The right to homes

It’s 1.55pm on a Wednesday. The Hammersmith and City line train trundles east. Three white women discuss a friend’s housing situation. ‘She’s getting a flat in Barking but she can’t go above the 13th floor because she’s got children,’ says one. ‘What, you can’t die if you live on the 12th floor then?’ reasons another. ‘No balconies ‘til the 13th,’ reckons the third.

The trio disembark at Plaistow. One white face, other than my own, remains in the packed carriage. It belongs to a man engrossed in the Daily Star, today’s splash: ‘Jordan suicide horror over Pete’. A few lines beneath a small headshot of Gordon Brown acknowledge that yesterday the prime minister called the general election.

Is it mere happenstance, I wonder, that these observations are there for the making on the very day I head for Barking to try to lay bare exactly which way housing is swinging the electorate’s vote in this key battleground between Labour and the British National Party.

Perhaps. More likely is that the odds of housing and the election coming up in quick succession are favourable. As one half of the borough of Barking and Dagenham, the east London conurbation suffers a severe lack of affordable housing and there has been much media coverage of the far right’s exploitation of that shortage in order to win the ‘indigenous’ vote.

The train lumbers into Barking and it is my turn to disembark. On the opposite platform a Hasidic Jew and his family await a train heading back into town, a mixed race Muslim couple next to them. So far, so multicultural London. But it wasn’t always so in this borough.

Housing shortage

Between 2001 and 2008 its population grew only marginally, by 2 per cent, according to official figures. But in that time, the number of white people living here shrank by 13 per cent, compared with 0.6 per cent across London and 0.4 per cent in England. Meanwhile, the area’s supply of affordable housing declined significantly during that period. Right to buy sales depleted the council’s housing stock by 15 per cent, eroding the local authority’s share of local homes by more than 6 per cent - almost twice the rate experienced by London as a whole. The council has built no homes for 25 years and today owns just over 19,000 dwellings, less than half the 40,000 when its stock peaked in 1979.

Much of what remains is poor quality: 40 per cent of the council’s homes failed the government’s decent homes standard in 2008 - 14 per cent more than the English average. Yet demand for social homes is skyrocketing. Today, 11,695 households are on the waiting list, up from 6,150 five years ago. The resulting ‘10-year wait’ for a home features regularly in the campaigns of the area’s prospective MPs.

Nationwide, those hoping to make it to Westminster following the general election on 6 May are confronting the electorate’s concerns over housing. But here the issue is at the heart of a racially charged battle. In 2006, the British National Party successfully used housing as a key plank of a local election campaign which saw it win 11 councils seats, second only to Labour. It claimed, falsely, that the council was housing migrants in favour of local people. This time round, the possibility of the party seizing control of the town hall is very real. If ever there was a salutary lesson to be learned about the perils of ignoring housing, as highlighted by Inside Housing’s House Proud campaign in recent months, this is it.

But the party also has its sights on Westminster: leader Nick Griffin is standing against sitting Labour MP Margaret Hodge in Barking, his colleague Michael Barnbrook against Labour’s Jon Cruddas in neighbouring Dagenham and Rainham (formerly Dagenham).

‘Housing is by far the biggest issue, certainly,’ says Mr Griffin. ‘There are several issues on housing. The most keenly felt is the question of outsiders coming in and whether they are being given council accommodation or moving into, in increasing numbers, buy-to-let properties. Both have the same effect in transforming the borough.’

Never mind that council records blow the BNP’s claims, when it comes to social housing at least, out of the water. A council spokesperson confirms that of the 1,238 social housing allocations made in the area during the past 12 months, ‘all’ of the households boasted a local connection. He adds that though the rules allow for applicants without such a connection to trump those that do in exceptional circumstances, ‘this did not happen over the past 12 months’.

Nonetheless, on one BNP campaign billboard a long queue of white people snakes towards a home under the slogan ‘Labour’s housing scandal - vote BNP’. Mr Griffin, currently an MEP, contends his housing policies are getting a ‘very good response’ on the stump. They include making ‘all benefits and social housing only available to British citizens’.

Under BNP rule, explains Mr Griffin, non-British residents would be out on their ear. ‘We can’t afford to play nursemaid to the rest of the world. We would expect people who don’t qualify to probably go to other boroughs,’ he says. ‘Or we assume they’d go to somewhere like Sweden, or else back to where they came from.’ Later, his fellow prospective MP Mr Barnbrook tells me ‘there will be financial assistance’ to help them on their way home.

