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/)
08 February, 2020
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
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