At Hackney Council, we’re doing everything we can to deliver renewable energy and net zero locally, from our sector-leading work to rapidly expand our EV charging infrastructure, to installing solar panels on our council and community buildings, decarbonising our pension fund, our Green Homes programme and of course our ambitious plans for community energy. Not to mention our efforts ‘greening’ our environment.
Last week’s announcement from Keir Starmer and Ed Miliband, during Community Energy Fortnight, demonstrates Labour’s commitment to listen to and work jointly with Local Government in the drive towards net zero. Nationwide, Labour local authorities know that net zero is a target that must be achieved to secure the wellbeing of the planet and it must be delivered alongside social justice. The global scale can be overwhelming, but a strong and ambitious partnership between Central and Local Government is an essential tool in this fight. Most of us in Labour local government are also already more ambitious than the national 2040 target.
As we get closer to our collective goal, at a local level it means we will be able to walk, cycle or bus to work and school breathing more freely, without fear that air pollution is causing us more harm than good; it means that our neighbourhoods won’t become overheated in the summer which is not only uncomfortable, but poses risks to our own health as well as the health of our natural environment; and net zero will mean cheaper energy bills, from secure, clean and locally generated electricity, something which the cost of living crisis has proved we desperately need.
Hackney’s work with the Coop Party, London Councils, the LGA, Community Energy movement and most crucially Ed Miliband and the Shadow Climate Change and Net Zero team, demonstrates how local authorities can act as an incubator and innovator for the development of nationwide ideas to tackle the climate emergency. Labour’s recent announcement demonstrates the leadership’s commitment to supporting and facilitating local authorities to deliver change in their communities. We’ve emphasised the need for stable, long-term investment to unlock real change; Labour’s promise that GB Energy will make available up to £600m in funding for local authorities and up to £400m in low-interest loans each year for communities, directly answers this.
Labour’s Local Power Plan includes Hackney’s key asks and has directly responded to the Co-op Party’s campaign, putting communities and local authorities at the heart of their ambitions for a greener Britain, harnessing the potential that we know our communities are fizzing with. We have already started this journey in Hackney, with the Council's energy services arm, Hackney Light and Power, inspired by London's Labour Mayor Sadiq Khan, is delivering its first round of funding through its £300k community energy fund. This is empowering 14 local landmarks, including a church, gurdwara, wellness charity and seven schools, to develop their own bespoke carbon-saving projects such as solar panels, battery storage, insulation and heating controls. This is only the start for us and we are already committed to funding future rounds, but we could do so much more working with a Labour Government committed to Community Energy.
In the future, we hope to develop this work to put solar panels on roofs of housing estates, as we’re already doing with other council assets. We’re also exploring district heat networks - the Council already operates the Shoreditch Heat Network which serves the Wenlock Barn, Cranston and Fairbank estates, and is investigating the feasibility for two new areas: Woodberry Down and Colville.
As we know, the devil is in the detail and this latest announcement from the national party adds necessary detail to Labour’s mission to make Britain a clean energy superpower. It is brilliant to see that Ed and Keir have taken this opportunity to take another step forward in their devolution agenda and we in Hackney welcome it with open arms. Now we must ensure that regulatory barriers which currently cap progress on community energy, such as those highlighted by Power for People’s Local Electricity Bill as well as the subsidy control rules which are a growing concern in Hackney, are eradicated so we can truly unleash our potential for sustainable and affordable power.
Following this year's Community Energy Fortnight let's celebrate what's been achieved, and the pioneering potential 'energy' (pun intended) unleashed by Labour in this bold green, co-operative community vision for our future for how we deliver low carbon, low cost energy owned and powered by the people.
11 January, 2023
The Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition come to Hackney to 'Take Back Control'
It was wonderful to see, albeit from a far, both the Prime Minister and Sir Keir Starmer choose Hackney to give their new year speeches last week. I don't know whether it was coincidence* they were both drawn to the borough and Here East in Hackney Wick, perhaps it was because it’s home to an incredible cluster of creative businesses and universities. A part of our Olympic legacy and an example of what partnership between national, regional and local government can achieve.
I've written before for Labour List about Keir, the Labour leadership and why we need to build on Labour's record in power in local government and why we must in our next manifesto fully articulate what a new Labour local government settlement would look like.
Since then, neither LGA Labour nor Keir, Angela, Lisa or Rachel have backed away from this debate. It's felt like we were on the verge of something radical and exciting to reset the relationship between Whitehall and town halls across the country. Alongside us, they’ve rightly levelled harsh criticism of Tory failures to deliver, particularly in relation to Levelling Up. The latest strikes and crises in the NHS and wider public sector highlights services under immense pressure, which continue to deliver due to the good will and commitment of staff despite perpetual under-resourcing.
Keir's speech in Hackney gave us a real sense of what the journey to ‘Taking Back Control’ might mean. A clear reset in the Labour’s first King's Speech with a bill to transfer power to citizens, communities and the Councils that represent them. It's a thoughtful and credible solution to the hollowing out of our communities and the powerlessness so many feel.
However, let's not pretend this will be easy. This bold approach will likely face opposition within the party, from Labour MPs and potential ministers, who've now spent years out of power and who as they enter Whitehall departments for the first time in a generation, will now be tasked with shrinking their departments and devolving their new found power to communities. It will also face entrenched civil service resistance not just from departments, but most crucially the Treasury who must be forced to let go of so many of their levers of power and control.
Although not yet confirmed, there are significant signs pointing towards (greater devolution): Ed Miliband’s Conference announcements on Climate Change, Rachel Reeves’s Green Prosperity Plan and being the first 'green chancellor', and Lisa Nandy's book rethinking the state - all the ingredients are now there for a bill with teeth. Demonstrating a Labour Government committed to something much bigger, tangible and impactful, than the wasteful competitive, lumpy, and uneven approach to investment and devolution the Tories have taken.
As we focus rightly on communities left behind, level up & deliver devolution, it can't be a levelling down of London, and the boroughs that surround Here East may well be closer to Whitehall than Carlisle, Plymouth or Newcastle, but they are still as remote from the powers they need to create truly fairer and greener local economies.Why does London and the UK’s cities still only have access to two regressive tax revenues - council tax and business rates.
So my shopping list for this bill is picking the big areas where Labour in power over the past decade of austerity has proved itself better in local government and Wales, than Westminster in delivering.
We need to harness local government’s record on skills, training and jobs, by finally breaking up DWP and DfE and giving the powers and funding associated with Job Centre Plus to councils, with more local investment in Further Education and a reset of apprenticeships funding. With this we could do so much more with the residents and businesses who we know, who trust us to deliver.
On schools, scrap the undemocratic structures of forced academisation and regional schools commissioners and reset the roles between schools, community and councils. Hackney already has some of the best schools, outcomes and high performing school improvement; don't break what is working and intervene only in education systems that really need central support.
On housing, communities shouldn't have to beg a distant secretary of state to licence landlords, ban Section 21 evictions, introduce rent control or even pause or reshape the right to buy. These decisions and powers can and should sit locally. On development, give councils access to right to buy receipts from day one, deliver proper local funding for social and council housing and let us get on with building the homes our communities so desperately need.
On climate, let's take the bold energy and ideas from Miliband and Reeves and use GB Energy to unlock community and municipal energy. Putting assists in the hands of the people, not private companies or a new wave of nationalised businesses, would create the buy-in for a just transition. Giving communities control and a stake in assists to shape their own energy future and create jobs and resilience across coastal, rural and urban areas.
From village halls, to seaside towns and urban estates solar, wind and energy networks could be built, maintained and owned by the people. Already there are tangible examples out there from coops to Stokey Energy, Hackney Community Energy Fund and Hackney Light and Power, with the Energy Bill in Parliament we can put some of the ideas forward now as well with cross party support deliver the sort of localism found in the Local Electricity Bill.
We should also push for devolution on taxation and including new powers to level a hotel or overnight tax. The latter is common across America and Europe, where Governments trust communities to make these decisions, and could create additional revenue common across the world to fund culture and local economic innovation. If this was in turn supported by a new business rates system grounded in the reality of local economies - councils would have a real toolkit to partner with business.
I could go on, but I'm not writing the bill and Labour aren't yet in government nor finalising the manifesto quite yet, but let's be clear and bold in every area of policy what permanently handing back control could really mean. For those worried about the risks and costs, let me reassure you it will be cheaper and more efficient, because while Whitehall has grown and become more remote, local councils have had to do more with less for every year since 2010. What we have never had though is control, with it we can deliver even more.
So let's build something as bold as the vision set out last week, something hopeful in contrast to the already stuttering relaunch of Sunak's already failing premiership. A bold new settlement that seeks to heal the wounds of Brexit, rejects utterly the lack of compassion and dog whistle culture wars at the soul of the postmodern Tory party and starts to really rebuild this country from the bottom up.
A real Labour reform of our broken political system which will make the decisions and debates in our communities count. A new constitutional settlement to unite not only the country, but all parts of the Labour Party and our movement - making us the natural party of government in every village hall, town hall, city hall, shire hall, assembly, and nation in the UK.
*I can also make Valentine’s Day Hackney restaurant recommendations if they are still making plans.
I've written before for Labour List about Keir, the Labour leadership and why we need to build on Labour's record in power in local government and why we must in our next manifesto fully articulate what a new Labour local government settlement would look like.
Since then, neither LGA Labour nor Keir, Angela, Lisa or Rachel have backed away from this debate. It's felt like we were on the verge of something radical and exciting to reset the relationship between Whitehall and town halls across the country. Alongside us, they’ve rightly levelled harsh criticism of Tory failures to deliver, particularly in relation to Levelling Up. The latest strikes and crises in the NHS and wider public sector highlights services under immense pressure, which continue to deliver due to the good will and commitment of staff despite perpetual under-resourcing.
Keir's speech in Hackney gave us a real sense of what the journey to ‘Taking Back Control’ might mean. A clear reset in the Labour’s first King's Speech with a bill to transfer power to citizens, communities and the Councils that represent them. It's a thoughtful and credible solution to the hollowing out of our communities and the powerlessness so many feel.
However, let's not pretend this will be easy. This bold approach will likely face opposition within the party, from Labour MPs and potential ministers, who've now spent years out of power and who as they enter Whitehall departments for the first time in a generation, will now be tasked with shrinking their departments and devolving their new found power to communities. It will also face entrenched civil service resistance not just from departments, but most crucially the Treasury who must be forced to let go of so many of their levers of power and control.
Although not yet confirmed, there are significant signs pointing towards (greater devolution): Ed Miliband’s Conference announcements on Climate Change, Rachel Reeves’s Green Prosperity Plan and being the first 'green chancellor', and Lisa Nandy's book rethinking the state - all the ingredients are now there for a bill with teeth. Demonstrating a Labour Government committed to something much bigger, tangible and impactful, than the wasteful competitive, lumpy, and uneven approach to investment and devolution the Tories have taken.
As we focus rightly on communities left behind, level up & deliver devolution, it can't be a levelling down of London, and the boroughs that surround Here East may well be closer to Whitehall than Carlisle, Plymouth or Newcastle, but they are still as remote from the powers they need to create truly fairer and greener local economies.Why does London and the UK’s cities still only have access to two regressive tax revenues - council tax and business rates.
