Shalden shame

Vandals have been smashing up Shalden House in Tunworth Crescent, on the Alton Estate. I never quite understand why a tiny minority enjoys kicking in windows, or urinating in lifts or stairwells - not least their own - but sadly Shalden is the latest victim and the peaceful, self-respecting majority now have to put up with this:



This was one of the problems raised last week at the Roehampton Safer Neighbourhoods Police meeting and I've already taken the issue up with the Council's Housing Director, because this temporary repair isn't good enough: it's dangerous, it's unsightly, it's making the communal areas incredibly dark and residents deserve better. Here are some more other examples of the criminal damage done to Shalden House - you can click to enlarge them:





I know Roehampton's local Police team are working at finding those responsible for this vandalism; and I'll keep pushing the council to make sure that the damage is repaired as soon as possible - because no-one should have to put up with this for any longer than necessary.

New entry in worst Putney pothole competition

Residents of The Platt, just across the road from my campaign HQ in Felsham Road, have a very strong entry into my Putney potholes competition. This is the state the Council has allowed Gay Street, on the estate, to fall into:



Here are a couple of close-ups of what can no longer be called a road - more like a gravel track (you can click to enlarge):



The state of Gay Street - and a lot of the roads on Putney's council estates - leave much to be desired, though of course as my earlier post, here shows, The Council aren't discriminating: they're neglecting all roads equally as dreadfully.

Do you know of a pothole worse than this one? Let me know - email stuart.king@putneylabour.org.uk or sms it to 07533 384 895 and we'll add it to our gallery. Sooner or later, even Wandsworth Conservatives will be shamed into taking action on their neglect of our roads.

Lennox Estate blog

Well, there are blogs on the most surprising things, aren't there? I've just come across a blog extolling the virtues of the Lennox Estate off Priory Lane, which you can read here.

And why not? After all, as the blog notes, many people - particularly Roehampton's Conservative councillors - won't go near the estate simply because of pre-conceived notions of what a council estate is like.

The Lennox blog hasn't been updated for a while, but you can find out a bit about why the estate; and blocks within it; are named as they are.

Taking housing concerns to the top

On Tuesday I met with Housing Minister Caroline Flint MP at the House of Commons to take her through my plans to tackle Putney's housing crisis.

Housing is my number one priority; whereas the incumbent Conservative has yet to ask a single question or come up with a single idea to tackle the increasing shortfall in housing affordable to ordinary Putney people it will be my focus as MP for our constituency.

Here's my five point housing plan:

1. For every rented home the council sells off, they will be obliged by law to replace it with two new ones; and first refusal for every surplus piece of public sector land will go to affordable housing

2. Two thirds of all new homes in Wandsworth must be affordable - and by that I mean what most of us regard as affordable: not the absurd formula the Tory council uses which puts new "affordable" homes beyond the means of most Putney residents

3. The Stamp Duty threshold increased to £250,000 as a first step towards a higher threshold for Greater London; and much wider availability of long-term 10 or 15 year fixed rate mortgages.

4. HomeBuy schemes through which first-time buyers can get a grant of up to a third of the cost of a market home worth less than £300,000 repayable only when they choose to move-on, at whatever one third of the value of their property is at sale

5. More family houses - the Tory Council is obsessed with building ever more apartments and flats - especially one bedroom flats - when Putney is in desperate need of family accommodation

This is a common sense, affordable and urgently needed first step towards tackling our housing crisis. But this is a huge problem locally, because of which my plan goes further than the Government's Housing Act.

I'm taking the lead on housing, while the Conservatives have nothing new to say on this critical issue.

In their own words: Conservative neglect of the Alton

Apparently, one of Wandsworth's Conservative Councillors ventured onto Roehampton's Alton estate last Saturday (before anyone asks, it WASN'T one of the councillors elected to, supposedly, serve Roehampton!). This is how she describes her experience on her own blog (in a post titled "Different worlds"!):

"The lift wasn't working, the smells, sights, sounds can be intimidating. On 23rd floor I took fright and ran all the way down and went and did a different block. But I knew I had to go back and finish the one I hadn't done. I came back via the basement walking through foul smelling leaking sewage."

Aside from the fact that no block on the Alton has more than twelve floors - so climbing to the 23rd was a remarkable feat even for a Conservative councillor - let's just take a reality check:

• The Conservatives have run Wandsworth Council (and its housing department) for 30 years
• They've (at least notionally) represented Roehampton ward for the past ten years
• They're the ones who sacked the local caretakers in favour of a cheapskate, out-of-town cleaning contractor
• They're responsible for the lifts working...or not; and the drains being cleared...or not

As the Councillor says candidly: Putney Conservatives live in a different world - on a different planet - entirely.

