A letter to the Deputy Prime Minister, Angela Rayner MP, is backed by an interim report setting out five solutions to solving the current social housing crisis which has left too many households in substandard homes and too few affordable homes being built.
Capped income, crippling cuts, unfunded new requirements and soaring costs have decimated housing association and council’s housing budgets, the letter states. In Lambeth alone previous government policies issues have reduced the budget for improving or retrofitting residents’ homes by an estimated £500million.
The letter says that ‘after 14 years of policy uncertainty and underfunding, we want to establish a long-term and collaborative relationship with our new government, working together to bring our all our existing homes up to a modern, decent and green standard, and ensure we’re on track to build desperately needed new homes’.
Cllr Danny Adilypour, Lambeth’s Deputy Leader and Cabinet Member for Housing, Investment and New Homes, said: “It is clear that we have a social housing crisis in Lambeth, and across the country, as a result of the national failure to fund, invest or prioritise the maintenance and building of social housing in this country.
“Lambeth is one of the country’s biggest social housing landlords, with more than 33,000 council homes, but because of Government policy failures, a lack of investment and rising prices too many of our households live in sub-standard homes.
“This national failure to prioritise new social housing means that every night more than 4,200 homeless households in Lambeth are in expensive, but unsuitable temporary accommodation as an emergency stop-gap. This is both wasteful and fails to meet people’s needs.
“Lambeth council has built the first new council homes in a generation, but cuts in grant funding and income, the challenges of the construction market and the failure to reform Right to Buy are holding back our ability to build the homes that local people need.
“We welcome the new Government’s commitment to tackling this issue, and so we are working with the other large social landlords to set out the scale of the challenge and commit to working with the Government to find solutions.”
An interim ‘Securing the Future of Council Housing’ report sent with the letter sets out five solutions to turn the situation around, lifting the council homes we have up to modern, safe, healthy and green standards, and delivering the thousands more council homes that our country urgently needs.
They draw on the work councils are already doing to deliver more and better homes for our communities. This includes Lambeth’s ambitions to build at least 500 new affordable homes on council owned land by 2030 and stated need to secure new funding to bring council homes up to scratch.