So my shopping list for this bill is picking the big areas where Labour in power over the past decade of austerity has proved itself better in local government and Wales, than Westminster in delivering.
We need to harness local government’s record on skills, training and jobs, by finally breaking up DWP and DfE and giving the powers and funding associated with Job Centre Plus to councils, with more local investment in Further Education and a reset of apprenticeships funding. With this we could do so much more with the residents and businesses who we know, who trust us to deliver.
On schools, scrap the undemocratic structures of forced academisation and regional schools commissioners and reset the roles between schools, community and councils. Hackney already has some of the best schools, outcomes and high performing school improvement; don't break what is working and intervene only in education systems that really need central support.
On housing, communities shouldn't have to beg a distant secretary of state to licence landlords, ban Section 21 evictions, introduce rent control or even pause or reshape the right to buy. These decisions and powers can and should sit locally. On development, give councils access to right to buy receipts from day one, deliver proper local funding for social and council housing and let us get on with building the homes our communities so desperately need.
On climate, let's take the bold energy and ideas from Miliband and Reeves and use GB Energy to unlock community and municipal energy. Putting assists in the hands of the people, not private companies or a new wave of nationalised businesses, would create the buy-in for a just transition. Giving communities control and a stake in assists to shape their own energy future and create jobs and resilience across coastal, rural and urban areas.
From village halls, to seaside towns and urban estates solar, wind and energy networks could be built, maintained and owned by the people. Already there are tangible examples out there from coops to Stokey Energy, Hackney Community Energy Fund and Hackney Light and Power, with the Energy Bill in Parliament we can put some of the ideas forward now as well with cross party support deliver the sort of localism found in the Local Electricity Bill.
We should also push for devolution on taxation and including new powers to level a hotel or overnight tax. The latter is common across America and Europe, where Governments trust communities to make these decisions, and could create additional revenue common across the world to fund culture and local economic innovation. If this was in turn supported by a new business rates system grounded in the reality of local economies - councils would have a real toolkit to partner with business.
I could go on, but I'm not writing the bill and Labour aren't yet in government nor finalising the manifesto quite yet, but let's be clear and bold in every area of policy what permanently handing back control could really mean. For those worried about the risks and costs, let me reassure you it will be cheaper and more efficient, because while Whitehall has grown and become more remote, local councils have had to do more with less for every year since 2010. What we have never had though is control, with it we can deliver even more.
So let's build something as bold as the vision set out last week, something hopeful in contrast to the already stuttering relaunch of Sunak's already failing premiership. A bold new settlement that seeks to heal the wounds of Brexit, rejects utterly the lack of compassion and dog whistle culture wars at the soul of the postmodern Tory party and starts to really rebuild this country from the bottom up.
A real Labour reform of our broken political system which will make the decisions and debates in our communities count. A new constitutional settlement to unite not only the country, but all parts of the Labour Party and our movement - making us the natural party of government in every village hall, town hall, city hall, shire hall, assembly, and nation in the UK.
*I can also make Valentine’s Day Hackney restaurant recommendations if they are still making plans.
06 February, 2021
One year on, how is Keir supporting Labour to win in local government? (first appeared on Labour List)
It’s difficult to believe that it has only been one year since the last Labour local government conference and LabourList takeover.
One year ago, I wrote for LabourList on the four Labour leadership candidates as they set out their visions for localism and their relationship with us in local government. Many of us would have argued back then that local government was already the ‘fourth emergency service’, but little did we know just how important local public services would become to saving lives, not just improving them.
Councils throughout this year have stepped up to support their communities during this pandemic like never before. They have set up food delivery services, coordinated personal protective equipment for council and local care staff, helped improve coronavirus tracing efforts and housed thousands of rough sleepers off the streets and into safe accommodation.
So far, Keir has put words into action. He and his team have shown new leadership through an impressive level of engagement with local leaders and by backing us on the big issues of the pandemic. One of his first events was a call with local leaders from across the country, which was a refreshing direct engagement that we had not seen in recent years.
At the same time, in between set-piece events, the shadow cabinet has continued to engage and learn from us. Whether on schools, food, private sector contracts or test and trace, the issues and solutions of this pandemic have all involved or been led by local councils, and the shadow cabinet has listened at every step of the way, taking local evidence and insight directly into parliament.
Local councils pointed out the flaws in the tracing programme and pushed for local involvement. In Hackney, we ran a tracing pilot and pushed successful tracing rates from 70% to the SAGE-recommended over 80%. Councils across the country have helped improve successful tracing rates in their areas. And against the backdrop of dodgy government private sector contracts with Tory donors, shadow cabinet member Rachel Reeves has rightly been leading a campaign against more outsourcing, citing Labour councils as an example of transparency and best practice.
Councils have continued to resource efforts to keep their communities safe, including working with the NHS to support vaccination efforts in their areas. Shadow Community and Local Government Secretary Steve Reed and Keir have made council cuts and council tax rises a vital part of their campaign to see more support for families, which has rightly highlighted that there will be no end to austerity or tax rises without financial support for councils.
Where the Tories left a vacuum of leadership on education and schools, local councils have acted. It was local councils that raised the issue of school safety and opening during the second wave, and the shadow education team stood by us. And it was also Keir who advocated on behalf of councils’ radical solutions to increase sustainable and active travel like low-traffic neighbourhoods, when even Labour MPs often failed to lead.
Last year, Keir pledged to support more devolution to “set local government free” and we saw him deliver a major speech on devolution. But, like I said in my previous article for LabourList, Westminster and Whitehall can feel as remote to the needs of London’s boroughs as they can in Carlisle or Plymouth. Devolution is not just about geography or a useful narrative to stave off the SNP. Devolution is about power: it must be seen as a vital tool in empowering communities to rebuild a better country and rebalance our economy.
The structural and cultural change in the party that Keir has talked about is still needed. Councillors contribute over £2m to the party every year as well as a vital activist base, yet local government is only represented by two seats on the party’s national executive committee. The lack of a national conference has understandably halted any much-needed internal reforms. A lot has changed culturally with the Association of Labour Councillors (ALC) and Local Government Association (LGA) Labour group now much more front and centre, but as soon as conference is back on the timetable, reform must be back on Keir’s agenda.
Finally, we are in a critical election year. London mayoral and assembly, Senedd and Scottish parliament, county, district and police and crime commissioner elections will all take place this year. Commentators will talk about these elections as Keir’s first ‘test’ – as if local elections are purely a polling opportunity for the national party.
But Labour’s success in 2021 will not just come from Westminster. It will come from Labour cities and town halls across the country, on the ground and in our communities. Keir needs to pivot party resources to those efforts, and then listen to what works. Because making Britain the best place to grow up and the best place to grow old will only happen if Keir and our leadership keep engaging with the Labour councils that are leading the way.
After these elections, we must move swiftly to harness the innovation happening at a local level. We must see Keir, with his shadow team, using all our energy and experience to develop fresh national policies that we can take into government, rebuilding the social and economic damage of the coronavirus pandemic.
One year ago, I wrote for LabourList on the four Labour leadership candidates as they set out their visions for localism and their relationship with us in local government. Many of us would have argued back then that local government was already the ‘fourth emergency service’, but little did we know just how important local public services would become to saving lives, not just improving them.
Councils throughout this year have stepped up to support their communities during this pandemic like never before. They have set up food delivery services, coordinated personal protective equipment for council and local care staff, helped improve coronavirus tracing efforts and housed thousands of rough sleepers off the streets and into safe accommodation.
After a tumultuous year, which has tested both the new Labour leader and Labour local government, how has Keir lived up to his pledge to put us at Labour’s heart?
So far, Keir has put words into action. He and his team have shown new leadership through an impressive level of engagement with local leaders and by backing us on the big issues of the pandemic. One of his first events was a call with local leaders from across the country, which was a refreshing direct engagement that we had not seen in recent years.
At the same time, in between set-piece events, the shadow cabinet has continued to engage and learn from us. Whether on schools, food, private sector contracts or test and trace, the issues and solutions of this pandemic have all involved or been led by local councils, and the shadow cabinet has listened at every step of the way, taking local evidence and insight directly into parliament.
Local councils pointed out the flaws in the tracing programme and pushed for local involvement. In Hackney, we ran a tracing pilot and pushed successful tracing rates from 70% to the SAGE-recommended over 80%. Councils across the country have helped improve successful tracing rates in their areas. And against the backdrop of dodgy government private sector contracts with Tory donors, shadow cabinet member Rachel Reeves has rightly been leading a campaign against more outsourcing, citing Labour councils as an example of transparency and best practice.
Councils have continued to resource efforts to keep their communities safe, including working with the NHS to support vaccination efforts in their areas. Shadow Community and Local Government Secretary Steve Reed and Keir have made council cuts and council tax rises a vital part of their campaign to see more support for families, which has rightly highlighted that there will be no end to austerity or tax rises without financial support for councils.
Where the Tories left a vacuum of leadership on education and schools, local councils have acted. It was local councils that raised the issue of school safety and opening during the second wave, and the shadow education team stood by us. And it was also Keir who advocated on behalf of councils’ radical solutions to increase sustainable and active travel like low-traffic neighbourhoods, when even Labour MPs often failed to lead.
Last year, Keir pledged to support more devolution to “set local government free” and we saw him deliver a major speech on devolution. But, like I said in my previous article for LabourList, Westminster and Whitehall can feel as remote to the needs of London’s boroughs as they can in Carlisle or Plymouth. Devolution is not just about geography or a useful narrative to stave off the SNP. Devolution is about power: it must be seen as a vital tool in empowering communities to rebuild a better country and rebalance our economy.
The structural and cultural change in the party that Keir has talked about is still needed. Councillors contribute over £2m to the party every year as well as a vital activist base, yet local government is only represented by two seats on the party’s national executive committee. The lack of a national conference has understandably halted any much-needed internal reforms. A lot has changed culturally with the Association of Labour Councillors (ALC) and Local Government Association (LGA) Labour group now much more front and centre, but as soon as conference is back on the timetable, reform must be back on Keir’s agenda.
Finally, we are in a critical election year. London mayoral and assembly, Senedd and Scottish parliament, county, district and police and crime commissioner elections will all take place this year. Commentators will talk about these elections as Keir’s first ‘test’ – as if local elections are purely a polling opportunity for the national party.
But Labour’s success in 2021 will not just come from Westminster. It will come from Labour cities and town halls across the country, on the ground and in our communities. Keir needs to pivot party resources to those efforts, and then listen to what works. Because making Britain the best place to grow up and the best place to grow old will only happen if Keir and our leadership keep engaging with the Labour councils that are leading the way.
After these elections, we must move swiftly to harness the innovation happening at a local level. We must see Keir, with his shadow team, using all our energy and experience to develop fresh national policies that we can take into government, rebuilding the social and economic damage of the coronavirus pandemic.
