In theory, Britain’s Housing Ombudsman is not one of London’s emergency services: the office’s primary role is to resolve disputes between social housing tenants and their landlords. In practice, there is a flashing blue light quality to its work. Ask Richard Blakeway, the Housing Ombudsman himself. “The housing emergency is starting to make us feel like an emergency service,” he said at a London Society event last week. “Every 30 seconds someone calls us for help.”
Not all of those calls are from Londoners. But Blakeway told the gathering at the Clerkenwell office of architects BDP that 47 per cent of his team’s casework comes from the capital. That is striking, yet no surprise. Councils and housing associations own about 800,000 homes for low-cost rent in London. All of those providers have to sign up with the Ombudsman, and with some private landlords also doing so voluntarily, one Londoner in four or five is entitled to seek the organisation’s assistance.
Demand is a daily deluge. That, too, is to be expected, given the daunting stats. Drawing on research from cross-party local authority group London Councils, Blakeway reminded his audience that on average every classroom in the capital contains a child living in temporary accommodation. At the other end of the age range, he pointed to an increase in the number of over-55s housed by the private rented sector, which has been growing in recent years as the number of mortgage-holders has declined. “At some point, they will retire,” Blakeway said. “How will they afford their housing costs?”
To these numbers can be added the more than 323,000 London households on waiting lists for social housing – twice the population of Cambridge. In inner London, where lists are longest, the average waiting time for a one-bedroom property is well over three years. City Hall’s latest evidence base says there was a small increase in the total amount of social housing in London between 2022 and 2023, but that was nowhere near enough to keep pace with demand, and supply has lately ground to a near-halt.
The same data source says at least 6.6 per cent of all London’s homes are overcrowded. A government estimate in 2020 found that over 400,000 London homes fall short of the national Decent Homes Standard. The other week, I spent two hours with tenants of two-year-old housing association block in Purley. I headed home with my head ringing with their stories of doors that won’t close, a lift that doesn’t work and rats scratching in cavities behind their walls.
I could go on. And on. And on. And the awful thing is, you might get bored. So might I. After all, voices have been raised about London’s housing crisis for much of this century. As Blakeway said, the term embraces a number of different crises covering quality, availability and affordability across every tenure in different ways. With the big picture getting darker and borough budgets buckling under the financial strain, the word “emergency” has been recruited to bring home just how alarming these crises are. But how much impact does that have when even some of those with the most direct responsibility for putting things right display symptoms of commitment fatigue?
“I worry that the numbers are so huge or so often repeated that people may become desensitised,” Blakeway said. He expressed concern, echoing the findings of recent Ombudsman investigations, that the pressures housing associations have come under, due to new post-Grenfell safety standards, ongoing grant reductions, the disruptive effects of mergers and the combination of market conditions that has hit home-building across the board, have seen what he called “a creeping normalisation of responses, a sort of tolerance of things that aren’t tolerable”.
To illustrate the scale of the task to be addressed, he spoke about the landmark Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes, published in 1885. We would be struck if we read it, Blakeway said, by the similarities between the issues the commissioners addressed by then and those clamouring for attention today, not least the link between housing conditions and public health. An Act of Parliament about the issue was assented in the same year and another five years later, the latter giving new powers to the London County Council.
Descriptions of London’s housing conditions in George Orwell’s Keep The Aspidistra Flying, published in 1936, advise us that these initiatives did not instantly make everything right. They did, though, represent a coherent effort to cure an often unspeakable social ailment of the Victorian age, one that debilitated much of the capital city and left hundreds of thousand of Londoners trapped in grim conditions that ruined and cut short lives. Today’s London may not be synonymous with dire hovels and hellish rookeries. But it is in danger of moving back in that direction. The very thought can prompt you to avert your gaze. It is an impulse to fiercely resist.
OnLondon.co.uk provides unique coverage of the capital’s politics, development and culture. Support the website and its writers for just £5 a month or £50 a year and get things that other people won’t. Details HERE. Follow Dave Hill on Bluesky. Photo: Early London social housing near Westminster Abbey.
I come across this every week with a resident in my ward. The whole housing system is broken. Starts from Council housing rent being set too cheap – less where I live than the service charge on my privately-owned flat.
Bear in mind that the definition of overcrowding is mind blowing, I first came across it when I met a family of 5 living in a one bedroom flat. They were deemed (by law) not to be overcrowded because the 2 children could live in the kitchen/dining room and the baby could live in the parents’ bedroom until he turned 1.
Thanks Guy. Apologies for taking a while to spot and approve this and your other recent comment.
A new way of looking at Council Housing.
I want to set out an argument which will be quite short, but which I suspect is controversial. But I think it shows a sustainable way to contribute to what must be one of the most pressing challenges – the poor financial state of so many local authorities.
In LB of Hounslow, we are not in immediate danger of insolvency because the borough has decent reserves which have been built up by many years of careful financial management, but our budget is of course very stretched and there are many services that are not what we would like, and unlikely to improve any time soon unless we hear an unlikely show of generosity from the Treasury.
My suggestion concerns council rents.
The average rent of a council 2BR place in Hounslow is £126.99 per week ie £6603.48 per annum.
There is an official definition which sets the amount the Department for Work and Pensions will allow to be paid to support claimants. The is called the Local Housing Allowance (LHA), actually set by the Valuation Office Agency, part of the HMRC. A private rent at LHA level in central Hounslow is £229.18 per week ie £11917.40 per annum.
A private rent at market rent in Hounslow starts at about £1700 per month ie £20400.00 pa. That is an enormous difference.
The myth is that council houses are for poor people, but that really isn’t true. Many are on low incomes, but by no means all of them, and many people on low incomes are renting from private landlords.
Council homes attract discounts if tenants decide to buy them. A 2BR flat here is worth perhaps £300K and if you’ve been there 10 years you are entitled to a discount of 60% – £180K, but that will be limited to £136,400. That discount would be well over twice the whole rent that would have been paid over 10 years.
If we moved council rents to LHA level – a discount from market rent of about 40% so still a bargain – for 4M housing properties, that would generate over £20 Bn pa. Charging market rent would generate £55 Bn pa. Of course, the numbers would not be quite like that because different council and market rates apply in other places, and probably significantly less in some areas, but the principle is the same.
I would not advocate we would do this immediately: there should be a phased implementation to reduce shocks. Some, perhaps many, would need income top up but at a time of our parlous state of public finances, why should we provide an enormous subsidy to council rents and deny any subsidy for those who do not win the council accommodation lottery and in some cases really don’t need that subsidy?
Many others do, whether their aspiration is to attain a secure rental, or to finance the start of a home purchase.
Practically every week now I meet someone who lives in a desperate hovel or is sofa surfing. We have practically no response to this because there is very little accommodation locally and very little that exists is attainable by someone with meagre income. Quite often people are being evicted for no fault of their own (which is another concern).