Victims of London's property boom
Thousands are trapped between spiralling prices and desperate lack of council housing
Larry Elliott
Friday November 24, 2006
The Guardian
Vicky Walsh is a typical Islington resident. Typical but not stereotypical. The stereotypical Islington resident is a well-heeled trendy liberal who takes a surreptitious peek in the windows of estate agents on Upper Street, tut-tuts at dinner parties about the lunacy of the property market and picks up tips from television programmes providing owner-occupiers with advice on how to add value to their homes.
Ms Walsh does none of these things because she doesn't own her own home. Like more than 13,000 other families she is on Islington council's waiting list to be rehoused. She needs rehousing because she and her partner live with their two seven-month old twin boys in a one-bedroom flat that an estate agent would call compact and everybody else would call small.
Article continues
For the past 25 years, debate about the housing market in the UK has focused almost exclusively on the 70%-plus of homes that are owned outright or being bought with a mortgage. The fact that house prices are going up by more than 8% a year or that some banks are offering mortgages of five times individual or joint incomes warrants far more attention than the remote possibility of Ms Walsh being rehoused soon. But Ms Walsh and tenants like her provide a stark contrast to Britain's booming housing market.
Many houses in Islington are sold for £1m or more. Affordable properties for rent are so scarce in the borough that the council has to use a points system to ration demand. Those on the waiting list get extra points if they have dependent children, if they have a medical condition, but need a minimum of 140 points to put in a bid for a new property. Ms Walsh and her partner have 150 points but to have a chance of successfully bidding for a two-bed flat they need 250.
"There is double of everything - two seats, two cots, two high chairs. It's getting me down. I can cope with the kids - it's just the living arrangements. I wake up in the morning and think that I have to come up with a way of getting more points off the council. It's like the lottery. You know you are going to lose but you have to keep trying."
Price vice
Ms Walsh, like thousands of other families in Islington, is caught in a vice between some of the highest property prices in the country and a desperate shortage of council housing.
Amyn Elsafty is a butcher who works in Highgate but like Ms Walsh lives on the Bemerton estate on the other side of York Way from the massive King's Cross development. The flats are smart and well appointed, but Mr Elsafty has to sleep on the sofa in the living room of his brother's flat. His brother and his brother's pregnant girlfriend share the only bedroom. Mr Elsafty has split up with his partner but sees his children three evenings a week. When they stay at weekends they sleep on a blow-up bed in the living room with their dad.
"It was supposed to be temporary but that was a year ago", says Mr Elsafty, 30. "My brother says stay here as long as you need, but how long can I keep sponging off him?"
There is no chance, he says, of affording a mortgage on his wages of £780 a month and he does not qualify for the government's scheme for key workers. "I'm just a humble butcher. It makes no difference to me. I'm stuck in limbo."
The local Labour MP, Emily Thornberry, says the caseload at her surgery is dominated by people desperate to be rehoused. "I think it's disgusting, truly shocking," she says. "I think it's the sort of thing that went out when Dickens died. I suspect that people in government don't realise just how bad it is."
Even if affordable housing is well below the radar for most of those in Islington's leafy lanes, it is a big political issue locally. Ms Thornberry says the Liberal Democrat-run council should be doing more, and in particular taking a tougher line with developers to ensure they build more affordable homes.
Until recently, the council had a policy that any development of 15 homes or more was required to contain 35% of affordable homes. Now 50% have to be affordable in any scheme of 10 or more properties. Developers are pretty smart, however. According to Ms Thornberry's analysis, of the nearly 1,200 planning applications between 2001 and 2006 only 172 were for 10 homes or more.
"We have to turn high land prices to our advantage," said Ms Thornberry. "We must insist that if the developers are going to make huge profits that half the properties will be social housing. We have got to be tough on people.
"I live in the leafy lanes but I was brought up in council accommodation. I have some perception of what it's like but I was never as overcrowded as these people. It's awful. It just hits you all the time."
Terry Stacey, the Liberal Democrat chair of housing on the council: "There's no doubt that there is a big shortage of housing in London. Unlike Ms Thornberry, who lives in her own £2.6m house, I'm a housing tenant myself."
Mr Stacey said that Islington was one of the smallest boroughs in London and had a dearth of land available for development. Even so, it had nobody living in temporary accommodation, had been providing for key workers in the public sector and had weighted the points scheme to people who had lived in the borough for a long time. But it was important, he added, that developers were given incentives to build rather than being scared off.
"I have total and utter sympathy for the people on the waiting list. The council is doing everything it possibly can. We would like to build more council houses ourselves but the government does not let us do it."
Backstory
The number of council homes has fallen sharply over the past 25 years. In 1981, there were 6,305,000 properties rented from local authorities; by 2005 the figure had dropped to 2,803,000. Over the same period, homes rented from social landlords increased from 473,000 to 2,154,000. Owner occupation rose by 50% - from 12,442,000 to 18,405,000. Government figures show that right-to-buy legislation led to a steady erosion of the stock of social housing from the early 1980s onwards. In Islington South, according to the Labour party, 7,500 new homes were built between 2000 and 2005, of which 1,581 were affordable. Of the 13,120 families on the waiting list, more than 4,500 have enough points to bid for re-housing.
