There is only one way more affordable homes will get built in this country and that is if local authorities like my own borough are given the resources to build them.
As we move into the Brexit era, Britain must be far more visionary and build homes that become national assets. Private developers build the bare minimum of affordable homes; their real focus is on profits from luxury developments. Only when public institutions take the lead in housing models will we see the kind of homes being built that begin to address our housing crisis.
In my local area, even within the existing restrictive system, we have demonstrated that it is possible to build affordable homes, particularly on disused railway land. in 2012, I negotiated the development of land owned by Network Rail at Royal Mint Street. There are significant pockets of disused railway land across the whole of London and I can see the potential for other railway villages.
But councils can’t tackle this crisis alone. I would like to see a national railway land housing corporation to build council homes, develop homes through community land trusts, build more private rented sector dwellings and more homes for sale, following our success with railway lands in the East End of London.
Last month, a report from the Greater London Authority showed that Tower Hamlets topped the league for affordable housebuilding, with Greenwich in second place.
My borough gained 1,830 affordable homes between 2013 and 2016, including deductions for any affordable housing lost. I led on the housing portfolio in Tower Hamlets when these homes were commissioned. For us, it’s all about involving the local community and thinking in new ways.
As well as building on old railway land, we also established an infill scheme to identify existing estates with room for additional blocks. In my former role I kickstarted Tower Hamlets council homes programme through The Estates Capacity Project, which began in March 2012 with the objective of building more new council homes, identifying sites in Bethnal Green, Globe Town and Mile End and which launched the largest regeneration project in London at Blackwall, together with the rebuilding of Stepney’s long-neglected Ocean Estate.
We also commissioned the first new homes in decades to be built directly by the council, rather than housing associations, at the reopened Poplar Baths and the site of a disused council depot at Watts Grove.
We worked in partnership with the GLA to secure an additional £7m for Watts Grove in 2013, which delivered 149 homes and was recently opened in Tower Hamlets by Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London.
However, the challenge was the coalition’s government introduction of the market affordable rent, and the ineffective Labour opposition at the time affected rent levels even though the borough had managed to bring the rent down to a lower level.
It was always my intention to bring rents down further and so in 2014 I worked with Tower Hamlets Citizens UK on a seminar on the Living Rent; the legacy I began has continued to deliver lower rented homes.
Our Whitechapel Vision masterplan capitalises on the new Crossrail hub to bring investment to our town centre while ensuring it does not become commercialised at the expense of local heritage and local people. Significant change is expected in Whitechapel in the next 10-15 years as large developments come forward, delivering up to 3,500 new homes and 5,000 new jobs.
As a country, we need to be far more visionary as we prepare for leaving the EU. In the past, EU institutions and funds, such as the European structural and investment funds and the European Investment Bank, have provided a significant amount of funding for UK infrastructure projects.
The decision to withdraw from the EU has created uncertainty in this area, despite the government’s pledge to provide new opportunities for the private sector to play a role in delivering UK infrastructure projects.
By 2020, local government will have lost 75p out of every £1 of core central funding that it had to spend in 2015. In terms of helping the homeless and providing temporary accommodation, the funding gap by 2019-20 is estimated to be £200m.
At the Conservative party conference, Theresa May pledged an extra £2bn for social housing. This comes on top of the February housing white paper, which promised reforms to boost the housing market and increase the supply of new homes, and the £2.3bn fund launched in July 2017 by the communities secretary, Sajid Javid, through the housing infrastructure fund, with the aim of opening bids for local authorities to come forward with proposals to aid faster building of homes.
But it is still not enough. The Chartered Institute of Housing’s annual review revealed that the government is spending four times less on building affordable homes for those on a low income than it is on subsidising private housing.
Building homes on Network Rail land, supporting urban community land trusts and beginning the foundations for a living rent has taught me that Britain must be far more pioneering. This crisis can only become more difficult to conquer the longer this task is left.
Rabina Khan is a councillor in Tower Hamlets.
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