Labour’s London Assembly Housing spokesperson on the need for local democracy.
On Friday, Sadiq Khan published his long-awaited Good Practice Guide to Estate Regeneration. The major change from his draft guide, published for consultation last year, is the inclusion of mandatory ballots where demolition takes place as a condition of schemes receiving mayoral funding. By including ballots, the Mayor has shown he has listened to community groups, as well as the unanimous voice of the London Assembly.
I have long argued for ballots where homes are to be demolished. Estate residents are generally the only people who face the prospect of having their homes demolished. Therefore, it is only right that they should be able to vote on whether demolition takes place.
The question of exactly who should be balloted is one on which a consultation will now take place. It is my strong view that those balloted should be actual residents who live in the homes that it is proposed are demolished. That means private tenants should get a vote, but not their non-resident landlords.
The Mayor’s Good Practice Guide to Estate Regeneration also reaffirms his pledge that there must be no net loss of social housing on regeneration schemes. This is crucial. An assessment by the London Assembly’s housing committee in 2015 found that there had been a loss of more than 8,000 social rented homes across 30 regeneration schemes in London. The Mayor demonstrated he is standing by this commitment recently when he used his planning powers to reject a proposed estate regeneration scheme at Grahame Park in Barnet that would have resulted in the net loss of 257 social houses.
Estate regeneration can work well, but it is always done best when led by, or delivered in partnership with, residents. The regeneration of Bacton Low Rise by Camden Council is a superb example of this, and could not be more different to Barnet’s approach. The quality of the new build council homes is absolutely stunning, with residents involved in the design of the scheme from the beginning. Once the scheme is completed there will be a net increase in the number of genuinely affordable council homes as well as new shared ownership homes. Yes, market sale homes have to be built to pay for the new council homes in the absence of government funding, but crucially Camden Council retains the ownership of the land on which they are built.
It’s important to remember that when local councillors are coming forward with regeneration schemes, they often can’t do what ideally they would like to do because of national government policy. Councils that are looking to provide more and better housing for local people are constrained by government restrictions on their ability to borrow to build new council homes, by the Right to Buy scheme, and by outdated compulsory purchase laws that mean land can’t be compulsorily purchased for a fair value. Never mind the fact that government funding for new social housing is practically non-existent. VAT rules can sometimes make knocking down and rebuilding housing cheaper than refurbishing it, because VAT is charged on refurbishment but not new build homes.
I believe councils should welcome the inclusion of ballots as adding legitimacy to proposed schemes. Some councils are very good at including residents in designing regeneration schemes, but others sadly are not. Mandatory ballots mean that councils and housing associations must engage effectively in order to gain approval. This necessitates the active inclusion and involvement of residents from the very beginning.
Tom Copley is Labour’s London Assembly Housing spokesperson.
