Three million is not enough

I was born in a slum in 1954, where my house was an attic and I slept in a drawer. I shared an outside toilet with five other families. When we moved to a council estate it was like Beverley Hills. It was a life transforming experience – not just for me, but for everyone involved in the slum clearances.

These days, council houses are almost impossible to find. In Barking, where the BNP is making strong headway, the council built just a handful of council houses last year. It’s a recipe for trouble – it feeds racial tension.

There is a dearth of family housing because the right-to-buy coupled with the failure to build replacements means that almost all the big houses have been bought and not replaced. In Tower Hamlets, my constituency, there are 23,000 on the waiting list. Shelter says there are 12,000 overcrowded families. We have 10 or 12 people or more cramped into one house – it is on a Calcutta scale. The local population is being is being forced far away from where they lived and where their family and friends are.

Any green spaces left in the cities are increasingly being used, not even for housing associations but to build for private sales – even housing associations are doing this. These houses are not affordable even for relatively well-off people.

Where did the idea that you must sink all of your hard earned cash into your home come from?

Right to buy has decimated the rented sector and has been an almost unmitigated disaster. In Tower Hamlets, people rejected the housing association which came from out of town to woo the residents and instead voted to stay with the council. They preferred to be council tenants. The reason? Because people suspect that housing associations are merely one step away from privatisation and once that step is taken, there is no way back. We argued that this vote was one of the most important you will ever have – you may never again be able to vote on your housing situation. Housing associations can’t be voted out, and that is profoundly undemocratic.

The government’s recent plans to ask councils to build more homes is too limited and too late – the progress will be glacial and the numbers are not enough. They are wallowing in false hope – with brainwaves such as shared equity. They will fail.

The quickest and cheapest way is to give councils money and power to borrow and build. The numbers given now by the government for council housebuilding are too small – there are too many half way houses. Three million homes is not enough – not enough at all.

Where did the idea that you must sink all of your hard earned cash into your home come from? The crisis is not going to be solved by housing associations or private ownership. What we need is an honest drive to build council houses, an opportunity to create smaller, better managed communities.