He adds that there are limits to the relief new housing can bring to the area’s housing shortage. ‘We would say that we can’t really build more than 5,000 new homes in the area because of the lack of work. Stacking up all those houses [would be a] disaster.’

Not racist, but …

Preposterous though their policies may be, the BNP’s message is resonating with parts of the electorate. ‘I’m not racist at all, but I will vote BNP,’ says Donna Bronson, leaning from the first-floor window of the two-bed flat she has rented from the council since her eldest son was a toddler. He is now 19 and shares a bedroom with his 10-year-old brother. Their mother, a 38-year-old cashier, shares with her four-year-old daughter.

‘I don’t know what I’m supposed to do,’ she exclaims, clearly at her wits’ end. ‘I started bidding [for a new council home] five years ago. The bidding process takes four days. By Monday [the fourth day], if there’s one house, I’m number 65. Housing and the bidding system is sh*t, it’s cr*p.’

Her building is close to where the Labour council, it has just announced, will build some of the 145 homes which form its £27 million new build programme. It has ambitions to build 200 more during the next three years, funded in part by a £2.2 million windfall from proposed changes to council housing finance.

The news does not swing Ms Bronson’s vote. ‘The new ones they’re building have been put on the bidding system already. They’re gone,’ she says.

Her decision to vote BNP is based on ‘housing particularly’, she adds. ‘I’m not racist one little bit,’ she repeats, convincingly. ‘I know they won’t get in, but it’s your voice being heard.’

Similar frustrations are apparent in Percy Ingles, a bakery in Barking town centre. ‘I’m 22, I’m working. I have to live in rented, shared accommodation and I’m getting no [financial] help at all,’ says Alison Collyer from behind the cake counter. She pays £60 a week to a private landlord for a room in a three-bed house, shared with four others.

‘I was better off on the social security. It’s really hard for young people today. I don’t think the politicians realise what’s going on. They’re on a monumental wage and then we pay for their houses,’ she says, referencing the MPs’ expenses scandal. Ms Collyer considers voting pointless, ‘because there’s not one party’ able to fix things. She is not alone in her apathy.

Frustration turns to votes

While Ms Collyer isn’t persuaded by the BNP, it is not hard to see how the party can turn the frustrations shared by her and Ms Bronson into votes. Mr Griffin denies that his party is abusing such desperation in the pursuit of power. ‘We’re not exploiting it. We’ve raised an issue,’ he says.

He holds no truck with the notion that many of his supporters are delivered to him purely as a result of their circumstances (as the frequently heard refrain of ‘I’m not racist, but’ would suggest), and not because they support his policies per se. He argues it’s ‘very common in British politics’ for people to back a party they are not fully committed to. ‘People who vote Conservative know very well that David Cameron is a snake oil salesman, but they’ll vote for him because they want to get rid of Gordon Brown.’

Several locals admit they plan to vote tactically - for Labour. ‘I will probably be voting Labour,’ says John Middleton, 63 (pictured below, right), a self-employed educational advisor and owner occupier. ‘There’s got to be some sort of consolidated defence of this area with regard to people voting for this BNP bloke [Mr Griffin]. It’s just so embarrassing to have somebody like that standing in this area. That people actually think that’s the way people are around here.’

Indeed, collective defiance against the BNP is not hard to come by, however dissatisfying the status quo. The mainstream candidates know they must tap into this. Earlier this year, Barking hopeful Margaret Hodge drew flak from Labour colleagues after she was reported saying migrants should ‘earn their rights’. More recently, a not untypical campaign tweet from Ms Hodge reads: ‘60 out with me for 5hrs on #labourdoorstep. 1,000+ contacts. Gd response but need all help - BNP out too! Join our campaign to beat nick griffin [sic].’

Doing so requires fresh thinking on local housing, says Simon Marcus, the Conservative candidate standing against her who describes current housing provision as ‘chaotic’. ‘The mainstream parties have got to come up with sensible and responsible answers that benefit British people of all faiths, ethnicities and backgrounds.’ His idea is to regenerate the area much as Tory grandee Lord Heseltine began the transformation of London’s docklands from wasteland to commercial bastion in the 1980s.

Despite this being a campaign in which housing enjoys a starring role, there has been almost no mention of Mr Marcus’ vision as Barking high street empties and the afternoon draws to a close.

Five years ago, his party polled the same share of the vote here as the BNP. For those who want to see the BNP defeated next week, their best hope is Labour. And for Labour, whose tenure in power has bred so much frustration and anger over housing, overcoming voter apathy may prove its strongest line of defence.

Have your say

You must sign in to make a comment