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London Housing Panel to be scrapped
A forum set up by Sadiq Khan to give community organisations a channel for influencing housing policy in London is set to be scrapped after just three years.
Its focus is to discuss housing issues in the capital and advise City Hall officials on policy.
But the panel is now set to be disbanded next spring, and the Greater London Authority (GLA) has informed it that funding will cease in March 2022.
The GLA currently provides £30,000 a year to support the panel, with anti-poverty and inequality charity Trust for London putting up match funding.
It was set up after lobbying from the London Tenants Federation (LTF), which represents tenants’ and residents’ associations.
Pat Turnbull, who sits on the panel for the LTF, said that the federation’s members are “both disappointed and confused” about the decision to cut funding, with Mr Khan having last year praised its work.
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She added: “The £30,000-a-year funding provided by the mayor of London’s office last year must be a tiny fraction of his revenue budget and so we are now urging the mayor, the deputy mayor for housing and the London Assembly Housing Committee to do all they can to keep the panel going.
“At this time of greater housing need and insecurity for so many low-income Londoners, which have increased or been more prominently highlighted during the COVID-19 pandemic, the work of the panel is needed more than ever.”
Appearing before the London Assembly earlier this month, deputy mayor for housing Tom Copley was questioned about the move by the Green Party’s Sian Berry.
She asked if the mayor would reconsider the decision to cut funding, saying that “the money involved is very low, and this work seems like extremely good value”.
Mr Copley replied that “very real and growing constraints on the GLA’s budget” mean it has “had to take some difficult decisions about the panel”.
He said: “It does seem very low and if you look at the housing and land budget within the GLA it seems like a lot of money, and it is, but of course the vast majority of that is capital spends that we are spending on our various programmes – the [Affordable Housing Programme], community housing and things like that.
“Our revenue budgets are pretty limited and have to cover very important areas like rough sleeping, like the private rented sector, like the Gypsy and Traveller accommodation needs survey that we are going to be conducting in conjunction with our planning team.”
He added that he hopes that between now and March the panel will “continue its work and establish a legacy helping us to embed community engagement with our policymaking and in our implementation” and that he is “keen to explore as well other ways going forward that we can continue this sort of engagement in a way that recognises the GLA’s considerable financial constraints”.
GLA budget documents show that its housing and land directorate expenditure in 2020/21 was £56.1m, with the budget plummeting to £16.6m for 2021/22 and 2022/23.
Members of the London Housing Panel include Generation Rent, Homeless Link, the Leasehold Knowledge Partnership and LGBT retirement housing provider Tonic Housing Association.
Since its inception, the panel’s work has included pushing the GLA to take equality issues into account through the design of its Affordable Housing Programme.
Its chair, human geography professor Loretta Lees, attends meetings of the GLA’s Homes for Londoners board.
