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The Labour MP holding her own government to account
Florence Eshalomi is a Labour MP. But as chair of the Housing, Communities and Local Government Select Committee, she is also one of the most important figures scrutinising how the new Labour government is performing on housing. She sits down with Katharine Swindells
Florence Eshalomi is a Labour MP and chair of the Housing, Communities and Local Government Select Committee. She sits down with @Kathy_Swinds #UKhousingFlorence Eshalomi leant forward in her leather chair, her expression grave, as she faced Angela Rayner at the Housing, Communities and Local Government Select Committee in January. Ms Eshalomi and her committee members had spent the past hour grilling the deputy prime minister on record rough sleeping numbers, temporary accommodation statistics and social housing waiting lists. But Ms Eshalomi still felt there was something Ms Rayner hadn’t addressed.
“How are you going to make a dent in that if we don’t have a figure and a target for how many new social homes are going to be built by this parliament?” she asked.
“I appreciate the challenge, chair,” was Ms Rayner’s response, before she insisted that the government remains committed to “the biggest wave of social and council homes of a generation”.
Fast-forward to March, and Inside Housing secured a sit-down with Ms Eshalomi at her office in Westminster to discuss some of this work. It is notable that social housing is already a strong theme for the committee – it has opened four inquiries and all have a big focus on affordable housing and homelessness.
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Shadow housing minister: ‘Majority of grant funding under Labour government will be for social rent’Ms Eshalomi has been a Labour MP since 2019, after a career in policy and public affairs, including as public affairs manager at race equality thinktank the Runnymede Trust, as well as serving as a councillor and deputy cabinet member for housing in Lambeth. She took the helm of the select committee in September 2024, as the new Labour government put housing at the heart of its mission.
Social housing is an issue Ms Eshalomi is passionate about, both politically as committee chair and a south London Labour MP, and personally, as she lived in social housing and temporary accommodation as a child.
“To think that so many years down the line, that’s still happening to the residents I represent, it makes me sad. Sometimes it makes me angry. It makes me want to push the government to do a lot more on this, especially making sure we’re building social homes, not just private homes,” she tells Inside Housing.
The latest government data shows that there are more than 5,400 families with children in B&B temporary accommodation in England, up 15% in one year. Inside Housing’s research found that almost two-thirds of these households have children aged under five, meaning there are likely to be severe impacts on their health and development from poor accommodation.
The experience of children in temporary accommodation has been the topic of one of the committee’s key inquiries, and it recently published its first report on what it calls a "crisis". Last year, the committee heard evidence from experts, who spoke about the broken bones, burns and respiratory problems they’ve seen among children living in temporary accommodation. It was a tough listen and set off memories for Ms Eshalomi.
“I still remember when we finally got permanent accommodation. I was 10, in 1990, and it was just like, ‘This is home,’” she recalls. “It’s knowing you’re not going to have to move again, that this is your room and you’re not having to share with your two younger sisters. It’s just the stability that provides, to know that you’ve got somewhere you can put the key in the door and that’s your home.”
Ms Eshalomi lived in temporary accommodation with her mum and two younger sisters for two years – including in a three-storey converted Victorian house in Brixton that had damp and mould, and a B&B in King’s Cross – before they received a permanent home on Brixton’s ‘Barrier Block’ estate in 1990. Today, Ms Eshalomi knows her family’s situation would be considered lucky. She has a constituent who has been in temporary accommodation for 15 years.
“I think to myself, if that was happening to us now, there’s no way my mum would have been able to cope,” she says. “With the state of some of the accommodation now, with my late mum’s health complications, it would have been so much harder. Sadly, that’s what we’re seeing now, the state of some of the accommodation that people have to live in on a not-so-temporary basis.”
But Ms Eshalomi wants to see this same passion from her colleagues, even if they haven’t experienced housing insecurity themselves. “I’m hoping that they want to push the government to do more on housing because of what they’re seeing in their inbox,” she says. “When we strip it down, housing should be a basic human right, but at the moment, so many people have been denied a safe, warm, secure roof. So I want every MP to take an interest.”
She sees it as her duty to raise the issue of children in temporary accommodation with her colleagues across government, such as with education secretary Bridget Phillipson, who the day before our interview had announced the roll-out of Labour’s breakfast clubs.
“If those children haven’t had a decent night’s sleep, how do you expect them to go to school the next day, to function and take part in the breakfast club, and then actually learn?” Ms Eshalomi says. “There should be a lot more alarm bells about this.”
More immediately, Ms Eshalomi wants to see action from the government, not just to reduce the numbers of families in temporary accommodation, but also to regulate the conditions of the accommodation and how long families are there for. The report recommends mandatory inspections before housing is used as temporary accommodation, and for a child’s school and GP to be notified when they are moved into this type of housing.
Ms Eshalomi wants answers on why so many councils are breaching the six-week rule; the latest data shows that 64% of families with children in B&B temporary accommodation have been there for more than six weeks, despite it being unlawful.
