London’s councils have buckled under the costs of providing temporary accommodation to families rendered homeless by the housing crisis.
As the Evening Standard revealed last week, all but two of the capital’s boroughs will overspend this year due to the “critical factor” of the homelessness crisis.
Every week, 300 more Londoners face a ‘no fault’ eviction, with the government’s promise to ban these section 21 notices gone AWOL. One in 50 Londoners are now living in makeshift housing ranging from drafty hostels to downright unsafe shipping containers.
Twelve children have already died due to complications associated with the temporary accommodation they were placed in.
The clearest solution to these interlocking crises would be to build more council homes, with sensible rents collected to plough back into more construction.
But the current deficit is proving overwhelming.
London’s golden age of social housing in the Sixties and Seventies, with its in-house council architects and funding available for feasibility studies with local community participation, are long gone.
Right to Buy decimated available stock over ensuing decades. London’s ex-council homes are still hot property, but they’ve passed into private hands.
A cap on council borrowing introduced in 2012 took much of the blame for the building stall, with local authorities unable to take on the temporary debt needed to build rental homes that could have quickly paid themselves off.
Although it was lifted in 2018 the hurdles had already become harder to clear. Councils have already sold off much of their lands and assets to private developers and are left to buy back council homes at inflated rates.
Even as the debts mount, every pound spent on temporary accommodation is a sunk cost paying only misery and death in dividends.
Unless urgent action is taken, the social housing crisis will enter a death spiral. If the government is prepared to back risky 99 per cent mortgages for its taxpayers, surely more sensible funding structures could be devised so councils can build their way out.
We owe more to the city’s people than its creditors.
