The current model for building social housing in Southwark is broken but the land commission is a good start to fixing it.
As it stands, local authorities don’t generally have the capital to build large-scale social housing projects on their own. So, they must rely on investment from private developers to fund these projects – think the Aylesbury Estate redevelopment and Elephant Park.
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Unfortunately, it’s not in private developers’ interests to build cheap, affordable flats for families. If the housing market was to be flooded with reasonably priced flats, it would bring down house prices generally – not what private developers want.
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So we’re left with a situation where local authorities must pander to multi-billion development companies, potentially with opaque off-shore accounting structures. They are reduced to begging them to include a measly 35 per cent affordable housing in their housing projects. And even then, developers do everything they can to nibble away at that, looking to squeeze out more profit.
But the land commission could cut out private developers. By encouraging the council to team up with private landowners with social interest, like faith institutions, it extracts the financial imperatives of the private developer.
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Admittedly, private landowners like churches, and small to medium size businesses, won’t have capital even comparable to large developers. So don’t expect your local flat-roofed evangelical church to fund a 25-storey social housing block. But involving them in community building projects is still a good idea and creative solutions to the housing crisis could come of it.
The commission does have some pitfalls. For all Labour councillors’ protestations, making prospective Labour MP Miatta Fahnbulleh the chair does seem questionable. If the commission turns out to be a huge success, is it right that a future Labour candidate will get the credit, having been appointed by a Labour-run council? Almost certainly not.
The exclusion of any environmental group from the board is also bizarre. Especially as Cllr James McAsh, who came up with the land commission, said tackling the climate crisis was a big reason for the commission. We might, however, see a late addition to the board with climate credentials.
It’s a shame that the commission won’t do a full survey of land ownership in the borough. You feel that we can only seriously talk about revolutionising land-use in Southwark once we know who owns what.
At a national level, the government must do more to ensure land ownership is transparent in this country. It’s an obvious first step to tackling the housing crisis.
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