Thousands are trapped between spiralling prices and desperate lack of council housing
Larry Elliott
Friday November 24, 2006
The Guardian
Vicky Walsh is a typical Islington resident. Typical but not stereotypical. The stereotypical Islington resident is a well-heeled trendy liberal who takes a surreptitious peek in the windows of estate agents on Upper Street, tut-tuts at dinner parties about the lunacy of the property market and picks up tips from television programmes providing owner-occupiers with advice on how to add value to their homes.
Ms Walsh does none of these things because she doesn't own her own home. Like more than 13,000 other families she is on Islington council's waiting list to be rehoused. She needs rehousing because she and her partner live with their two seven-month old twin boys in a one-bedroom flat that an estate agent would call compact and everybody else would call small.
Article continues
For the past 25 years, debate about the housing market in the UK has focused almost exclusively on the 70%-plus of homes that are owned outright or being bought with a mortgage. The fact that house prices are going up by more than 8% a year or that some banks are offering mortgages of five times individual or joint incomes warrants far more attention than the remote possibility of Ms Walsh being rehoused soon. But Ms Walsh and tenants like her provide a stark contrast to Britain's booming housing market.
Many houses in Islington are sold for £1m or more. Affordable properties for rent are so scarce in the borough that the council has to use a points system to ration demand. Those on the waiting list get extra points if they have dependent children, if they have a medical condition, but need a minimum of 140 points to put in a bid for a new property. Ms Walsh and her partner have 150 points but to have a chance of successfully bidding for a two-bed flat they need 250.
"There is double of everything - two seats, two cots, two high chairs. It's getting me down. I can cope with the kids - it's just the living arrangements. I wake up in the morning and think that I have to come up with a way of getting more points off the council. It's like the lottery. You know you are going to lose but you have to keep trying."
Price vice
Ms Walsh, like thousands of other families in Islington, is caught in a vice between some of the highest property prices in the country and a desperate shortage of council housing.
Amyn Elsafty is a butcher who works in Highgate but like Ms Walsh lives on the Bemerton estate on the other side of York Way from the massive King's Cross development. The flats are smart and well appointed, but Mr Elsafty has to sleep on the sofa in the living room of his brother's flat. His brother and his brother's pregnant girlfriend share the only bedroom. Mr Elsafty has split up with his partner but sees his children three evenings a week. When they stay at weekends they sleep on a blow-up bed in the living room with their dad.
"It was supposed to be temporary but that was a year ago", says Mr Elsafty, 30. "My brother says stay here as long as you need, but how long can I keep sponging off him?"
There is no chance, he says, of affording a mortgage on his wages of £780 a month and he does not qualify for the government's scheme for key workers. "I'm just a humble butcher. It makes no difference to me. I'm stuck in limbo."
The local Labour MP, Emily Thornberry, says the caseload at her surgery is dominated by people desperate to be rehoused. "I think it's disgusting, truly shocking," she says. "I think it's the sort of thing that went out when Dickens died. I suspect that people in government don't realise just how bad it is."
Even if affordable housing is well below the radar for most of those in Islington's leafy lanes, it is a big political issue locally. Ms Thornberry says the Liberal Democrat-run council should be doing more, and in particular taking a tougher line with developers to ensure they build more affordable homes.
Until recently, the council had a policy that any development of 15 homes or more was required to contain 35% of affordable homes. Now 50% have to be affordable in any scheme of 10 or more properties. Developers are pretty smart, however. According to Ms Thornberry's analysis, of the nearly 1,200 planning applications between 2001 and 2006 only 172 were for 10 homes or more.
"We have to turn high land prices to our advantage," said Ms Thornberry. "We must insist that if the developers are going to make huge profits that half the properties will be social housing. We have got to be tough on people.
"I live in the leafy lanes but I was brought up in council accommodation. I have some perception of what it's like but I was never as overcrowded as these people. It's awful. It just hits you all the time."
Terry Stacey, the Liberal Democrat chair of housing on the council: "There's no doubt that there is a big shortage of housing in London. Unlike Ms Thornberry, who lives in her own £2.6m house, I'm a housing tenant myself."
Mr Stacey said that Islington was one of the smallest boroughs in London and had a dearth of land available for development. Even so, it had nobody living in temporary accommodation, had been providing for key workers in the public sector and had weighted the points scheme to people who had lived in the borough for a long time. But it was important, he added, that developers were given incentives to build rather than being scared off.
"I have total and utter sympathy for the people on the waiting list. The council is doing everything it possibly can. We would like to build more council houses ourselves but the government does not let us do it."
Backstory
The number of council homes has fallen sharply over the past 25 years. In 1981, there were 6,305,000 properties rented from local authorities; by 2005 the figure had dropped to 2,803,000. Over the same period, homes rented from social landlords increased from 473,000 to 2,154,000. Owner occupation rose by 50% - from 12,442,000 to 18,405,000. Government figures show that right-to-buy legislation led to a steady erosion of the stock of social housing from the early 1980s onwards. In Islington South, according to the Labour party, 7,500 new homes were built between 2000 and 2005, of which 1,581 were affordable. Of the 13,120 families on the waiting list, more than 4,500 have enough points to bid for re-housing.
Comments