(This article first appeared on Labour List and can still be found there: https://labourlist.org/2021/02/one-year-on-how-is-keir-supporting-labour-to-win-in-local-government/)
08 February, 2020
Our leadership candidates must set out a localist vision for Labour (first appeared on Labour List)
The Labour Local Government conference taking place in Nottingham today will hear from all four of the party leadership candidates at another hustings event. But this is a hustings with a difference. An audience of councillors and mayors from across the country is an audience with the party’s real campaigners-in-chief – if I do say so myself – with direct experience of the difficult doorstep conversations that were had last December. And even more crucially, a meeting with those representing Labour in power.
Many of us here have direct experience of delivering for our communities – in the Welsh government, regional authorities, and in local councils. We are implementing Labour’s values in our local areas, being collectively trusted with billions of pounds of public spending every year, and acting as the real ‘red wall’ between our communities and this Tory government.
In the build-up to the hustings this week, we have heard from all four candidates who have written in more detail about their approaches to working with local government colleagues. As a leader in local government who is undecided, I have been asked to share my thoughts and what I am hoping to hear this weekend.
When it comes to discussing the power of local government and devolution the candidates have, so far, been largely singing from the same hymn sheet. All candidates attribute Brexit to a feeling of lost power and place, and see devolution and more democracy as one of the answers.
We have heard from Keir Starmer this week who has called for a constitutional convention, devolving power from Westminster with an aim to “set local government free”. ‘Power away from Westminster’ is a well-worn metaphor but as others have said, Westminster and Whitehall can feel as remote to the needs of London’s boroughs as they can in Carlisle or Plymouth – so it isn’t just about geography, but also who has power.
Rebecca Long-Bailey puts this front and centre in her pitch this week, labelling the “over-centralised governance system” as a contributor to the “feeling of powerlessness and falling behind of local communities that the Brexit vote exposed”. Importantly, both her and Emily Thornberry make the link between community campaigning and local councillors as one of the solutions.
This valuable community role in the party, with councillors dedicating hours each week to casework and campaigning for our communities, is hardly recognised by current party structures. Labour councillors are the second largest contributor to the national party, raising £2m every year through the councillor levy. Yet central resources rarely trickle down to the frontlines of local government campaigning, nor is there meaningful involvement for us in forming national campaign strategies in local elections.
To repair this bridge between local groups and the national party, one point of Thornberry’s three-point plan includes a full time organiser for every Labour group in the country. This would make sure we get the share of the party resource that we contribute, and send a strong signal internally and externally that the national party is there to support Labour councillors, not to undermine them.
Lisa Nandy points out in her article the link between local and national results, highlighting the loss of Darlington Council last May followed by the loss of the parliamentary constituency six months later. Building on this, she calls for local government to be “empowered with a greater influence at every level of the party”.
Nandy specifically references the national executive committee (NEC) but stops short of making a specific suggestion to alter the party’s ruling body. Starmer makes more than just signals, specifically stating he would increase councillor representation on the NEC and deepen the relationship with shadow ministers. Nandy has gone further and offered a place in the shadow cabinet, a role in future leadership nominations and dismantling of local quangos.
But there have also been too many missed opportunities by all of the candidates so far to reference the radical policies that Labour are implementing in their local areas. Hustings have discussed nationalising industries, social care, social security, and the climate emergency without mentioning local authorities’ role in all of those issues.
The green industrial revolution was a highlight of the 2019 manifesto, so this week it was good to see Long-Bailey and Nandy highlight our role in tackling the climate emergency. The Local Government Association (LGA) has already done extensive work to show that the ambitions of Labour councils are being met with real action on the ground. But we need the Labour frontbench to shout about our work ─ from investing in renewable infrastructure to setting up publicly-owned, municipal energy companies.
Nandy highlighted an important point about the nationalisation debate that many of us in local government have been saying for years: why stop at nationalisation? Why create public structures that can be so easily torn-down by new Tory governments? Listen to the good work of Preston Council, highlighted by Starmer, who are disrupting private markets and building community wealth in their areas through co-operatives, social enterprise and council-owned public services and from him the cherished hope of greater fiscal independence.
What do we need more of today? A good start would be a clear recognition of a need for cultural shift in our party, so that we can bring about radical change to the country; clear promises to give more power to local government; and clearly pledging to endorse LGA Labour’s 10 pledges.
Once the wooing is over and the selection won, we must ensure that unlike so many past Labour leaders they don’t turn their back on Hackney, Halifax and Hartlepool, stop listening, infantilise local government in the party and develop only Whitehall-based solutions. I for one am looking forward to uniting behind a new localist vision of Labour.
(This article first appeared on Labour List and can still be found there: https://labourlist.org/2020/02/our-leadership-candidates-must-set-out-a-localist-vision-for-labour/)
Many of us here have direct experience of delivering for our communities – in the Welsh government, regional authorities, and in local councils. We are implementing Labour’s values in our local areas, being collectively trusted with billions of pounds of public spending every year, and acting as the real ‘red wall’ between our communities and this Tory government.
In the build-up to the hustings this week, we have heard from all four candidates who have written in more detail about their approaches to working with local government colleagues. As a leader in local government who is undecided, I have been asked to share my thoughts and what I am hoping to hear this weekend.
When it comes to discussing the power of local government and devolution the candidates have, so far, been largely singing from the same hymn sheet. All candidates attribute Brexit to a feeling of lost power and place, and see devolution and more democracy as one of the answers.
We have heard from Keir Starmer this week who has called for a constitutional convention, devolving power from Westminster with an aim to “set local government free”. ‘Power away from Westminster’ is a well-worn metaphor but as others have said, Westminster and Whitehall can feel as remote to the needs of London’s boroughs as they can in Carlisle or Plymouth – so it isn’t just about geography, but also who has power.
Rebecca Long-Bailey puts this front and centre in her pitch this week, labelling the “over-centralised governance system” as a contributor to the “feeling of powerlessness and falling behind of local communities that the Brexit vote exposed”. Importantly, both her and Emily Thornberry make the link between community campaigning and local councillors as one of the solutions.
This valuable community role in the party, with councillors dedicating hours each week to casework and campaigning for our communities, is hardly recognised by current party structures. Labour councillors are the second largest contributor to the national party, raising £2m every year through the councillor levy. Yet central resources rarely trickle down to the frontlines of local government campaigning, nor is there meaningful involvement for us in forming national campaign strategies in local elections.
To repair this bridge between local groups and the national party, one point of Thornberry’s three-point plan includes a full time organiser for every Labour group in the country. This would make sure we get the share of the party resource that we contribute, and send a strong signal internally and externally that the national party is there to support Labour councillors, not to undermine them.
Lisa Nandy points out in her article the link between local and national results, highlighting the loss of Darlington Council last May followed by the loss of the parliamentary constituency six months later. Building on this, she calls for local government to be “empowered with a greater influence at every level of the party”.
Nandy specifically references the national executive committee (NEC) but stops short of making a specific suggestion to alter the party’s ruling body. Starmer makes more than just signals, specifically stating he would increase councillor representation on the NEC and deepen the relationship with shadow ministers. Nandy has gone further and offered a place in the shadow cabinet, a role in future leadership nominations and dismantling of local quangos.
But there have also been too many missed opportunities by all of the candidates so far to reference the radical policies that Labour are implementing in their local areas. Hustings have discussed nationalising industries, social care, social security, and the climate emergency without mentioning local authorities’ role in all of those issues.
The green industrial revolution was a highlight of the 2019 manifesto, so this week it was good to see Long-Bailey and Nandy highlight our role in tackling the climate emergency. The Local Government Association (LGA) has already done extensive work to show that the ambitions of Labour councils are being met with real action on the ground. But we need the Labour frontbench to shout about our work ─ from investing in renewable infrastructure to setting up publicly-owned, municipal energy companies.
Nandy highlighted an important point about the nationalisation debate that many of us in local government have been saying for years: why stop at nationalisation? Why create public structures that can be so easily torn-down by new Tory governments? Listen to the good work of Preston Council, highlighted by Starmer, who are disrupting private markets and building community wealth in their areas through co-operatives, social enterprise and council-owned public services and from him the cherished hope of greater fiscal independence.
What do we need more of today? A good start would be a clear recognition of a need for cultural shift in our party, so that we can bring about radical change to the country; clear promises to give more power to local government; and clearly pledging to endorse LGA Labour’s 10 pledges.
Once the wooing is over and the selection won, we must ensure that unlike so many past Labour leaders they don’t turn their back on Hackney, Halifax and Hartlepool, stop listening, infantilise local government in the party and develop only Whitehall-based solutions. I for one am looking forward to uniting behind a new localist vision of Labour.
(This article first appeared on Labour List and can still be found there: https://labourlist.org/2020/02/our-leadership-candidates-must-set-out-a-localist-vision-for-labour/)
06 September, 2019
Sajid Javid’s spending round was too little, too late for local councils (first appeared on Labour List)
For Labour in local government, on the frontlines of fighting austerity and protecting our most vulnerable residents from the worst of Tory cuts, we know that even the pre-election splash of the cash in Sajid Javid’s spending round this week does not reverse the damaging cuts over the last nine years. It is simply too little, too late.
Local government has faced a cut of 60p for every £1 the last Labour government was spending on local government. My own borough of Hackney has faced a £140m cut to our central government grant, working out at £529 per resident, and before these announcements we were predicting that we would still have a further £30m of savings to find over the next two years.
This, alongside the cuts to other public services, has increased demand on local authorities services as people are impacted by pressures on the NHS, police services and damaging welfare reforms. But the overall £3.5bn increase for local government announced this week isn’t all new money – it assumes council tax and business rate rises and represents in many areas just a continuation of existing temporary grants.
The Chancellor was keen to announce a short-term £1.5bn funding boost for social care to cover this government’s failings to publish a social care green paper, plan for a sustainable future for social care funding and help people in desperate need of good quality care, which we know would relieve pressure on the NHS. But in reality, a third of the one-off spending would be funded by a 2% council tax increase, and it does not cover the overall £2.5bn gap in social care funding.
The extra money for schools is welcome and has only been won because of the hard work of campaigners, the unions and the Labour Party in highlighting the growing crisis in our schools. But it should not take the funding situation to get so bad – with teachers having to ask parents to help pay for school supplies, and some funding it out of their own pay packets – for the Tories to act. Even now some estimates still show real terms cuts to Hackney’s schools, and it comes after a pay offer that has not been fully funded and other pressures such as business rate increases that have already stretched so many school budgets especially in high need areas. On SEND, further one-off funding of £800m – half the amount councils need.
There were also considerable gaps in the Tories’ spin, which did not address the real crisis situation that some of our most vulnerable residents are in. They could have returned some decency to the welfare system by lifting the punitive housing benefit caps, or used the 100th anniversary of the first Housing Act to announce grant funding for councils to build the desperately needed social homes for the country’s nearly 300,000 homeless families. Instead, they announced £54m for homelessness for the whole country. Hackney alone is spending that amount to support homeless families in our borough.
They could have recognised the need for a meaningful commitment to a new green economy, with many Labour councils declaring a climate emergency this year and resourcing plans to reach net-carbon-neutral public services. Instead of listening while the world’s lungs burn, they announced a pitiful £30m to the Department for the Environment and Rural Affairs, nowhere near enough to meet their own net-carbon-neutral target by 2050.
