The Politics of Housing Need

Published on Wed 7th Dec 2005

Affordable housing is sadly not a high enough priority for national politicians and even at local council level excuses are always found for not providing more. In my own constituency, Oxford West and Abingdon, there have been several very good examples of the way that even with the best intentions it is desperately difficult to provide social housing for rent.

In one example, there was an area of land along the river mostly in private ownership but some publicly (City Council) owned. City Council policy at the time indicated that the publicly owned land should be used to maximize the amount of social housing, especially given the reliance by the Council on bed and breakfast for the homeless; this was made clear in the Local Plan. The rest of the land was developed by the private sector and financial contributions were made available for transport and other facilities.

Due to bad management and difficulty in getting any funding from the Housing Corporation to develop the Council-owned land, by the time the planning application was put in to build the social housing, the privately built houses were occupied. The Council-owned land had been a waste dump but was now overgrown with thick bushes. Some of the new private residents argued against giving planning permission for the social housing element of the overall development on the basis that they did not want to lose this "green area" within the development. It is obviously hard to judge how much of the opposition was due to a specific interest in the "natural overgrowth" and how much was due to an unwillingness to see social housing built on the site. The campaigners identified a legal provision whereby they could claim that the land was a "village green" despite it not looking anything like a green or the surrounding houses anything like a village. So far they have been successful in the courts and the case is now before the House of Lords. Politically it has been a difficult issue. I have been of the view that housing need is the most important factor here. In contrast the Green Party, while always talking about the importance of social housing, are strongly supporting the application for social housing land to be denoted as a village green.

Oxford City Council, for decades run by the Labour Party, has an unfortunate history of collecting financial contributions from private developers, from a range of exclusively private projects, and then using them to create areas of exclusively social housing in other parts of the City.

While this might be defended as a financially efficient way for building social housing, it has the unfortunate consequence of having created sink estates with multiple social problems and effectively separating out the "haves" from the "have nots". More recently the Council, under Liberal Democrat - and even under Labour - control has seen the error of this and is insisting through the new Local Plan that large private developments contain at least 50% of affordable housing and as such, housing is mixed in as far as possible with the private units. In my view small areas of publicly owned land within existing exclusively private developments should still be used for 100% social housing to meet the need, especially when we are only talking about a small development of 100 houses or less. Bizarrely however, it is now being argued by some that in order to avoid the creation of socially troubled large estates, even small tracks of publicly-owned land should be offered for 50/50 private/social housing. It is hard to escape the conclusion that this is intended to aid the financing of such a development at the expense of maximizing the number of social units.

Predictably the only lobbying letters I have had are from existing (well-housed) residents in the private development making their case for the village green. The people in desperate housing need who would benefit from social housing are not in a position to write to their MP or to turn up at planning committee meetings or campaign rallies. Those of us who want to see more affordable housing need to find a way to mobilize the dispossessed and the homeless, the overcrowded and the poorly housed. Only then will we start to have a balanced debate at local level and in the national arena about priorities for land use.