Municipal socialism - The mayor of Hackney, Philip Glanville, in conversation with Hettie O'Brien

As part of the IPPR pamphlet 'The social contract in the 21st century' I was part of one of the chapters.

Hackney Council is drawing on the UK's rich history of municipal socialism to reinvigorate local democracy

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/newe.12110

Philip Glanville: Scrapping the HRA cap is a win for Labour – but not a silver bullet for the housing crisis (first appeared on Labour List)

Brexit infighting, no new policy ideas and announcements stolen straight from Labour’s manifesto, Tory conference was a good metaphor for Theresa May’s time as Prime Minister. Her speech, lacking in ideas but full of attacks on Jeremy Corbyn, showed her party’s lack of vision for the country.

But hidden in the rhetoric, there was one policy announcement that will have made council leaders across the country do a double-take. Did she really just say she will scrap our Housing Revenue Account borrowing cap? The devil will be in the detail, but yes, it appears to be true. After years of campaigning by Labour councils, housing charities, policy bodies and even the Conservative chair of the Local Government Association, the Tories have finally listened.

For nearly a decade, this Tory Treasury-imposed cap has been the main blocker on us building the new generation of council housing we desperately need. There are more than a million households on waiting lists, around 120,000 children who will spend this Christmas in temporary accommodation like hostels and B&Bs, and homelessness is rising We won’t solve our country’s housing crisis – a crisis made and prolonged in Whitehall – unless local authorities are given the freedom to build genuinely affordable social housing.

For too long, the arbitrary borrowing cap placed on us has hamstrung our efforts to build in the numbers we need. In Hackney, the borough I lead, we are building despite this cap, having delivered nearly 400 new council homes in the past few years (in the teeth of Tory austerity). We’ve promised to complete nearly 800 new council homes in the next four years under my mayoralty.

Theresa May’s announcement has the potential to unleash a step-change in the number of homes councils like mine can build – returning us to our historic role as major housebuilders. Like many, I marched, campaigned and lobbied in parliament to get to this moment. We believe by 2025 full HRA reform could help us build between 700 and 900 additional council homes. This will be the highest number since the 1970s and ’80s.

But while we celebrate this Labour win, we must also strike a note of caution. The Prime Minister did not announce a single penny of funding to build council housing – only the ability to prudently borrow our own money, against our assets, to finance the expensive business of constructing homes.

Alone, this won’t solve the housing crisis. Many councils have no existing development programmes thanks to decades of government policy under both parties, and it will take years to build up an in-house delivery team like Hackney’s. There are still pointless restrictions on reinvesting income from Right to Buy sales on building new homes – albeit with welcome noises from ministers on reforms. Most importantly, there’s barely any grant funding available to get projects off the ground. At least in London we are now lucky we have a mayor committed to using existing funding to build council housing, and Hackney will work with his team to do this.

Although without a borrowing cap we can build more at one time, it doesn’t mean there’s any new money to build homes, and we still need to find cold, hard cash towards the £250,000-300,000 it costs us to build every home for social rent. In Hackney, we do this through what we call cross-subsidy – that is, selling some homes outright to pay for council housing. It’s a successful, award-winning model that has housed hundreds of families in high-quality, modern and genuinely affordable new council homes. Even with more borrowing power, we’ll still need to match it with income from private sales. We’ll look to expand this model to deliver even more homes, including options for a living rent and shared ownership for private renters who will never realistically qualify for a council home.

But without reforms to Right to Buy, significant grant funding, better regulation of the private rented sector – where evictions are now the main cause of homelessness – and an end to damaging welfare changes on the most vulnerable, we risk not seeing a real change in the numbers of families unable to find or afford a place to call home.

While Theresa May’s announcement on Wednesday has been hard won, and it represented a surprising change to Tory orthodoxy, whether she can convince her warring party to reverse eight years of counterproductive attacks on social housing and those that live in it remains to be seen.

Of course, there is a simpler option. A Labour government, a Labour housing minister; building on the record of councils like Hackney to truly deliver a radical programme of reform that will actually deliver the homes we need.

