barnet housing action
MY FIVE MINUTES
Barnet citizens will be astonished to know that their Council takes its democracy very seriously. In 2010-11 it paid its Democratic Service Officer £72,000 a year [although amittedly this was £60,000 less than the official he was answerable to: the Director of Corporate Governance.
The authorities allow citizens five minutes to speak in front of various unhearing committees etc.
This is a record of what I said to a "housing allocation and placement scrutiny committee" meeting a little while ago.
I am a member of the Barnet Alliance for Public Services.
BAPS does not have a stated position on the question of housing allocation and placement.
Our only allegiance is to the community.
As members of our community, we would not wish to be in the position of having to select which ones of us deserve to receive medical assistance or care when we cannot look after ourselves, or education or somewhere to live. These are services the whole community is entitled to and were always intended to be provided for and by the community as a whole.
A housing placement or allocations policy is forced upon councils. It is a way by which people with homes [sometimes very big ones, and several of them] make rules for what to do with people without:
Barnet has been more diligent in this task than most. They reckon they have solved the problem with a stroke of the pen.
They boast [in the growth document, appendix 3]: The council has been proactive in progressing housing policy changes, and has put in place a new housing allocations scheme which targets access to social housing to those in the greatest need. This has reduced the number of households on the housing register and waiting for housing from over 18,000 to 1,430.
This is Barnet-speak for “we've abolished the waiting list”: a bold act that no other council in the country had the sheer nerve to do.
But abolishing the list has not abolished the18,000 households in need of a home.
The report tells us there were some1400 households actually homeless or in temporary accommodation and less than 700 places for them
Meanwhile, the Barnet population is set to rise by over 5% by 2016: more people than Barnet knows what to do with [Social housing tenants, like other people, get older and older, will keep on having babies and are not dying off quickly enough]
And this is going on everywhere. More people and no use for them. No pay, low pay and benefit cuts drive them from central London to Barnet to the great enrichment of West End landlords and developers, and Barnet simply dumps tenants it can't deal with on to someone else.
The council is introducing a series of measures to restrict access to what it does have: it is raising rents, has already agreed to impose council tax on the poorest. Instead of a fairly objective 'points system, it has set up a banding system [top band for ex-army etc.] It is now to take away from tenants any say in deciding what is a 'suitable' home for them. A housing officer will tell them and it will be 'one choice or you're out'.
And in case you're happy with it, they are bringing in fixed term tenancies, so as to be able to eject you or move you on or offload you on to a private landlord. In previous years if you were literally without a home they would place you in temporary accommodation and put you on the waiting list. Now Barnet, like other councils, is simply expelling its homeless and placing them in the hands of unregistered private landlords. These landlords can be people with spare bedrooms, who, instead of a bedroom tax, are offered £1500 [for a single room] and a tenant + rent, or they can be people with surplus capital who have bought up houses as buy-to-let and who will take tenants on benefit on suffrance, or they can be huge corporations like Graingers who manage 40000 properties in the UK and Germany
Barnet Homes are actually taking homes away from 'social housing' and offering tenants £29,000 to
release them on to the market.
But the two centuries' experience has shown us that the market system is not fit to deal with the housing problem. It is just not profitable to build homes for ordinary people. Hence the need for social housing [as opposed to commercial housing].
The problem was well expressed by the late leader, Lynne Hillan who excused the council for not fulfilling even its newly reduced quota of 'affordable' housing in this way:
“...we rely solely on private developers to provide affordable housing and all across the country development plans have come to a full-stop. They can’t borrow money and there is no guarantee they will be able to sell the properties at the end.”
The profit system cannot provide homes for ordinary people.
Now they are beginning to sell houses again. But not for us! House prices are already rising 5 times the rate of wages. The main benefits of the 'recovery' go to speculators [i.e. money changing hands rather than homes provided ]. Barnet has just agreed to let Barrett homes build tower blocks up to 29 storeys high dumped on top of London's major nature reserve. Out of 2000 units only 500 will be 'affordable'. [And 'affordable' in Boris' definition means for those on £74, 000 and above!]. Other new developments mean turfing out squatters from the wreckage of an abandoned football ground, and selling off land which had been designated as for public use.
So long as Barnet refuses to build social homes itself, refuses to take back Barnet Homes and refuses to recruit its own direct labour force it will both continue to lose money to unscrupulous builders and add to the unbearable misery of people in bad private or public housing or squatting in insanitary conditions etc. Social housing was created as a public service for all, like the Health Service. But the developers need the council more than we need them. The council is in a position to negotiate from a position of strength to ensure that developers build social housing and genuinely affordable housing.
This is an emergency. There is an urgent need to make sure that Barnet's many un-occupied and under-occupied homes are made available to those in urgent need. Barnet can call upon the power where there is a "compelling case in the public interest", to bring in compulsory purchase orders.
The same applies to land. There are large expanses of private land, much of it grabbed from common land, which are unused or used by very few people for purposes that do not contribute to the public welfare.
90% of Britain's population take up no more than 6% of the land. Rural land is worth £5k an acre, development land £500,000 - £1 million. This is one of the major causes of the problem. 2/3rds of UK land is in the hands of 0.7% of the population, who pay no council tax and are subsidised up to some £23,000 each, largely to do nothing with it. They own most of London too. The West end belongs to the Royal Family and the Duke of Westminster. Chalk Farm to Eton College and Tufnell Park to St Johns College, Cambridge. Who owns Barnet? Do we even know?
A council which was genuinely concerned would call to be given back the c. £10 million annually which is taken from the Housing Revenue Account to pay interest on housing schemes which finished a generation ago. They would work with others to fund decent and attractive new developments for all who needed them – would recruit an in-house team of experts to advise on cheap and environmentally sustainable building and help develop self-build projects etc.
In housing as in other spheres, if the people who made up the rules were the same people who had to live by them, we could reach rational solutions in everybody's interest.