I wonder if she's bothered to report her findings to the housing department, let alone demand they be fixed? Maybe she doesn't realise that the point of being an elected representative is to improve the quality of life of our constituents, not just to write these shocked, skewed and, frankly, derogatory blogs about the novelty of visiting a council estate, of all places!

UPDATE 26.03.2008 - curiously, the councillor's post has, all of a sudden, disappeared from her website. Fortunately, thanks to the wonders of Google, it's been cached - so you can still read it here. Or, if you prefer, as a PDF here.

More from the Arndale

This is the Arndale estate - or at least most of it: the photo was taken from Sudbury House, the big block right on Wandsworth High Street. The three tower blocks are Knowles House, Edwyn House and Albon House on Neville Gill Close, and below them the long block that comprises Eliot and Wentworth Courts.

And here are some more photos we took on Saturday of the neglect of the estate by the Council. One of the things people kept mentioning was that they never get the chance to raise these problems with their councillors (all Conservative), or MP (also Conservative). The Arndale estate lies in Southfields ward, but evidently for their elected representatives, Southfields comprises just the leafy streets around the station - they don't appear to venture north of Granville Road.



When Putney had a Labour MP, Tony Colman, residents of the Arndale and the other northern parts of Southfields could pop in and see him regularly because he held an advice surgery at the Penfold Centre, right at the foot of Albon House. When I'm MP for Putney, Roehampton and Southfields, I'll hold advice sessions in this area too so that local residents are properly represented.

Out and about on the Arndale Estate

For far too many residents of council estates in Putney, this picture typifies the state of the housing the Tory Council believes they deserve to live in.

This is the entrance to Knowles House (or, as the Council's vandalised lettering would have it: "Koles Hous"), one of the three high-rise blocks overlooking King George's Park above the Southside Shopping Centre in Wandsworth Town.

What a disgraceful image to present to the world of our borough, and how unfortunate that the residents have to put up with such lack of respect for their homes.

My campaign team and I spoke to over 200 residents of Knowles House, its sister blocks Albon and Edwyn Houses, Sudbury Court - the really big blue and white block on the corner of Wandsworth High Street and Garratt Lane, and Eliot and Wentworth Courts: the long blocks in the middle of the Arndale development.

We came across problems that are sadly typical of those we pick up all around the constituency: damp problems, refuse collection problems, graffiti, dangerous dogs, lack of thorough cleaning, anti-social behaviour and - in this case the Housing Department is excelling itself - a flat that floods every time it rains.

Unfortunately, the Council seems much more interested in piling up new high-rise blocks in next door Hardwick's Way and further down Neville Gill Close rather than taking decent care of the ones it already has responsibility for. We're going to be keeping Council housing officers rather busy over the coming weeks, following up on the concerns residents asked for our help with.

The Tories' "affordable" housing scam

Two examples of how Wandsworth Council and their developer friends are making a laughing stock of affordable housing targets have come to light this week.

The first is that the Conservative definition of an affordable home is 250,000 for the tiniest one bedroom flat on the Riverside Quarter development just past Wandsworth Park.

As usual with Wandsworth Conservatives, they've refused to build a single affordable home for rent as part of this huge scheme while the proportion of so-called affordable homes here is barely 15%, despite requirements to make 50% of these huge developments affordable.

Now the Council will say that anyone interested in their poky quarter-of-a-million pound flats (which have all been bunged close to the railway line - the Tories don't believe ordinary Wandsworth residents deserve riverside views) only has to buy a minimum 25% share of that - and for some a 62,500 mortgage is more attainable than one for 250,000.

But that's not the end of the costs. Because while you're repaying that 62,500 mortgage (that's an outgoing of roughly 450 a month) you also have to pay rent on the 75% you don't own - so add another 260 a month to that total. Plus, these are serviced blocks - so add the service charges on top.

And then, if that wasn't crippling enough, I was contacted just today by a resident of the 'affordable' section of Castle Court, which is part of the Brewhouse Lane development by Putney Bridge. For the privilege of being able to park off-street (which she has to, because the council has disqualified residents of these developments from owning a residents' parking permit) her landlord, St George, is demanding the outrageous sum of 12,000!

All this adds up to totally unaffordable 'affordable' housing. It's nothing short of a scandal that whilst our local housing crisis grows ever worse the Conservatives block affordable homes, have the front to claim a 250,000 flat is affordable, and allow their developer chums to fleece those local families.

House prices still soaring

The Evening Standard today reports how London house prices are continuing to soar despite the national slowdown; further widening the gap between the Capital and the rest of the country.

In Wandsworth, prices climbed 20% last year with the average price in the whole borough at 394,000 (remember, in Putney the average price is just shy of half a million), though price-rises have slowed-up this month.