(This article first appeared on Labour List and can still be found there: https://labourlist.org/2018/10/philip-glanville-scrapping-the-hra-cap-is-a-win-for-labour-but-not-a-silver-bullet-for-the-housing-crisis/)

Licensing changes won't kill Hackney, but will protect our residents (first appeared in The Guardian)

Nightlife is at the heart of our borough’s vibrancy, but we must stop revellers vomiting and urinating on our residential streets

Licensing policy isn’t usually the most contentious area of local government. It’s certainly not something I ever thought would lead to me being called an “unutterable cunt” by Giles Coren. But that’s what happened after Hackney council, where I am the elected mayor, approved its new licensing policy on 18 July. Since then, some have described the new rules as the toughest restrictions on nightlife in the country. But we don’t agree.

Over the past two years, Hackney council has gathered extensive research, from our street cleaning time to the emergency services, on the impact of the night-time economy. As a result, we’ve introduced a new policy that aims to support new, well-managed businesses.

Our new policy sets the basic guidelines for new venues. It will be the responsbility of businesses to state, in their application, how they will manage the impact of their late-night business on the local area. We want to work collaboratively with new businesses to achieve that.

It also doesn’t affect existing businesses at all. On Tuesday, for instance, under the new policy, our licensing committee granted permission for a restaurant to extend the hours it serves alcohol in Dalston.

We have decided to set the core opening hours across Hackney, including Dalston and Shoreditch, for which a new business can expect to get a licence because, after careful reflection, we need to balance the need for pubs and clubs to thrive with the needs of people living in the local neighbourhood.

This row has quickly moved away from the technical aspects of licensing to become one about class and what kind of place Hackney is.

We have come under fierce attack, especially on Twitter, in particular by the We Love Hackney campaign, which has, unfortunately, spread some ideas that are simply not true about the impact of the policy. Residents and local business owners have, quite rightly, been alarmed.

If I didn’t know better, I would have supported it myself. I love Hackney’s nightlife – it’s one of the reasons I moved here in 2003, spending my formative years in Shoreditch and Dalston. Before that, I worked in bars at college and university. Nightlife is at the heart of the borough’s creativity, inclusivity and vibrancy. I understand why people have risen to defend it and I know we’ve got to work to reassure those with genuine concerns.

But campaigners suggest it’s a blanket policy against all new venues, or a curfew. It’s not. They suggest that everything in Hackney will shut at 11pm. It won’t.

We’re trying to strike a balance between a growing night-time economy, the interests of the residents who live nearby and the impact on our increasingly stretched public services. Since we implemented similar measures from 2005 in Shoreditch and 2014 in Dalston, we have not hindered the growth of the night-time economy, but sought to shape it in a sensitive way to the benefit of all. There are now more than 1,300 licensed premises in the borough.

Nightlife is very important to Hackney, financially and culturally, but it has a huge cost on the public purse. The Metropolitan police, already stretched to its limits, is stretched even further on a Friday and Saturday night in Dalston and Shoreditch, when crime and antisocial behaviour rise sharply.

Nightlife costs us about £1.5m a year more than it brings in, mostly for extra street cleaning. Whether we should be spending that money cleaning up partygoers’ litter, vomit and worse using austerity-stretched services is a matter for serious debate. Rents and business rates have gone up, but this money doesn’t come to the council to spend on services.

The argument we’ve faced is that if people don’t like noise they shouldn’t live in the city. Tell that to the thousands of council tenants who live in Shoreditch, many of whom were there long before it became the Shoreditch we know today. Tell that to the working people bringing up their families in Dalston, without whom London could not function, who are woken at 4am by revellers vomiting in their front gardens or urinating on their steps.

For some, nightlife has positive benefits; for others, it means antisocial behaviour, noise and people from elsewhere using Hackney as a weekend playground with no thought for those who live here.

This borough is just 6.8 square miles with a population of nearly 300,000. Many of our residents enjoy our rich cultural and social life, and many of them just want a good night’s sleep.

We have fantastic, responsible bar and club owners with whom we work closely, and others – thankfully a minority – who are less so.

Hackney council, with a diverse population and ever-decreasing public resources, is trying to achieve a balanced approach. As mayor of this exciting borough, I’ll always be a friend to responsibly run venues but I will also defend our residents’ right to a clean and peaceful life.

(This article first appeared in the Guardian, it can still be found there: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/jul/27/icensing-changes-wont-kill-hackney-but-will-protect-residents)