conditions.
Years of lobbying have still not produced a single penny. We can’t let this situation continue.
We need to find a way forward and can’t wait for government to see reason while our homes deteriorate further.
Improving Camden’s council homes is a top priority for this partnership administration.
While some London boroughs have sold off all their housing, we’re committed to retaining our council homes, in line with tenants’ and leaseholders’ wishes.
But we face a major challenge.
The council needs to find £489m for repairs, renewals and general improvements, in the next five years alone.
We need to spend £256m, to simply bring our homes up to a decent standard. And another £157m must be spent on essential mechanical and electrical work on things like lifts and wiring.
At the moment, we are short of £242m to do that.
You may ask what we can do if the government is not giving us the money we need.
We will respect tenants’ wishes and are committed to keeping council homes under our management.
We will continue to push ministers for more money and we are due to meet the housing minister later this month. However, despite billions being spent on housing around the country, three years of lobbying has so far had no effect.
We must do something now before things get worse.
We have come up with a three-pronged proposal that we want to discuss with tenants and residents over the coming six months.
We will scale down our existing refurbishment programme to focus on the basics like rewiring, lifts, heating and kitchens and spread the benefits more widely.
We are also working to identify the estates with the biggest and most complex challenges.
We will then work with tenants on those estates to find ways to tackle those issues and to secure the money we need, not just to deliver homes, but also better places, safer places for residents to live.
We could also raise extra cash by selling off a small proportion of empty homes and commercial properties.
We are considering an initial pilot to raise £11m from the sale of about 50 vacant properties.
By selling a maximum of 500 over the next five years, we would be able to improve the nearly 24,000 properties kept for our secure council tenancies.
We are now under pressure too from government to produce a plan to get our homes up to the Decent Homes standard.
We are the only council in London not to have done this. We have to submit an outline very soon, working towards a final proposal in December which we will be consulting residents on over the summer.
This is an important opportunity to ensure all the people living in council homes have a decent place to live.
It is one we cannot afford to let pass. Doing nothing will see council homes continue to get worse, the repairs bill rise and solutions harder to come by.
I want as many people to get involved as possible, particularly those people living on our estates in most urgent need of repair.
There will be lots of ways to have a say over the coming months, but, in the meantime, please contact me or your local councillor with your views.
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