“Why are so many councils breaching that? What are the penalties going to be? I pushed the [homelessness] minister on that,” she says. Ms Eshalomi argues councils should be carrying out a full inspection on temporary accommodation, to make sure it meets standards.
And the lobbying is making headway. The day of our interview, homelessness minister Rushnara Ali announced that the government is planning to consult on “how best to apply Awaab’s Law to temporary accommodation”.
“When temporary housing has been linked to the deaths of at least 74 children, we can and we must act urgently,” Ms Eshalomi says. “We need practical solutions to help improve temporary accommodation and we are determined to press the government, councils and others to take the steps to deliver stable and secure homes for families and children.”
In numbers
5,400
Families with children living in B&Bs
£732m
Yearly spend by councils on nightly paid accommodation
Ms Eshalomi recognises that councils are under pressure, but she thinks this makes the conversation even more urgent. “It comes back to that tax bill that’s been paid for. How much money is being spent on all of this? Is it really good value for money? I’d say ‘no’.”
The funding and sustainability of local government finance is the committee’s main inquiry, with temporary accommodation a huge part of the financial burden. Research for Crisis by the London School of Economics found that net local authority expenditure on nightly paid accommodation like B&Bs has increased more than fivefold from 2017, to £732m a year.
But Ms Eshalomi acknowledges that it isn’t as simple as just a cash injection. “[We are] being quite honest to say, ‘Why have so many councils presented with bankruptcy, and why is it that some councils are still facing financial pressures, even after the support and financial package from the government?’ And being mindful that you know what, this isn’t going to change overnight. I think some councils will still struggle.”
Challenging the government
That is the challenge she put to Ms Rayner in the committee meeting: that the government goes beyond the 1.5 million homes commitment, to a specific pledge on social homes, as called for by Inside Housing’s Build Social campaign.
She refers to the 90,000 social homes per year figure, cited by Inside Housing alongside Shelter and Crisis, as the minimum required. But, she says: “If we’re absolutely honest, we all know that we actually need more.” Lambeth and Southwark, the boroughs she represents, “will take up a large chunk of those homes”.
Although Ms Eshalomi acknowledges that it can be strange to grill her colleagues in the formal setting of a committee room, she says it is important to be a “critical friend” and “hold [government] to account on their commitments”.
“I’ve been elected [as committee chair] by colleagues from right across the political divide, and I’m very humbled and honoured, and I want to do a good job,” she says. “And that means when I’m sitting in that role, I’m not sitting there as the Labour representative for Vauxhall and Camberwell Green, I’m sitting there as the chair of the select committee on behalf of the House. And our key role as a select committee is to scrutinise some of those key policies. It’s not to give the government a hard time. It’s to help them.”
Ms Eshalomi’s conversations with social landlords inform the questions she asks when ministers appear before the committee. She met recently with representatives of the G15 to discuss the challenges the sector is facing around funding, planning and access to skilled workers. But she also emphasises that “it’s a two-way relationship” and there is more she needs to see from landlords, too.
“[Social landlords] push on the rent conversion and the rent freeze over the many years in the cap and the impact that’s had on their day-to-day budgets,” she says. “But I’ve generally reminded them that you’re housing social tenants on lower income. So you’re not there to make a profit.”
She is keen to see more work from housing associations and councils to tackle the stigmatisation that many residents experience, including sometimes from staff. “That’s something that I want to discuss and develop more with some of the big [landlords]. Why should it be that some of them only respond after questions from journalists, or Kwajo [Tweneboa, the social media activist] tweets about them?”
Ms Eshalomi wants to see more tenant engagement and scrutiny, and more transparency on the remuneration of chief executives.
One fear the sector has, I put to her, is that no government will ever think long-term enough to make real change in the housing sector. How can the sector get the government to think beyond a five-year horizon?
For Ms Eshalomi, it comes down to an understanding of the importance of a stable home that spans across all government departments.
“It shouldn’t just sit with Angela Rayner and her ministry – we should be getting all secretaries of state to think about housing within their respective portfolios,” she says. “Because for education, you need homes for those children. For business and trade, you need the homes where the workers will live… It’s about making sure that if the government wants to see this as a priority… it has to be an ongoing priority.”
And, she adds, it would help if the housing minister stayed in place, after 16 people held the role across the Conservatives’ 14-year tenure. “Matthew Pennycook is not allowed to resign, and I’ll keep telling him that.”
Recent longform articles by Katharine Swindells
Revealed: housing officers’ top priorities
We surveyed over 600 frontline staff to find out the biggest issues affecting their job, organisation and the sector more broadly. The results inform the work of a new website we have launched – Inside Housing Management. Katharine Swindells reports
Top 50 Biggest Builders 2024
Which are the 50 housing associations building the most homes? What tenures are they building? And, with warnings already sounded about starts by the G15, what is happening to the pipeline? Katharine Swindells reports
The estate where tenants are taking collective legal action on damp and mould
Tenants on one east London estate are teaming up to file a joint legal claim about the damp and mould in their homes. Katharine Swindells reports
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