I appreciate, as someone who has a mortgage myself that this is one of those issues where homeowners generally welcome price rises, but for those not on the housing ladder they're a massive - and growing - problem. I don't want to see a down-turn in prices - that will have major consequences in terms of negative-equity for anyone with a mortgage, and we don't want to return to the boom-and-bust days of the last Tory government when tens of thousands lost their homes.

The local housing market is affected by more than just lack of supply and excess demand. The impact of the ultra-rich at the top end of the market in Kensington, Chelsea and Westminster has caused major ripples through next-door boroughs like ours. The rapid demographic changes Wandsworth has experienced in little over 30 years have also worsened the housing problems, as life-long Putney families have been forced out of the area, unable to move to more appropriate accommodation anywhere close to home. And, as I noted before, the Council's aggressive selling-off of half their housing stock has been catastrophic for social mobility in Wandsworth.

The answer remains the same: a massive shift in local house-building priorities away from top-end riverside penthouses and towards affordable homes to rent and buy. Because Wandsworth remains a popular place to live we're likely to avoid a marked downturn in house prices - which is important; but that only places a greater urgency for more affordable housing.

And that's an urgency Putney's Conservative MP and councillors have proven they simply don't have.

Click here for a larger image of the property map in today's Evening Standard.

Housing letter

I had a letter on the housing crisis published recently in the Wandsworth Borough News and Wandsworth Guardian, following parliamentary debate about the Government's housing green paper. Here's what I wrote:

Last week Parliament debated one of the most important issues facing Londoners - the need to provide more affordable homes.

The shortage of affordable housing in Putney means that many couples, families and first-time buyers are priced out of living locally.

There are almost 9,000 Wandsworth residents on the council's waiting list, many of whom have no realistic prospect of being offered a home in the foreseeable future.
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And the amount of affordable homes to rent in the borough has been halved by council policies: from over 32,000 to less than 17,000.

The Government's Housing and Regeneration Bill is a step in the right direction, promising three million new homes by 2020 and 240,000 zero carbon homes built every year.


That is why it is so disappointing that Putney's Conservative MP Justine Greening voted against these plans to build more affordable homes.

But this should come as no surprise as there is no reference to housing problems on her website, and there is no record of Ms Greening ever raising local housing problems in Parliament. She has, however, found time for 10 parliamentary questions on tobacco smuggling and two on the problems of the Island of Sark.

By voting against the Bill, Ms Greening has voted against helping local families to stay in the area as their families grow; she has voted against more affordable homes and she has voted against ensuring the new homes built are low and zero carbon and environmentally-friendly.

I encourage your readers who share my priority for local housing to visit my website at http://www.stuartking.net/housingsurvey and share their housing views with me.

STUART KING
Labour parliamentary candidate for Putney

Tories in denial about their role in our housing crisis

There was a quite extraordinary story in yesterday's Wandsworth Guardian flagging up the out-of-control homelessness problem in our borough.

New figures showing homelessness in the borough now standing at over 9,000 people: that's up a stunning 187% in the space of 6 years.

The figures from the independent London Housing Federation also show over 1,300 people in hugely-expensive temporary accommodation.

These are both disgraceful figures - and I personally would consider resigning if I had been responsible for causing such a problem, as Wandsworth Conservatives have been, by flogging off thousands upon thousands of council homes for rent and aggressively refusing to build any more to replace them.

It beggars belief that the Tories are still attempting to ply the line "Sure, we've halved the number of affordable homes in the borough from over 32,000 to less than 17,000 but it's nothing to do with us guv". It's the reason why I want the law changed so that for every council home sold off, two must be built - for rent - to replace it.

And it really is untenable for Putney's Conservative MP to remain utterly disinterested, oblivious and aloof about the local housing problem. She hasn't asked a single parliamentary question about it since she was elected over two and a half years ago. Yet again, she'd rather shut up about the failings of her Tory friends on the council than side with the constituents who elected her and it's just not good enough.

Read the Guardian article here.

Another example of housing neglect

On Sunday my campaign team and I were out in Southfields ward talking to residents of Brathway Road and Avening Terrace, as well as Merton Road and Morris Gardens.

Just as we found in our earlier visit to Longstaff Road and Longstaff Crescent, we found the state of repairs to the council properties in Brathway and Avening truly shocking - especially the neglect of windows. There was real anger at the refusal of the council to pay any attention to the needs of tenants in this area.

As a result, I asked Councillor Leonie Cooper, Labour's Housing spokesman and London Assembly candidate for our area, to get onto the Housing Department and find out why the Conservative-run council was being so neglectful of this area. And through our efforts, Avening and Brathway are on a list for repairs that could start next April, provided council tenants approve the schedule at a forthcoming meeting.

