A one-bedroom former council flat in Kensington and Chelsea is for sale at £355,000. A two-bedroom flat in a Fulham Road council block was bought recently for £1m. Eventually, almost every vacant council dwelling in this borough will have to be sold to pay for the government’s proposed extension of the right to buy to housing association tenants. Shelter estimates that ultimately 97 per cent of the council’s entire stock will be lost under the proposed sell-off thresholds. These are currently set at £340,000 for a one bedroom unit, £400,000 for a two bedroom unit and £490,000 for a three-bedroom unit.
Somewhere in this absurd policy is also a commitment to use the receipts not just to fund the new right to buy but to replace all the units that are sold off on a one-to-one basis. Since this is a logistical and financial impossibility in inner London, the government’s intent is clearly to rid central London of social rented homes. Given that affordable housing is a necessary part of the infrastructure that enables low-paid workers to keep London running, it is hard to understand the rationale for a plan probably determined on the back of an envelope by an adolescent special adviser.
Our Conservative council protests, yet this is not far removed from its own policies. Our planning decisions promote massive mansions that only the super-rich can buy. And property speculators’ plea of the need for ‘viability’ (ie profits) permits them to build huge blocks of buy to leave units with no affordable housing – not even through a ‘poor door’!
To compensate – or indeed hasten – the removal of its poorer households, Kensington and Chelsea is buying homes outside the borough. Ostensibly these are to provide temporary accommodation, but being outside the housing revenue account, the council can also use them to discharge its duty to homeless households through two-year tenancies private sector rented properties. These households could then be moved on to become the responsibility of the host area, with a consequential increased pressure on local services. An initial plan was to develop these homes in Peterborough, but subsequently vetoed by Peterborough Conservatives. Currently, Kensington and Chelsea is eyeing up Croydon.
The second string to Kensington and Chelsea’s housing plan is to demolish and regenerate all its large council estates. This will further reduce the social rented stock, while providing flats for market sale, or on offer at an intermediate rental primarily to those earning £46,000 to £85,000 per year. However, if the new homes on a regenerated estate are also at risk of being forcibly sold off as soon as they are built, this regeneration incentive will be lost.
Will flooding the market with empty council flats damage the inner London housing market? The market in Kensington and Chelsea is so hyperactive that nothing will cool it down until plutocrats, oligarchs and billionaires stop using London property as an investment haven. David Cameron’s promise to tackle money-launderers taking advantage of London’s housing market seems to have disappeared, so a home in Kensington and Chelsea will continue to remain far out of the reach of all ordinary Londoners.
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Judith Blakeman is a councillor and Labour housing and property spokesperson for the London borough of Kensington and Chelsea
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Photo: Wikipedia