But they chose to do none of these things, because austerity has always been a choice to keep tax for the few as low as possible and damaging services for the many in the process. Rather than a “new chapter for our public services”, austerity continues as councils like Hackney still face a budget challenge as need rises, and the situation is much worse across the country. We also need to be clear that we wouldn’t have even got this extra funding if it hadn’t been for the hard work of Labour at the LGA working with our front bench teams.
Finally, it is important to remember that school funding is the only announcement detailing new money for three years or more, with every other announcement being repackaged spending lasting for only one year. The Tories are preparing for a general election, and this is part of their strategy as they realise voters are tired of austerity. In reality, we know that only a Labour government will rebuild Britain, not just offer one off crumbs from the Treasury this side of the election and further cuts if the Tories get back into power.
It seems even these budget sweeteners are not sweet enough to keep Boris Johnson’s own brother on board, let alone the public. Christmas at the Johnsons’ should be fun.
Local government has faced a cut of 60p for every £1 the last Labour government was spending on local government. My own borough of Hackney has faced a £140m cut to our central government grant, working out at £529 per resident, and before these announcements we were predicting that we would still have a further £30m of savings to find over the next two years.
This, alongside the cuts to other public services, has increased demand on local authorities services as people are impacted by pressures on the NHS, police services and damaging welfare reforms. But the overall £3.5bn increase for local government announced this week isn’t all new money – it assumes council tax and business rate rises and represents in many areas just a continuation of existing temporary grants.
The Chancellor was keen to announce a short-term £1.5bn funding boost for social care to cover this government’s failings to publish a social care green paper, plan for a sustainable future for social care funding and help people in desperate need of good quality care, which we know would relieve pressure on the NHS. But in reality, a third of the one-off spending would be funded by a 2% council tax increase, and it does not cover the overall £2.5bn gap in social care funding.
The extra money for schools is welcome and has only been won because of the hard work of campaigners, the unions and the Labour Party in highlighting the growing crisis in our schools. But it should not take the funding situation to get so bad – with teachers having to ask parents to help pay for school supplies, and some funding it out of their own pay packets – for the Tories to act. Even now some estimates still show real terms cuts to Hackney’s schools, and it comes after a pay offer that has not been fully funded and other pressures such as business rate increases that have already stretched so many school budgets especially in high need areas. On SEND, further one-off funding of £800m – half the amount councils need.
There were also considerable gaps in the Tories’ spin, which did not address the real crisis situation that some of our most vulnerable residents are in. They could have returned some decency to the welfare system by lifting the punitive housing benefit caps, or used the 100th anniversary of the first Housing Act to announce grant funding for councils to build the desperately needed social homes for the country’s nearly 300,000 homeless families. Instead, they announced £54m for homelessness for the whole country. Hackney alone is spending that amount to support homeless families in our borough.
They could have recognised the need for a meaningful commitment to a new green economy, with many Labour councils declaring a climate emergency this year and resourcing plans to reach net-carbon-neutral public services. Instead of listening while the world’s lungs burn, they announced a pitiful £30m to the Department for the Environment and Rural Affairs, nowhere near enough to meet their own net-carbon-neutral target by 2050.
But they chose to do none of these things, because austerity has always been a choice to keep tax for the few as low as possible and damaging services for the many in the process. Rather than a “new chapter for our public services”, austerity continues as councils like Hackney still face a budget challenge as need rises, and the situation is much worse across the country. We also need to be clear that we wouldn’t have even got this extra funding if it hadn’t been for the hard work of Labour at the LGA working with our front bench teams.
Finally, it is important to remember that school funding is the only announcement detailing new money for three years or more, with every other announcement being repackaged spending lasting for only one year. The Tories are preparing for a general election, and this is part of their strategy as they realise voters are tired of austerity. In reality, we know that only a Labour government will rebuild Britain, not just offer one off crumbs from the Treasury this side of the election and further cuts if the Tories get back into power.
It seems even these budget sweeteners are not sweet enough to keep Boris Johnson’s own brother on board, let alone the public. Christmas at the Johnsons’ should be fun.
(This article first appeared on Labour List and can still be found there: https://labourlist.org/2019/09/sajid-javids-spending-round-was-too-little-too-late-for-local-councils/)
26 April, 2019
Large-scale house building doesn’t have to mean sacrificing quality (first appeared on Labour List)
This year, Hackney is marking two anniversaries in the history of social housing. The first is the 100 year anniversary of the Housing and Planning Act 1919, popularly known as the Addison Act after the Shoreditch Liberal (and then Labour) MP and Minister Christopher Addison. This act ushered in ‘Homes fit for Heroes’ and the first era of council house building in Hackney, many of which are still standing today. It set out a clear sense of national mission that only returned under the 1945 Labour government and, despite all the Macmillan rhetoric, our weakened Tory architects of the current housing crisis have singularly failed to match.
A more contemporary anniversary is also being marked. It is ten years since, under Labour, Hackney returned to this legacy and started to directly build council housing again. This was only possible given the financial and policy freedoms of the last Labour government, led by John Healey, then Housing Minister (now our excellent Shadow Secretary), who started the Local Authority New Build Programme.
We have learnt a lot in the past ten years, from how to give residents a meaningful voice in the building and design of their new homes to continuing to fly the, dare I say it, ‘red flag’ of council housing when many on the left and in the sector abandoned real council housing under Tory and Lib Dem attacks.
Social house-building has never been more important. That is why, despite little support from central government, Labour in Hackney is building thousands of council homes. Our in-house direct delivery programme, which focuses on us building council homes on council land, is delivering – to date we have built 912 homes across the borough. 62% of these hundreds of new council homes delivered between 2010 and 2018 are genuinely affordable – either for social rent or shared ownership. All were directly built and funded by the council, and will continue to be managed by it on council-owned land.
We are creating modern, high-quality, well-designed and spacious council housing that is built to last. Crucially, these homes are in mixed communities with the same high-quality lobbies and entrances for all residents, no segregation of public space or facilities, retaining ownership and management whether you are a private buyer or new council tenant.
We also continue to innovate developing an in-house non-profit estate agent Hackney Sales, which ensures our shared ownership homes or private sales homes (that we still need to sell to invest in council housing) are marketed and sold to local people first. At King’s Crescent, working with our construction partner, we ensured that none of the private sale homes were sold to foreign investor buyers and 97% went to owner-occupiers. We’ve made good on the idea of ‘first dibs’ for Londoners, and attracted international attention in the New York Times.
Frankly, compared to much of the social housing that was built in the past two decades, we are firmly saying that social tenants deserve the very best good quality homes. They deserve homes that would be the envy of any luxury developer brochure, but at true council rents and tenancies. Learning some of the clear lessons from our own past that we cannot afford to sacrifice quality for volume is something that a future Labour government committed to volume public housing delivery will need to learn from pioneering Labour councils like Hackney.
That doesn’t mean we aren’t acutely aware that Hackney residents are at the forefront of the capital’s housing crisis. In Hackney alone, it is a sad reality that there are currently more than 13,000 families waiting for a council home. More than 3,000 of these are living in temporary accommodation.
Following the support that the mayor of London has provided through the ‘Building Council Homes for Londoners’ fund, this month we will set out where we’ll be delivering over 100 more council homes for social rent than we could have without this desperately needed funding – homes that would otherwise have been for shared ownership or outright sale. That means 100 more families living in new, modern, high-quality council homes.
I am proud that as mayor, Hackney’s Labour council will more than triple its record of housebuilding over the previous two terms ─ under our 2018 manifesto we will directly deliver nearly 2,000 new homes, three schools and a new leisure centre. Over half of the new housing will be genuinely affordable – for social rent and shared ownership – and, just as importantly, these homes will be high quality and built to last. These homes are for local people and are designed in partnership with them, following the principles in the mayor of London’s Estate Regeneration Good Practice Guide, which Hackney’s approach helped to shape.
Our approach is focused on placebuilding ─ on building good quality homes that stand the test of time and that all our residents can be proud of. Alongside high quality architecture, we prioritise the highest environmental standards including plans to integrate new localised energy generation into a council-owned company. We also ensure that the London Living Wage is paid in the supply chain, create new apprenticeships and embed local recruitment through Hackney Works.
This month, we are also laying out how we will invest in new affordable work space, held by the council in perpetuity. We’ll make sure that the new developments we create address not just housing inequality, but economic inequality too ─ helping to bridge the gap and build a more inclusive local economy.
Rather than just talking about building homes, we are doing it. We as Labour must be proud of the ambitions of the past, channeling them into a new era of Labour-led public housing delivery, while avoiding some of the pitfalls by putting people and quality at the heart of everything we do. What better way of marking 100 years of local council housing than by uniting to win the local elections in May and making certain that mayor Khan is re-elected next year in London. We are clearly showing the difference that Labour in power can make and laying the building blocks for a radical Labour government that will truly invest in council housing – so that boroughs like Hackney are able to do even more.
This piece was commissioned by Tom Copley, who is guest editing LabourList today.
A more contemporary anniversary is also being marked. It is ten years since, under Labour, Hackney returned to this legacy and started to directly build council housing again. This was only possible given the financial and policy freedoms of the last Labour government, led by John Healey, then Housing Minister (now our excellent Shadow Secretary), who started the Local Authority New Build Programme.
We have learnt a lot in the past ten years, from how to give residents a meaningful voice in the building and design of their new homes to continuing to fly the, dare I say it, ‘red flag’ of council housing when many on the left and in the sector abandoned real council housing under Tory and Lib Dem attacks.
Social house-building has never been more important. That is why, despite little support from central government, Labour in Hackney is building thousands of council homes. Our in-house direct delivery programme, which focuses on us building council homes on council land, is delivering – to date we have built 912 homes across the borough. 62% of these hundreds of new council homes delivered between 2010 and 2018 are genuinely affordable – either for social rent or shared ownership. All were directly built and funded by the council, and will continue to be managed by it on council-owned land.
We are creating modern, high-quality, well-designed and spacious council housing that is built to last. Crucially, these homes are in mixed communities with the same high-quality lobbies and entrances for all residents, no segregation of public space or facilities, retaining ownership and management whether you are a private buyer or new council tenant.
We also continue to innovate developing an in-house non-profit estate agent Hackney Sales, which ensures our shared ownership homes or private sales homes (that we still need to sell to invest in council housing) are marketed and sold to local people first. At King’s Crescent, working with our construction partner, we ensured that none of the private sale homes were sold to foreign investor buyers and 97% went to owner-occupiers. We’ve made good on the idea of ‘first dibs’ for Londoners, and attracted international attention in the New York Times.
Frankly, compared to much of the social housing that was built in the past two decades, we are firmly saying that social tenants deserve the very best good quality homes. They deserve homes that would be the envy of any luxury developer brochure, but at true council rents and tenancies. Learning some of the clear lessons from our own past that we cannot afford to sacrifice quality for volume is something that a future Labour government committed to volume public housing delivery will need to learn from pioneering Labour councils like Hackney.
That doesn’t mean we aren’t acutely aware that Hackney residents are at the forefront of the capital’s housing crisis. In Hackney alone, it is a sad reality that there are currently more than 13,000 families waiting for a council home. More than 3,000 of these are living in temporary accommodation.
