Siân Berry: 'It's not OK to tell council tenants to move out of London'

“The biggest problem is affordability – the majority of the population don’t really see any security in the future, whether that’s security in their rented tenure or security as to whether you can buy a place – or what are you going to do when you have children.”

As a London mayoral election candidate, Siân Berry already knows the ropes: the 41-year-old Green Party member stood in the 2008 election, coming fourth and beating the British National Party by 7,500 votes. Now a councillor in Camden, she talks a lot about local solutions to the housing crisis, and out-of-control overcrowding in social housing.

This overcrowding has forced changes to local policy, which in turn affects others in need. Berry says: “Camden has just changed its allocations policy: it’s trying to favour people with children under five. Because we have a lot of families with small children who are still in a studio flat, seriously overcrowded, and the points system meant they had no chance to move.

“There’s not really any extra housing, so what that means is that people with older children are suffering instead. They’ve changed the emphasis. So you have ridiculous overcrowding, where the parents sleep in the living room and three children share a bedroom. When you’re 16 years old and trying to do your A-levels, that affects your opportunities.”

A big part of the current government’s housing policy has focused on starter homes, but Berry doesn’t think these are the answer for families in Camden. The borough already has a lot of one-bed homes and needs more family homes. “No one’s fiddling about trying to make starter family homes because you can’t make a three-bed house that comes in anywhere financially within that limit,” she says. “I think it’s prejudice in favour of the model the housebuilders want. They’d like to build glorified student flats: the one thing we’ve seen a lot of being built in Camden.”

Rather than just talk about building, Berry is keen to look at the way in which housing has become a commodity rather than a basic need. She wrote to George Osborne in the summer, and asked him to abolish mortgage interest tax relief and devolve the levy to local authorities, which could use it to fund housebuilding.

Berry accepts London needs many more homes and the money to build them, and has a creative solution. She would replace the council tax precept for the Olympics, due to run out in 2017, with a people’s housing precept from 2018 – this would fund 20,000 new homes without any hike in council tax.

“We wouldn’t put it all into big grants for housing associations because we want to try out different ideas: we want to be a pioneer for a new model of thinking,” she explains. “So we’d have different levels of grant for self-build and co-housing, because we do a lot of community land trust work [in Camden]. So some of it would go on that. But at least 20,000 social homes can come from that.”

Berry also wants to take a hard look at private renting, and believes collective organising is the answer to problems in the sector. As mayor, she would launch a tenants’ union, of which all tenants would automatically be a member. She’d start it up with some funding, then make it self-financing, with the interest on the deposit holdings paying for tenants’ membership. It would be a place for advice and a hub for people to go to when they have problems or don’t know their rights.

Of the four main candidates, Berry is the only one renting a home. “I’ve been a private tenant in London for 18 years now, moved six times and each time the terms and conditions get worse. The last time I moved, we had to put down eight weeks of rent and hundreds of pounds in various fees. It just gets worse and worse. Some, but not all, of these problems could be solved with a tenants’ union.”

Rather than focusing on homes to rent or buy outright, the Greens want to bolster alternative housing provisions in the capital. “Community land trusts can play a huge role in helping combat the housing crisis: I think they’re the way forward,” she says. “It’s about security – people want to be able to buy somewhere they can live for their whole lives, rather than building up an asset and passing on privilege to the next generation. That’s actually not important to a lot of people. And it’s certainly not important from a social, political, planning point of view.”

Under the community land trust model, residents eventually give their house back to the trust – quite different to the usual practice of flogging off public land for a one-off sum. This, Berry says, ensures affordability will always take priority.

Like the other mayoral candidates, Berry is keen Transport for London (TfL) land should be used for housing – but she wants to see that land used creatively. She would encourage more community self-builds on smaller sites, as well as cooperatives and co-housing projects.

Unlike rival candidate Goldsmith, Berry is sceptical of the Conservative plan to regenerate sink estates, seeing it as code for social cleansing. “We have to protect the estates we’ve got – responding to Cameron’s ‘we’ll redo the estates, a lot of them need to come down’ comments: it’s such ignorance. He doesn’t know any council estates.

“I went round the Central Hill estate in Lambeth, and people really, really like it. It’s well designed and ‘designing out crime’ applies to a really small number of places and can be dealt with by refurbishment. People think it’s OK to tell council tenants to move out of London and it categorically isn’t. As a councillor I go to the council and try to fight for individuals on the waiting list, to get them over the hump, and the first option is usually outside of London.”

So why aren’t councils building more, given the crisis? “Councils can’t borrow: that’s the main reason. We’ve got a programme in Camden where we’re developing some estates and that’s because we look at the business case. We look at the bottom of the spreadsheet where there’s a little bit that warns the risk of the borrowing cap, and remember we’ve got the rents – people don’t keep in mind that council tenants can pay rent for 60 years.”

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