The boldest pledge in Hammersmith and Fulham (H&F) Labour’s 2014 borough election manifesto was to “work with council housing residents to give them ownership of the land their homes are on”. This was largely a response to the huge Decent Neighbourhoods regeneration programme of the incumbent Conservatives, which envisaged redeveloping several of the borough’s larger estates in partnership with private developers. Labour, led by Stephen Cowan, famously won the election, sinking the Conservatives’ London flagship. So what exactly did that promise to council housing residents mean?
Last month, H&F announced it had appointed former Streatham MP and Labour housing minister Keith Hill to head a residents’ housing commission. Its remit includes looking at how to “protect council homes against unwanted demolition and development” and “give residents more power over what happens” to those homes. The commission’s proposals will eventually be put to a vote.
On Saturday, the council hosted a conference for tenants, for which well over 400 signed up. I was too pitifully cold-stricken to attend, but the council has given me the text of Hill’s keynote speech. It placed the Labour pledge in context from the start:
It was a promise which arose out of the threat to residents from major private developments in the borough like those the previous council was carrying out at Earls Court and considering in places like Hammersmith Riverside.
The purpose of the promise is to protect tenants and leaseholders from the risk in future of the disposal of their homes without consultation; from the risk - as several residents have put it to me - of having their homes sold out from under them.
Hill spelled that risk out:
The reality is that - yes - you do have a new council now. But you cannot be sure you will have it forever. In fact, it could all change in three years’ time at the next council elections. You could have an administration with a different political complexion and with quite different ideas about the future of the estates.
In other words, the Tories could regain H&F and start seeking private developers to buy council-owned estates all over again. Labour is trying to close off that option by enabling the transfer of ownership from the council to different types of organisation - existing housing associations, new ones, co-ops - run by democratic bodies that are “resident-led”. Hill’s point, though couched in non-political terms, was that this would make people more secure in those homes than being left at the mercy of any future Conservative administration.
Local Tories themselves have offered a novel response to the commission. When they ran the council between 2006 and their recent shock defeat, they were enthusiastic about selling their own housing stock. None of the profits were reinvested in building replacement council homes. It was the Tory view that H&F contained too many homes for social rent, whether owned by the council itself or by housing associations. They wanted more low cost home ownership to help people on to the housing ladder instead.
Their leader for most of those eight years was Stephen Greenhalgh, now Boris Johnson’s deputy for policing and crime and aspiring successor as mayor. In 2009, as part of helping his party at national level to draw up bold local government policies, Greenhalgh co-authored a think tank paper which argued that social housing as we know it should be done away with altogether.
It may, therefore, come as a surprise to learn that Charlie Dewhirst, the Conservative challenger to Labour’s Andy Slaughter in the Hammersmith parliamentary constituency, has been sending out leaflets to council house residents telling them that he will be “campaigning hard against the planned sale of Hammersmith and Shepherds Bush council housing.” He argues that Labour’s consultation is a cover for spending millions on “secret proposals” for a stock transfer and that this would result in higher rents and service charges and, in fact, less tenure security.
On Twitter, former H&F cabinet member for housing Andrew Johnson, who lost his seat last year, has drawn my attention to the response of the campaign group Defend Council Housing (DCH) to Cowan’s plans. DCH has characterised the housing commission as “considering privatisation” of H&F’s council homes and Hill as having “championed widespread stock transfer despite tenant complaints at bullying and dirty tricks.” It says it is “working to ensure tenants hear the risks and threat of privatisation”. Sounds a lot like what Dewhirst says he is doing. What a curious combination. Imagine Keith Joseph aligning with the SWP.
There’s been more enthusiasm for the commission from the campaign to prevent H&F’s West Kensington and Gibbs Green estates being demolished as part of the Earls Court Project, the truly gruesome scheme that Greenhalgh enthusiastically facilitated and was keen to see encompass the estates. They want to become the estates’ owners in a community-led housing association modelled on the widely-praised Walterton and Elgin Community Homes in Westminster, which emerged from Labour’s battles with Dame Shirley Porter in the 1980s and 1990s. Their immediate future remains uncertain despite Labour’s win last May, due to the Tories’ signing an agreement with developer Capital and Counties to sell it the land. However, I gather they’ve had an agreeable first meeting with Hill.
What Labour’s doing in H&F might be seen as a pragmatic “exit strategy” move by an administration addressing the electoral realities of a borough it cannot be sure of retaining control of for long. Some will have genuine qualms about it. But it might be a progressive strategy too. Much depends on how it plays out in the months to come.
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