Following the support that the mayor of London has provided through the ‘Building Council Homes for Londoners’ fund, this month we will set out where we’ll be delivering over 100 more council homes for social rent than we could have without this desperately needed funding – homes that would otherwise have been for shared ownership or outright sale. That means 100 more families living in new, modern, high-quality council homes.
I am proud that as mayor, Hackney’s Labour council will more than triple its record of housebuilding over the previous two terms ─ under our 2018 manifesto we will directly deliver nearly 2,000 new homes, three schools and a new leisure centre. Over half of the new housing will be genuinely affordable – for social rent and shared ownership – and, just as importantly, these homes will be high quality and built to last. These homes are for local people and are designed in partnership with them, following the principles in the mayor of London’s Estate Regeneration Good Practice Guide, which Hackney’s approach helped to shape.
Our approach is focused on placebuilding ─ on building good quality homes that stand the test of time and that all our residents can be proud of. Alongside high quality architecture, we prioritise the highest environmental standards including plans to integrate new localised energy generation into a council-owned company. We also ensure that the London Living Wage is paid in the supply chain, create new apprenticeships and embed local recruitment through Hackney Works.
This month, we are also laying out how we will invest in new affordable work space, held by the council in perpetuity. We’ll make sure that the new developments we create address not just housing inequality, but economic inequality too ─ helping to bridge the gap and build a more inclusive local economy.
Rather than just talking about building homes, we are doing it. We as Labour must be proud of the ambitions of the past, channeling them into a new era of Labour-led public housing delivery, while avoiding some of the pitfalls by putting people and quality at the heart of everything we do. What better way of marking 100 years of local council housing than by uniting to win the local elections in May and making certain that mayor Khan is re-elected next year in London. We are clearly showing the difference that Labour in power can make and laying the building blocks for a radical Labour government that will truly invest in council housing – so that boroughs like Hackney are able to do even more.
This piece was commissioned by Tom Copley, who is guest editing LabourList today.
(This article first appeared on Labour List and can be still be found there: https://labourlist.org/2019/04/large-scale-house-building-doesnt-have-to-mean-sacrificing-quality/)
20 November, 2018
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 democracyhttps://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/newe.12110
06 October, 2018
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/)
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/)
27 July, 2018
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)
06 December, 2016
The Mossbourne model (first published by Progress during their campaign against the expansion of grammer schools in 2016)
It is the top 20 per cent of kids that make Hackney’s schools truly comprehensive – and successful
Over the summer, Hackney Labour party started our own campaign against grammar schools and other Tory attacks on schools, which we continued into the ‘Education, Not Segregation’ campaign. The response from local parents, unions and residents could not have been clearer: the Tory plans were deeply unwelcome and that we should fight any attempt to impose them on Hackney.
This unity of purpose around defending our successes would not have been credible or possible only a generation ago when Hackney’s schools were among the worst in the country. Hackney’s record of improvement is Labour’s record of improvement, and we should be unapologetically proud of what we achieved between 1997 and 2010 at Westminster, and between 2001 and now in the London borough of Hackney.
In the late nineties, only nine per cent of children in Hackney schools were getting five good GCSEs. Now we are well above the national average, with some schools achieving as much as 90 per cent. Was that journey simple? No. There were debates to be had about local influence, the role and shape of academies and the setting up of an independent not for profit company – the Learning Trust – to run our schools along the way. However, the council, led by my predecessor Jules Pipe, ensured local political leadership remained at the heart of education in Hackney.
This led to record investment, with all secondary schools rebuilt, real investment in teaching and a relentless focus on standards and outcomes, as well as the council building 19 brand new children centres and five new youth centres.
When challenging the Tories on education, Labour must ground our campaigning in what works – looking to and championing our experience in local and national government to take them on, not only with our values, but also our record. As Michael Wilshaw, chief inspector of Ofsted and a former headteacher of Mossbourne Academy in Hackney, has said, reintroducing selection at 11 years old would be a ‘profoundly retrograde step’. Wilshaw has made it clear that he could never have achieved what he did at Mossbourne without, as he puts it, that top 20 per cent, who instead of being creamed off into grammar schools, inspire and lift the rest of the school, in a comprehensive setting.
I am proud of what has been achieved over the past 15 years, with Hackney’s schools changing beyond recognition, transforming the opportunities and life chances for children in the borough. Recent results at GCSE and Key Stage One are now amongst the best in the country, and importantly that success extends to our children in care, our special educational needs cohort, and those on free school meals.
However, rather than taking the lessons and experience of Hackney and exporting it to parts of the country that need support to improve, the Tories are set on turning the clock back. At a time when there are chronic skills gaps in the British economy and we need to invest more in skills, both vocational and technical, the reintroduction of grammar schools will do nothing to close those gaps and, if anything, will only widen them.
Instead of meeting these challenges they launch an attack on inclusive schools and continue to cut funding to early years and further education; while in the autumn statement finding £50m for new grammar schools. We face possible changes to the schools funding formula that could see London schools lose up to £1,000 per pupil. Which is why I, with other leaders, have written to the chancellor warning about the impacts of such a cut.
Locally, we know there is still more to do. We need to reduce exclusions, ensure apprenticeships are equally valued, improve careers advice and build more school places. We have the ambition to do all this, but it will all be put at risk if the Tories continue their attack on our schools.
As 2016 draws to a close, we have launched our own conversation with residents about the future of our education. It will ask them what type of schools they want to see, whether they support selection and what role they think the council should have in education.
The council carried out a similar consultation in 2003, and residents responded that they wanted non-selective, non-denominational, mixed-sex comprehensives. This feedback helped to shape the sort of the schools we opened. We think that it is only right that given the challenges we face we have that conversation again.
Labour must have a clear vision that seeks to raise standards for all, not just for the few, opposing the Tories and a policy which will undermine years of hard work by our councils and schools, and let down a generation of children.
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Philip Glanville is mayor of Hackney. He tweets at @PhilipGlanville
Join the Progress rally against grammar schools. 7-8.30pm, 12 December 2016, Committee room 15, House of Commons, SW1A 0AA. Speakers include: Angela Rayner MP, Lucy Powell MP, Peter Kyle MP, Wes Streeting MP, Catherine McKinnell MP, Estelle Morris, Richard Angell, Philip Glanville, Robbie Young, Liz Rees, Rory Palmer, Mark Rusling
05 October, 2015
This right-to-buy deal will wreck our plans for truly affordable homes
At Hackney council, we want housing associations to guarantee homes lost under right to buy will be replaced at social rent
This blog post first appeared in the Guardian Housing Network on 5th October 2015.
The past week has seen some of the most significant arguments in years about the future of social housing.
It started when the National Housing Federation and housing minister Greg Clark announced the proposal of a voluntary deal on extending right to buy to housing association properties. It continued through the Labour party conference where myself, many other Labour housing leads, London assembly member Tom Copley and shadow housing minister John Healey challenged housing associations to reject the deal. But following the vote on Friday 2 October, the vast majority of housing associations have signed up.
Last Tuesday, I wrote to housing association boards because, like many others including Red Kite, I believed a week was too short a time to scrutinise a deal that will bypass parliament and alter the supply of social housing.
The NHF says it does not endorse the forced sale of council homes to pay for it, but given there’s no sign that the government has any funding solution this is what it will do – undermine provision of social housing and do little to ensure future supply, whatever lip service is paid to the idea of one-for-one replacement.
The counter-argument is that it safeguards social housing held in trust, preserves the independence of housing associations and will allow them to continue delivering new homes. London housing associations have promised, according to Inside Housing, to build 93,000 new homes – but how many will directly replace what we have lost?
The key question I put to the government, the mayor of London and housing associations is where and when this new housing will be built, and under what tenure? I ask not just because I’m a Labour councillor who passionately believes in social housing, but also on behalf of the 2,100 families in Hackney in temporary accommodation.
Those families’ lives are on hold as they wait for a stable home in accommodation provided at a high cost to local and national taxpayers, as well as themselves. Our duty and commitment to those families has not changed, but decisions made in boardrooms and Whitehall have undermined their chances of living in a truly affordable home. While hoping I’m wrong, I fear they will not end up in one of these promised 93,000 homes.
If things proceed, council homes will be sold, right to buy (and, by association, buy to let) will expand and nowhere is there a guarantee that homes lost at social rent will be replaced at social rent.
I support the aspiration of home ownership, but not at the expense of the poorest and most vulnerable. Hackney is building nearly 900 new council homes for social renting, 500 homes for shared ownership and 1,200 for private sale. Long ago we resolved to stop being dependent on grants and instead self-finance. But just as we start to deliver, the rules are being changed, with the 1% rent cut to social housing and the move to force councils to sell off properties to fund the expansion of right to buy.
Even if this deal is agreed, I hope housing associations will oppose the housing bill and forced sales. I hope they continue to have a social purpose and help us replace all the social homes lost with new homes at social rent.
I support social housing because it is the only hope we have of stopping the hollowing out of communities. It’s why I am supporting the Our Homes, Our London campaign and why I am working with colleagues to oppose this bill.
Council and social housing is not dead. Before May we had started to see a renaissance of ambition and delivery across London. The days and months ahead will determine whether this continues.
This blog post first appeared in the Guardian Housing Network on 5th October 2015.
The past week has seen some of the most significant arguments in years about the future of social housing.
It started when the National Housing Federation and housing minister Greg Clark announced the proposal of a voluntary deal on extending right to buy to housing association properties. It continued through the Labour party conference where myself, many other Labour housing leads, London assembly member Tom Copley and shadow housing minister John Healey challenged housing associations to reject the deal. But following the vote on Friday 2 October, the vast majority of housing associations have signed up.
Last Tuesday, I wrote to housing association boards because, like many others including Red Kite, I believed a week was too short a time to scrutinise a deal that will bypass parliament and alter the supply of social housing.
The NHF says it does not endorse the forced sale of council homes to pay for it, but given there’s no sign that the government has any funding solution this is what it will do – undermine provision of social housing and do little to ensure future supply, whatever lip service is paid to the idea of one-for-one replacement.
The counter-argument is that it safeguards social housing held in trust, preserves the independence of housing associations and will allow them to continue delivering new homes. London housing associations have promised, according to Inside Housing, to build 93,000 new homes – but how many will directly replace what we have lost?
The key question I put to the government, the mayor of London and housing associations is where and when this new housing will be built, and under what tenure? I ask not just because I’m a Labour councillor who passionately believes in social housing, but also on behalf of the 2,100 families in Hackney in temporary accommodation.
Those families’ lives are on hold as they wait for a stable home in accommodation provided at a high cost to local and national taxpayers, as well as themselves. Our duty and commitment to those families has not changed, but decisions made in boardrooms and Whitehall have undermined their chances of living in a truly affordable home. While hoping I’m wrong, I fear they will not end up in one of these promised 93,000 homes.
If things proceed, council homes will be sold, right to buy (and, by association, buy to let) will expand and nowhere is there a guarantee that homes lost at social rent will be replaced at social rent.
I support the aspiration of home ownership, but not at the expense of the poorest and most vulnerable. Hackney is building nearly 900 new council homes for social renting, 500 homes for shared ownership and 1,200 for private sale. Long ago we resolved to stop being dependent on grants and instead self-finance. But just as we start to deliver, the rules are being changed, with the 1% rent cut to social housing and the move to force councils to sell off properties to fund the expansion of right to buy.
