It’s a year since the Council declared a housing emergency and committed to redoubling its efforts to provide warm, safe and secure homes to everyone who needs them. And what’s happened since?
Well, the promised annual review of the Housing Emergency Action Plan hasn’t materialised; the local housing strategy due for consultation this month has been postponed; hundreds of people are being turfed out of temporary accommodation which turned out to be unlawful; the Council is spending thousands of pounds on placing homeless people outside of the city; and the number of people sleeping rough is on the rise.
Of course, this isn’t all the fault of the Council – successive, national, austerity budgets have been disastrous for housebuilding and, coupled with rising construction costs post-Brexit, the picture is bleak. But declarations of emergencies should tell us all that we need to do things differently.
Politicians of all colours will tell you that the problem is funding – and they would be right. But it’s not just the amount of money available which is important, it’s how you choose to spend it. Historic failures to properly build and maintain social housing – even when funding was better – show us that we need to reimagine this landscape.
We shouldn’t be relying on income from Council tenants to build and maintain homes, as is the case currently. Greens recognise that social housing is a social good, and that cross-Council investment in housing – for example, through spending from the forthcoming tourist tax – is the right priority for the city. So, irrespective of whether funds are shrinking or growing, we must be more creative about how money is spent.
Greens are already leading the way on this point, suggesting new ways to fund greenspace improvements on housing land and therefore unlocking more spend within the budget for housebuilding. And we’ve plenty of ideas about how to do this in other areas too – from adaptations for disabled tenants to investments in retrofitting, the burden for such costs shouldn’t sit solely on tenant shoulders, and ‘savings’ realised in the housing budget against these should be reinvested in council housebuilding and maintenance. Spending better across the Council can see us deliver more for housing.
In the face of crisis, people are crying out for some hope and some ideas. In advance of February’s budget, Greens are working on ours – the question is, are other parties doing the same?