London Councils’ housing chief accuses mayor of stacking poorer boroughs with social tenants
Boris 'another Shirley Porter'
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Boris Johnson has been accused of attempting to ‘corral’ social housing into poor London boroughs, reminiscent of Shirley Porter, in an attack from London Councils’ new housing chief.
Steve Reed, who holds the housing portfolio on the cross-party committee, this week laid siege to the Conservative mayor’s policies.
Mr Johnson – who has been in post a year this week – has scrapped Labour predecessor Ken Livingstone’s 50 per cent affordable target for housing developments and is replacing it with individual targets for each borough.
Mr Reed, Labour leader of Lambeth Council, said the mayor was ‘trying to corral social housing into boroughs which are already relatively poor’.
‘He’s allowing boroughs which are relatively wealthy to avoid their responsibility to provide housing to people on low incomes. That’s what Shirley Porter did,’ he added.
In the 1980s, former Westminster Council leader Dame Porter was at the centre of a scandal in which the council tried to use home sales to cultivate Conservative votes in marginal wards.
Mr Reed said City Hall’s calculations of each borough’s capacity for new social homes had ‘found that poor Labour boroughs have plenty of capacity’ whereas ‘wealthy Tory boroughs have less’. Labour-controlled Newham was given a proposed target of 5,754 homes by 2011, while its neighbour Bexley got just 566, he said.
This could have ‘the potential advantage of taking Labour voters out of Tory areas’, he added. The mayor’s housing director, Richard Blakeway, said: ‘This is completely untrue.’
The borough capacity studies had been carried out under Mr Livingstone, he added. In an unconnected speech this week, Mr Blakeway said the mayor wanted to give councils greater control over affordable housing through ‘delegation contracts’. These would give councils control over the location, provider and types of affordable houses built in their boroughs in exchange for agreed annual delivery targets.
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Readers' comments (1)
Paul Heasman | 01/05/2009 11:03 am
Is Boris trying to recreate another Shirley Porter situation - I would think not well at least not deliberately but he may by neglect and a blind faith in the 'market'.
The problem as I see it is this; by and large London works as London from Croydon to Barnet, Hounslow to Dagenham. As residents we see the whole as our environment, if asked we say we are Londoners, not Westmisterites or Greenwichites. In spite of the Mayor and the GLA most politicians in the capital are parochial they see only the areas they are elected for. I saw this at first hand when I had an involvement with the ill fated Capital Moves project, the reality was that the political involvement just didn't seem to comprehend any relationship outside of their specific Borough.
Boris has a well stated policy of trying to persuade and encourage local Boroughs, that won't work because generally the Borough based politicians just don't recognise a greater need than their immediate electoral focus. Most would scrap the GLA and the Mayor tomorrow and retrench back to what they know and words like Regional, sub Regional and Strategic would disappear from the vocabulary.
Ken realised that you had to put great pressure on Boroughs to get them to co-operate by and large he succeeded - but they weren't happy, the truth is the best way would be a middle route, but we probably don't have time for that if we are to get the homes London needs.
Boris is different from Shirley Porter in that she deliberately set out to achieve political and social division through housing policy, Boris will achieve it through a lack of a fit for purpose housing policy.
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