Even if this deal is agreed, I hope housing associations will oppose the housing bill and forced sales. I hope they continue to have a social purpose and help us replace all the social homes lost with new homes at social rent.
I support social housing because it is the only hope we have of stopping the hollowing out of communities. It’s why I am supporting the Our Homes, Our London campaign and why I am working with colleagues to oppose this bill.
Council and social housing is not dead. Before May we had started to see a renaissance of ambition and delivery across London. The days and months ahead will determine whether this continues.
27 March, 2015
Providing support to Building Lives apprentices
In this blog, first published on the Hackney Council website on 27th March 2015, I give my thoughts on the measures that Hackney Council is taking to support the borough’s apprentices who have been affected by the recent withdrawal of funding from the Building Lives programme.
Cllr Philip Glanville, Cabinet Member for Housing, said: Both living and working in Hackney I notice one recurring theme: Construction. We are a growing borough, with development changing Hackney’s landscape to meet the demand for new homes, commercial space and the growing popularity of the borough’s leisure and hospitality economy.
Construction means opportunities, from on-site training for those wishing to build construction careers, to full or part-time employment for skilled tradespeople. Helping to provide people in Hackney with access to skills and training to take advantage of present and future opportunities is hugely important. Which is why I was shocked to hear that funding for the borough’s Building Lives programme had been cancelled.
Building Lives provides a range of construction-related training for apprentices in Hackney to build skills and experience across trade disciplines to support future construction careers, or to expand on existing skills to move into other areas of the industry. With the sudden loss of funding, the careers of the apprentices that use this important training service are being put at risk. We, as a Council, will try and mitigate this impact using as many avenues as we can.
I have worked with colleagues from across the Council and Hackney Homes who, alongside staff from Building Lives, are exploring ways of supporting apprentices by finding alternative placements and additional training.
Cllr Philip Glanville, Cabinet Member for Housing, said: Both living and working in Hackney I notice one recurring theme: Construction. We are a growing borough, with development changing Hackney’s landscape to meet the demand for new homes, commercial space and the growing popularity of the borough’s leisure and hospitality economy.
Construction means opportunities, from on-site training for those wishing to build construction careers, to full or part-time employment for skilled tradespeople. Helping to provide people in Hackney with access to skills and training to take advantage of present and future opportunities is hugely important. Which is why I was shocked to hear that funding for the borough’s Building Lives programme had been cancelled.
Building Lives provides a range of construction-related training for apprentices in Hackney to build skills and experience across trade disciplines to support future construction careers, or to expand on existing skills to move into other areas of the industry. With the sudden loss of funding, the careers of the apprentices that use this important training service are being put at risk. We, as a Council, will try and mitigate this impact using as many avenues as we can.
I have worked with colleagues from across the Council and Hackney Homes who, alongside staff from Building Lives, are exploring ways of supporting apprentices by finding alternative placements and additional training.
We have already taken a number of steps to support those affected:
- We are looking to identify and secure painting and decorating work in partnership with local developers and contractors in addition to Here East for further training opportunities
- Our regeneration team has been working closely with Building Lives to secure apprenticeship placement at a number of development sites, this work will continue
- Since 2014, Hackney has introduced Building Lives to a number of our Council-led housing regeneration developments to secure apprenticeship placements. We will continue to look at opportunities across these sites
- As a Council, we have contacted two apprenticeship training agencies to explore the possibility of transferring Building Lives apprenticeships over to them to ensure that their formal apprenticeship programme can be completed and qualifications can be gained. One of the agencies has welcomed this idea and is willing to work with the Council to look at this further.
- Above are a few options that we are continuing to look at closely. The Council will, in partnership with Hackney Homes, Building Lives, developers and other training agencies, continue to explore as many options available to us to ensure that the scheme completes its course and apprentices are supported.
26 March, 2015
Hackney City Villages
This chapter (4.1) first appeared in the IPPR report: 'City villages: More homes, better communities' edited by Andrew Adonis and Bill Davies which was published on 24 March 2015.
It was co-authored by Jules Pipe, Mayor of HackneyLocal authorities are going to be essential to bringing forward the city village model. As often both the largest landholders and landlords in the capital's boroughs, their role is pivotal in ensuring that developments are socially and economically viable.
The current climate for urban regeneration is challenging. While house prices in London have recovered since the crash in credit markets and risen substantially beyond pre-crisis peaks (GLA 2014), significant reductions in capital budgets, coupled with a stronger emphasis on using rents to finance development, has meant that local authorities have had to think more creatively about getting estate redevelopment off the ground.
The council as developer
In Hackney, the council is a major landowner and is regenerating 87 hectares of housing estates and brownfield sites across the borough, equivalent to more than half the size of Hyde Park in central London.
Housing quality and space are acute challenges to tackle locally. In particular, there is a high number of bedsit properties, which are increasingly inappropriate for the profile of tenant who needs social homes. Social housing in future developments will inevitably have to be different – more spacious and of better quality, and to be a part of a mixed blend of housing options rather than the socially segregated and crumbling mono-tenure estates.
Across the borough, Hackney is regenerating sites with new social renting, shared ownership and private sale homes, built to spacious, modern, lifetime standards and, in most cases, offering private outside space to existing tenants for the first time. Many blocks are simply too expensive to maintain and to refurbish, and so regeneration is the only way to ensure residents can live in homes that meet the Decent Homes standard, and with improved public realm and community facilities. These mixed tenures are not only needed to rebuild estates that are inclusive of families across the income and demographic spectrum, but are essential to finance the much-needed redevelopment. Given the squeeze on capital budgets, local authorities in London cannot build homes for social renting without cross-subsidising them by also building private sale properties. In Hackney, delivering shared ownership pays for itself, but to finance a social rent home demands the construction and sale of one and a half private homes.
Together with its partners, the borough has delivered 1,125 new homes since 2011: 622 for social rent, 155 for shared ownership/equity, and 348 for private sale. But this is not sufficient to meet the borough’s rapidly increasing population, projected to rise by 10 per cent, or an additional 25,000 households, in the coming years – in an area already struggling to meet housing demand (ONS 2014) let alone secure housing that is affordable for its resident population. Major redevelopments will play a central role in delivery supply, not least in the redeveloped estates of Woodberry Down and Colville.
Woodberry Down
When the London County Council began building Woodberry Down after the second world war, it was rightly regarded as a fine example of municipal housing and an estate of the future. It was also home to one of the country’s first comprehensive schools and the first purpose-built NHS health centre in London. The decades went by, but underinvestment by national and local government led to a situation where residents were living in homes that weren’t fit for purpose. Crucially, a structural assessment in 2002 identified that repair would be economically challenging – the homes on the site have simply become more expensive to maintain and bring up to a modern standard than to redevelop.
The first priority for Woodberry Down is to deliver modern, high-quality homes for existing residents. The second priority is to provide new community facilities including three new public parks, employment opportunities, a new children’s centre, a new academy school, an expanded primary school, as well as new shops. At Woodberry Down and on other regeneration estates we’re not only rebuilding higher-quality homes for social renting but also providing shared ownership and private sale properties, which in turn help pay for the redevelopment and meet wider housing demand.
Woodberry Down is a large-scale housing estate regeneration project, with a 20-year-plus delivery schedule worth more than £1 billion of investment. It involves demolishing 1,981 homes on the original site – now deteriorating properties – and replacing them with more than 5,550 new ones. Four out of 10 of these new homes will be for social renting and shared ownership.
Since construction began in 2009, financed in partnership with the Homes and Communities Agency and latterly the Greater London Authority (GLA), Woodberry Down has seen 441 properties demolished and 862 new homes completed, made up of 421 social rented, 135 shared ownership and 306 homes for sale. Indeed, partnership has been essential to seeing the project into its delivery stage. This includes working closely with developers, but also retaining the support of the current residents – represented by the Woodberry Down Community Organisation (WDCO).
WDCO has worked closely with the council as a critical friend, broadly supportive of the regeneration while ensuring the voice and aspirations of the community are heard. The listing of a local primary school and health centre, coupled with changing economic circumstances, necessitated a rephasing of the programme. As a result, the estate’s 2007/08 masterplan was recently updated in consultation with residents during an 18-month period, including commitments to increase the amount of public space by almost a third and to deliver 17 per cent more homes.
Regenerating the Colville estate
The Colville estate is another example of a major, local authority-led development scheme, a proposal which will double the density of existing homes on the site. The masterplan for the estate will see the replacement of 432 residential properties, 337 of which are council social rent, and 95 of which are leaseholder-owned. The proposed redevelopment will provide 925 homes, and this will directly replace the 337 social rented ones, as well as 111 units for additional intermediate housing, including shared equity and shared ownership. The remaining 476 homes on the site will be used as private market housing to cross-subsidise the social homes. Indeed, the entire scheme is largely paid for by two towers of up to 16 and 20 storeys of homes for private sale, overlooking Shoreditch Park.
Critically, the scheme has the support of the current residents: a petition featuring the names of 291 Colville residents in support of the estate’s regeneration masterplan was handed in to the borough’s planning committee, recommending approval (Hackney 2014). Facilities such as a new community centre, a new public square, space for shops and businesses, a new community garden, and the potential for local apprenticeships onsite for young people from the estate are all part of our vision for the regeneration of Colville.
As with all such schemes in Hackney we have a resident steering group, the Colville Estate Tenants and Residents Association. Every element of the 10-year-plus scheme is discussed with the elected representatives of the steering group; while the design of the new homes and the broader project are consulted on with the local community through events, drop-in surgeries and surveys. This process is not always easy, with issues such as the delivery timetable, local lettings, density and viability at the fore, but it is vital if these new city villages are to be successful for existing and new residents.
Fundamental to Hackney’s approach, as recommended by the London Assembly review of estate regeneration (London Assembly 2015) is that tenants have the ‘right to return’, with leaseholders offered a package of shared equity, rent free and shared ownership options to help them stay on their estate.
The council pays market rates for leaseholders’ properties, as assessed by an accredited surveyor and based on similar sales in the area. We also offer an equity swap for a newly built home for those that live on the estate and want to remain in the local area.
As residents are gradually decanted or temporarily moved out of the development, those vacant flats that are of sufficient quality are now being used to support local authority temporary accommodation for homeless households, until the demolition work begins.
The future for city villages
Both the Woodberry Down and Colville estates are examples of a local authority leading on estate regeneration and, in the latter case, delivering and funding estate regeneration through its own resources. Hackney now has a five-year record of development, investing in a strong in-house team, which for the first time in a generation is directly building new homes. No single model works in every location or local authority. Yet the two examples cited here are both new city villages, with the local authority taking the lead on delivering new homes, maintaining and renewing affordable and social housing in the heart of Hackney, and improving facilities for communities, now and into the future. If we as a country are to fully respond to the housing crisis in London and beyond, local authorities, like Hackney, will need to have the freedom to innovate and directly deliver these homes.
References
- Greater London Authority [GLA] (2014) ‘Housing Market Report’. http://data.london.gov.uk/housingmarket/
- Hackney (2014) ‘Planning Sub-committee: Colville Estate’. http://mginternet.hackney.gov.uk/documents/s38136/Report.pdfHackney
- London Assembly (2015) Knock it down or do it up? The Challenge of Estate Regeneration, Greater London Authority. https://www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/KnockItDownOrDoItUp_0.pdf
- Office for National Statistics [ONS] (2014) ‘Subnational population projections: 2012-based projections’. http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/publications/re-reference-tables.html?edition=tcm%3A77-335242
16 March, 2015
A new home for everyone on the estate: Woodberry Down and Hackney regeneration
This blog post first appeared on the Hackney Council blog on 13th March 2015.
For the past three years the Council has been discussing with tenants, leaseholders and freeholders in the second phase of Woodberry Down’s regeneration that they will need to move as part of the regeneration process.
For the past 14 months, residents have known that they must move out of their homes by the end of March.
Stories that have appeared in the Hackney Gazette and other newspapers in recent years about estate regeneration often lack the space to include the detailed background and processes involved.
Some estates are simply uneconomical to refurbish and maintain in the long term, so the only way councils can fully carry out Decent Homes commitments for residents is through demolition and rebuilding.
This is the case at Woodberry Down and other estates in Hackney, aging and inadequately-maintained during years of political and financial crisis in the Council that came to head in the late 1990s. Something had to be done to improve living conditions at Woodberry Down, and at the time the only way to do this was through partnership with a developer and a housing association.
There is no longer any government funding to build new homes for social renting, so the only way to pay for this is by building properties for private sale on the estate. They may seem expensively priced, but money from those sales is helping build new homes for social renting, new shops and creating jobs, and paying for local apprenticeships.
To make way for the new homes to be built, tenants are rehoused on the estate in new homes or, if they prefer, somewhere else. The homes owned by leaseholders, about a third of which live elsewhere and rent out their property to tenants, are bought back by the Council.
We offer leaseholders a brand new home on their estate, which is obviously going to be worth more than their old property, but they can simply transfer what they own of their existing home into the new one, and pay no rent on the rest – this is called shared equity. Shared ownership options are also available, depending on individual financial circumstances.
The law requires market value be paid to leaseholders for their properties, based on sales of similar properties in similar condition in the local area, plus up to 10% of the value of the property in compensation, as well as an additional disturbance payment, such as for legal and moving costs.
The law also states that no one should be paid less, or be paid more, than the market value of their property because there happens to be disruptive regeneration going on, or very expensive new flats being sold as part of it.
The Council acts fairly and reasonably, in accordance with the law, to ensure that leaseholders are offered a fair market value for their home. The Council also has a duty to protect the public purse. Compulsory Purchase Orders, such as the one at Woodberry Down, are only confirmed by the Secretary of State and an independent Planning Inspector when both are completely satisfied that the Council has acted reasonably and fairly.
Sales – not website asking prices – of similar properties in similar condition in the local area are what market valuations are based on. Leaseholders and freeholders are encouraged to appoint their own professional surveyor, which the Council will pay for.
On the other hand, some surveyors use properties that are not on an estate, and that are not in similar condition, or the local area, to base their valuations on, falsely raising the expectations of freeholders and leaseholders, perhaps in a bid to get a higher fee for their work.
If no agreement can be reached between the Council’s and the leaseholder’s surveyors, ultimately the judiciary’s Upper Tribunal (Lands Chamber) decides the value, with no further discussion on the matter.
Many people would like to move into a new house with a garden, but it is regrettable, though understandable, that we have only been able to offer leaseholders and freeholders newly-built and existing flats in Hackney, as houses with gardens are by and large extremely difficult to provide while trying to make the best use of available land to build new high quality homes.
So far at Woodberry Down, more than 400 homes for social renting have been built, with tenants moving into another 109 homes in recent weeks, while 206 homes for shared equity/ownership have been built, and hundreds more for sale which pay for the entire programme. At any given time the developer, Berkeley Homes, employs up to 40 local apprentices on site.
You see how lengthy and detailed this process can be; I hope the above clarifies some matters.
09 July, 2014
Hackney Labour - on the side of struggling renters
This article first appeared on the London Labour Party website on 9th July 2014.
The private rental sector in Hackney has been in the news recently, with the Mirror rightly highlighting the damaging impact rent rises are having on private tenants on a Hoxton estate. But these tenants are not alone and without better regulation, Hackney’s and London’s social diversity and economy will be at risk.
Renting privately is something I know well, as for the last 11 years I’ve been in Hackney I’ve lived in rented flats. I’ve paid the endless fees, dealt with sharp letting agents and fought to limit the annual attempts to increase my rent by 10% or more. Now I’ve been lucky, I’ve broadly had good landlords, had the time and skills to argue my corner and not had to fight to get repairs done. But others I know have not been so lucky facing intimidation, high rents, poor quality housing, exploitation and evictions.
In Hackney, private rents last year according to the GLA went up by 10%, with three and four bedroom properties seeing the highest rises of 15% and 17% respectively. This unregulated rise makes more of the borough unaffordable, increases the housing benefit bill and because of Tories’ Orwellian ‘Affordable Rent’ programme now has an impact on rents in some new social housing. As a Labour Party in Hackney, I am proud that we have worked with Digs a Hackney private renters’ campaign group to improve the information we provide on private renting and the service we offer tenants who need to complain about rogue landlords.
We found that housing was the number one issue in the local elections and in our 2014 manifesto we set how we would respond to some of these challenges: by setting up a Council backed social lettings agency; exploring how we can introduce a borough wide landlord licensing scheme; and by doing all we can to drive rogue landlords and letting agents out of the borough. But to really have an impact on high rents, the uncertainty created by short tenancies and end rip-off fees we need to campaign for a Labour Government and a Labour Mayor of London.
Recently Ed Miliband and Emma Reynolds showed that Labour is listening. For the first time, we now have a Leader and Shadow Housing Minister focusing on the problems faced by private tenants. Their promise to introduce longer tenancies, end letting agent rip off fees and stabilise rent rises is something worth fighting for and we need to campaign with Londoners to ensure we win.
We know where the Tories stand and that is with the landlords and speculators, alongside the Lib Dems they have frustrated attempts to regulate the private rental sector. Recently we saw London MPs taking the fight to the Government in Parliament, but as a London Labour Party we need to get out there and speak up for generation rent, a generation that before now has struggled to find a political voice. Labour are the only party offering hope to private tenants when we say we will tackle high rents, high fees, introduce real regulation and increase the supply of all types housing, but we can only clean up this failing market if we fight to win next May.
30 June, 2014
Improving police training and tackling the fear of HIV
This post first appeared on the NAT blog on 6th June 2014
'When asked about the most dangerous aspects of their jobs, neither constable misses a beat. "You can be searching somebody who has HIV/Aids, or hepatitis," says Hawke. "You'll empty a rucksack and it'll be full of uncapped needles. That, for me, is the biggest fear: a fear of infection.”'
Guardian article, 26 March 2013 'The police are constantly under attack from the government'.
Of all the risks the police face in their day-to-day jobs - attacks from armed criminals, stress, injuries from the physical nature of their jobs – all too often HIV transmission is cited in the media.
Why is this when 95% of all HIV transmission is sexual, and the likelihood of getting HIV from an uncapped needle in someone’s bag is so small it’s only theoretically possible?
As well as these fears they hold themselves. NAT heard through our networks people living with HIV have been treated badly by the police, often based on an unfounded view of the risk of HIV transmission.
In June 2012 we investigated this issue and found police training and policies on HIV were often based on outdated, inaccurate and included stigmatising information.
This is a problem for two reasons. First, it often resulted in police undergoing an HIV test when in fact there was no risk – which is not only a waste of time and resources, but it also causes unnecessary alarm and spreads myths about how HIV is passed on. Secondly, this can increase HIV-related stigma as people with HIV may be handled inappropriately in custody due to unfounded fears around the virus being passed on.
We reviewed materials in 15 of the 50 police constabularies in the UK, across a wide geographical area and including those with both high and low HIV prevalence.
Some of the guidance claimed HIV could be transmitted between people who share toothbrushes and razors, that the virus can be present in saliva and urine and could be passed on through kissing, scratching, and the "handling or lifting of persons".
One police force even recommended the use of "spit hoods" to protect officers from people with HIV. Others recommended providing disposable cups and cutlery for people living with HIV, keeping HIV positive detainees separate from others and even conducting interviews through the cell door inspection hatch.
Since we conducted our original research we have been working hard to ensure police forces across the country update their training and guidance. NAT created a resource for police forces to use called: 'HIV: A guide for Police Forces' in 2013. The guidance is endorsed by BHIVA (the British HIV Association) and includes information about how HIV is and isn’t transmitted, what to do if you are exposed to HIV, how to respond to someone with HIV, and information about criminal prosecution for HIV transmission.
We have had a good response to the guidelines so far and we hope we will now to start to see better practice from the Police across the Country.
25 June, 2013
Hurdles to housing – How new social housing and benefit rules may affect people with HIV
This article first appeared in the Spring 2013 issue of NAM's Health Treatment Update.
Having somewhere safe, secure and comfortable to live is something we all want, and is an important part of looking after our physical and emotional health. But for some people with HIV, finding or keeping somewhere suitable to live may be about to get harder. Philip Glanville, policy and parliamentary officer at the National AIDS Trust, looks at the issues.
Housing rarely seems to be out of the news these days, whether it’s fluctuations in the housing market, growing homelessness, changes to the benefits system, exposes on rogue landlords, or rising rents. That housing, as an issue, is changing and rising up the national agenda is unmistakable. However, what has been less clear is the impact that increasing interest in these issues and the changes to the housing and benefits system may have on people living with HIV.
At the National AIDS Trust (NAT), we published a report looking into HIV and housing-related issues in January 2009,(1) and followed it up a year later with a practical guide for housing officers, providing guidance on the impact of HIV on housing need.(2)
We regularly respond to enquiries on housing from individuals with HIV and organisations supporting them. The nature of these queries has been changing, however, and a recent survey of organisations supporting people living with HIV confirms that changes to the welfare system and the growing pressures on the supply of new, affordable housing are combining to have a significant impact on people living with HIV. Eighty-six per cent of organisations responding to a recent NAT(3) survey reported a rise in housing-related cases, highlighting benefits and housing allocations as the key areas of concern.
Over the coming year, and in response to changes in housing policy, NAT is planning to do more targeted work on the impact of these changes. So having this opportunity to outline some of the key issues facing people living with HIV could not have come at a more appropriate time.
It is worth noting that, although the changes to the welfare and benefits system apply across the UK, the housing powers in the Localism Act 2011 discussed below only apply to England.
How these changes interact with welfare reform and what impact they will have on people living with HIV in England is also discussed below.
The Localism Act 2011 and how it might affect you
Depending on where you live, whether you are homeless, claim Housing Benefit or need access to social housing, or are likely to need this support in the future, these changes may have a significant impact on you. The Localism Act 2011 is also going to alter substantially the types of homes on offer to you, and may change whether or not you are able to access social housing at all.
Changes to how social housing will be allocated
Under the Localism Act 2011, local authorities now have greater powers in deciding how to manage their housing waiting lists, who will have access to them, how they will be assessed, who will be prioritised, and – in many cases – what type of housing those on the list will be offered and allocated. Currently, not all local authorities are using these powers, but over the coming months more and more will be making decisions about how they respond to the legislation and its requirements, which powers they will use, and in what way they will choose to use them.
Traditionally, when someone made a ‘homelessness’ application to their local council, their needs were assessed based on whether or not they met the eligibility criteria to be classified as homeless, as well as on other factors including their relationship to the local area, the size of their household, and their medical needs.
Assuming they were deemed to be homeless (according to the legal definition used by councils), they would then be allocated a certain level of priority based on their need. After that, it was a question of waiting for suitable housing. The system was also broadly the same for those wishing to move into, or within, social housing: an assessment would be made, a level of need determined, and then someone would join the housing waiting list.
Often local authorities operated a banding system to determine priority for homeless applicants and/or those in acute need, with factors including domestic violence, disability, families with children, severe overcrowding or health needs taken into account to allocate a higher priority than those deemed to be ‘adequately housed’.
Depending on where people were living at the time of the application, and their assessed housing need, the wait for suitable housing might involve a period in temporary accommodation or, in some more urgent cases, an immediate offer of a suitable property.
More recently, in high-demand areas such as London, local authorities were increasingly encouraging those on the waiting list to consider renting in the private sector, to reduce waiting times and overcrowding. Ways they encouraged people to move into the private rented sector included financial assistance through rent deposit or bond schemes, or cash payments to encourage people to take this option. Nonetheless, for the vast majority of people waiting for housing, the goal would remain a lifetime tenancy in social housing and critically this option, even if it involved a long wait, remained open to them.
While there were often concerns about the assessment process, and many people waited a substantial time for suitable housing, everyone generally understood the system. For people living with HIV, the main issues were poor levels of HIV awareness amongst housing providers and those assessing housing need, the impact of poor quality or unsuitable housing on their health, and, for people going through the immigration process, restricted access to housing.
The new local authority powers
However – critically – this housing will not have to be social housing and doesn't necessarily even have to be in the local area; all it will need to be is ‘suitable’ for a local authority to have discharged its homelessness duty. Moving someone into the private rented sector would discharge this duty – effectively cutting the link between homelessness and access to social housing.
Local authorities will also be able to prioritise access to housing for those in work, training, volunteering or for service in the armed forces.
There is a new power to change the length of time applicants for housing have to live or have a connection with an area before they are eligible to access the local housing list. Currently this period is usually around six to twelve months, but some local authorities are now increasing this to two, three or even five years. This is likely to have a significant impact on how migrants, those leaving prison and others who have been placed in a given area by another local authority can access housing.
NAT fears there is a risk that some people living with HIV and others living with long-term conditions will be sent to the back of the queue unless they are appropriately assessed during this process.
We need to ensure that, when local authorities assess the suitability of a housing offer, especially one in the private rented sector or outside the local area, they take into account all the needs of people living with HIV. This should include considering the impact of poor or unsuitable housing on health and the need for someone to be near their HIV clinic and any support organisations or systems, given how critical this can be to them staying well.
Recently NAT campaigned for, and was successful in ensuring, a change to the UK Border Agency’s policy(4), so it no longer routinely disperses asylum seekers with HIV away from their HIV clinic if suitable accommodation is available.
We believe local authorities should also take such issues into account as they decide how to use their new allocation powers.
Changes to social housing tenure and rent levels
Under the Act, local authorities and registered social landlords (RSLs) will have the power to decide on the length of new social tenancies; rather than being offered a lifetime tenancy, successful applicants may only be offered a five-year tenancy, followed by a tenancy review. The terms of that review, and what might be involved, are unclear and NAT has concerns about the disruption and uncertainty this might cause for people living with HIV.
At the same time, the Government has created a new type of social housing called ‘affordable rent’ (AR), where the rent can be set at up to 80% of local private rents. Currently AR housing is likely to be largely restricted to new-build housing constructed over the coming years, but those local authorities and RSLs building for this new tenure are, as part of the financing of these new homes, allowed to convert a percentage of their existing housing stock from ‘social rent’ to this new higher ‘affordable rent’ level as they become vacant.
AR tenancy properties are, increasingly, going to be the only type of social housing being built. In areas like London where private rents are high, there are questions about how viable and suitable this type of housing will be for people on Housing Benefit or low incomes. The effect is likely to increase the pressure on traditional social housing. In some areas, the knock-on effect might be longer waiting times if people hold out for council housing with lower rents.
Housing allocations are likely to become ever more fragmented, making the system harder to navigate for housing applicants, and more complex for organisations that provide support and advice. People living with HIV will face some of the same issues on rent and tenure as anyone else in the social housing system. In other aspects of the process, such as the changes to assessment and prioritisation, those living with HIV and who have more serious health problems and can’t work could be at a substantial disadvantage.
Changes to Housing Benefit
From 2013, rather than seeing Housing Benefit paid directly to landlords, this payment will now be made monthly directly into individual bank accounts (with some small exceptions). It will bring social tenants into line with tenants in the private sector who already receive the Local Housing Allowance directly, according to the Government it will help people develop budgeting skills. It might also help those on low incomes to open and sustain a wider range of bank accounts.
But the potential downside will be the increased pressure of having to budget, especially for vulnerable people receiving a substantial amount of money directly into their bank accounts at the start of the month. While landlords, advice providers and others are going to do what they can to help people adapt to these changes by making sure people are encouraged to use direct debits to pay their rent, there are understandable fears that, for some people, this may increase rent arrears, put tenancies at risk, and increase the use of ‘payday’ loan companies.
Other recent or prospective changes to Housing Benefit and related benefits may also have implications for people with HIV:
- Since January 2012, those living in the private rented sector, aged under 35, and claiming Housing Benefit, have only been eligible for support at the new Local Housing Allowance (LHA) ‘shared room rate’ (SRR). This only covers the rent equivalent to a bedsit or room in a shared house. Currently, this does not apply to social housing tenants or those in supported accommodation. For people living with HIV this can create issues around confidentiality, stigma and harassment especially if they don’t have somewhere private and secure to store medication.(5)
- In April 2013, the Government introduced changes to Housing Benefit for social housing tenants of working age – the so-called ‘bedroom tax’. It will lead to reductions in Housing Benefit for those deemed to be ‘underoccupying’: by 14% if you have one extra bedroom or 25% if you have two or more.
- In 2013, the Government is planning to introduce Universal Credit. (It will be introduced on a small scale initially, followed by a national launch in October.) This will result in one payment into a bank account, comprising all the benefits someone is eligible to receive. It will include Housing Benefit and be subject to the ‘benefit cap’ of £500 a week for couples (with or without children living with them); £500 a week for single parents whose children live with them; and £350 a week for single adults who don’t have children, or whose children don’t live with them.
- The Universal Credit ‘benefit cap’ will not currently apply to those who qualify for and receive Working Tax Credit, or if they receive any of the following benefits: Disability Living Allowance (for new claimants Personal Independence Payment from April 2013), Attendance Allowance, or Employment and Support Allowance (with the support component).
Changes for existing tenants
There are various changes mooted by the Government to change the rights of existing tenants, but it would require further legislation to implement changes to the length of someone’s tenancy, their rights to succession or the level of rent they pay. As this article goes to press the idea of ‘pay to stay’, where tenants who earn above a certain threshold would be forced to pay a higher rent to stay in social housing has moved a step closer. It was announced by the Chancellor in the Budget in March that it would be introduced, and the household income threshold where it will start will be set at £60,000 a year.(6) Households earning over this amount could end up paying full private market rent and this could have a significant impact in London where the gap between social and private rents is widest.
Conclusions
The changes to Housing Benefit and the Local Housing Allowance will restrict the amount people have to spend on rents, at a time when housing supply is failing and demand continues to rise. The Localism Act 2011 now grants local authorities substantial new powers to making decisions about who can access social housing, the rents they will pay, and for how long they can occupy it.
This is happening at a time when the supply of new homes of all tenures is decreasing (with the supply of new social and affordable housing at an all-time low), it’s more difficult to get a mortgage and private sector rents are rising. For people living with HIV and needing social housing it is going to become increasingly difficult for them to access and afford the stable housing they need.
Organisations such as NAT, and others that support people living with HIV, need to be alert to the impact these changes are going to have, and campaign to ensure that HIV and the impact poor quality and unsuitable housing can have on health is considered properly when a local authority assesses someone’s eligibility and housing needs.
This will mean understanding the positions taken by local authorities in their Tenancy, Homelessness, Allocations and Housing Strategies, and related policy documents. All these policies, if they haven’t already, will be being developed, or revised, in the coming months and there is a role for all of us to make sure the voice of people living with HIV – emphasising the need for good-quality, stable and safe housing to stay well and live independent lives – is heard loud and clear.
Responding to these issues NAT, through our HIV Activists Network, is campaigning on housing and HIV by asking local councils to better support the housing needs of people living with HIV. If you would like to know more, or are interested in taking part, please visit the HIV Activists’ ‘ask’ page: www.lifewithhiv.org.uk/hiv-activists-network-campaigns
Help and advice on housing, benefits and HIV
NAT
- www.nat.org.uk/Information-and-Resources/Housing.aspx
- www.nat.org.uk/media/Files/Policy/2012/June_2012_Benefits_and_Housing_in_the_UK_factsheet.pdf
THT
NAM
Your local HIV support organisation
Stonewall Housing
Shelter
Citizens Advice Bureau (CAB)
UK government
Local councils
- If you are at risk of homelessness or want to make a housing application you need to contact your local council. In some circumstances they may also able to help temporarily if you are seeing a reduction in your Housing Benefit: www.gov.uk/browse/housing/local-councils
Your elected representatives
- If you are having problems with your landlord or in accessing housing you can contact the organisations above for advice, but if you have already made a complaint and were dissatisfied with the response you might want to consider contacting your local councillor or MP.
- You can find your local representatives here: www.writetothem.com
Abbreviation guide
- AR: Affordable Rent – properties let at a new higher rent level which can be up to 80% of the local private rents. Existing social and council rent levels tend to be 40 to 50% of the local private rents
- HB: Housing Benefit
- LHA: Local Housing Allowance (Housing Benefit for those living in the private rented sector)
- PRS: private rented sector
- RSL/RPs: Registered Social Landlord (increasingly called Registered Providers)
- Social housing: Housing where your landlord is a council, arms-length management organisation (ALMO) or RSL/RP
- SRR: Shared Room Rate (colloquially known as the 'bedroom tax' or 'spare room subsidy')
References
- NAT & Shelter, Housing and HIV, National AIDS Trust, 2009.
- NAT & Shelter, HIV and Housing: A practical guide for housing officers on HIV and its impact on housing needs, National AIDS Trust, 2010.
- NAT, Housing and HIV: A survey into the housing advice and support needs of people living with HIV, National AIDS Trust, April 2013.
- UK Border Agency and Home Office, Healthcare Needs and Pregnancy Dispersal Guidance. p33, August 2012.
- NAT & Shelter, HIV and Housing: A practical guide for housing officers on HIV and its impact on housing needs. National AIDS Trust, 2010.
- Lloyd T, Pay to stay threshold to be set at £60,000, Inside Housing, 20 March 2013.
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