This is great news for the residents locally, even though it does mean another winter of draughts and higher-than-necessary heating bills, but the question must be asked: two areas of council property, two areas seriously neglected by the council - how many more examples exist around the constituency in similar urgent need of repair?

The Boris Johnson housing plan: LESS affordable homes

The Tory Mayoral candidate for London, Boris Johnson, yesterday came out with his plan to tackle our housing crisis: scrap all obligations on councils to ensure affordable homes are built!

Of course, it wasn't Londoners priced out of the housing market Boris chose to announce his bright idea to: it was house-builders, who would much rather reap the extra profits than honour their commitment to the areas they pile up their gated-off luxury apartments in the midst of.

Along with Wandsworth's Conservative Council - that has just about the worst record in London for building affordable homes and has almost halved the number of council homes for rent in the borough from 32,000 to less than 17,000 - these are just about the only people who would regard Boris's plan as anything other than plain stupid.

So under the Tories, we'll see even more luxury riverside penthouses along our Thamesbank, more public sites sold off for private housing, greater overcrowding, even higher house prices, more homelessness and longer waiting lists.

We desperately need more affordable homes, not less. I think the problem is severe enough in London that I don't think even Ken Livingstone is being radical enough: for the next five years I believe two thirds of all homes built in the Capital should be affordable - mainly for rent. Fat-cat developers like St George won't like that of course, but they know full well that they can still net a huge profit on the one-third of properties they could still sell.

No one can reasonably argue that there is no difference between Labour and Conservative. This is a critical problem: the Tories either ignore it (as Putney's MP does), or want to make it worse. I know Boris likes to play up to his 'buffoon' image but this is ridiculous.

Average Putney house price now half a million

If you needed further evidence that the main focus of Putney's MP should be housing, look no further than the latest figures from the Land Registry. They reveal that the average house price in the constituency is now 498,976.

Despite a slowing housing market in the rest of the country, in London, prices surged by 16%; making homes here twice as expensive as the rest of the UK. This again is why I'm arguing that London is a 'special case' - that we need more imaginative and far-reaching solutions to solve the Capital's problems.

Sadly, we're not getting them from the Conservatives - those that are vaguely interested in the problem, that is (a group that excludes our current MP who hasn't asked a single parliamentary question on the local housing situation since her election). The Tories would actually make the problem worse by accelerating council house sales without any plan to replace the rented homes lost. In effect, they're trying to saddle the rest of the country with the problem they've created in our borough: cash windfalls for the lucky few council tenants fortunate enough to buy their home; greatly reduced social and housing mobility for everyone else.

After a decade of Opposition, it should genuinely worry everyone that the only housing policy the Tories have come up with is a retread that's almost 30 years old - when Britain was a different country. Unless your income's rising by 16% a year then this problem affects you and the Tories couldn't care less.

Click here to visit my homewatch site and here for the www.putneysw15.com coverage of this story.

Government's housing consultation

The Government Green Paper on Housing: Homes for the Future has now been published. Green Papers are official consultation documents and the Government is inviting views from all of us between now and 15th October on the housing challenges facing the country.

I'll be ploughing through it over the Summer and giving my feedback both here on my blog and to the Department for Communities but if you'd like to read more of the Government's ideas you can download the consultation paper here. This is a big file, incidentally: an Adobe PDF 1.7mb so beware if you've got a slow server!

Housing

You may have seen Gordon Brown's announcement yesterday in the House of Commons making housing a central priority of the government in the coming months and years.

This is obviously something I very much welcome: housing is by far the biggest problem faced by people in Putney, Roehampton and Southfields - and it's a problem that affects the whole community, just in different ways.

I'm going to wait until the publication of the Government's Green Paper - their consultation document - next week before commenting in more detail on their plans, but there are five key areas they need to address:

1. Recognising that London's housing problems are very different from the rest of the country: affordability; capacity and the polarisation of very affluent areas next door to incredibly deprived ones.

2. Protecting the Green Belt: we do not want Stevenage, Reading, Crawley and Chelmsford to become suburbs of Greater London due to urban sprawl - and the only thing preventing that is the Green Belt

3. Clearing the party-political roadblock that stops the provision of affordable homes - as in our area - while preserving the right of local people to have a say on planning issues and tailoring housing policy to local need.

4. Building sustainable communities: affordable housing should be high quality housing, communities should have a diversity of housing tenures, property sizes and residents should reflect a diversity of backgrounds. And homes should be built closer to jobs.

5. Increasing housing mobility: more schemes to help first-time-buyers, help with stamp duty, more council homes to rent - and an end to the stigma that living in rented council housing is something to be ashamed of; a duty on councils to replace every home sold under right-to-buy with at least two new homes to rent.

These are just the first steps I think are needed to begin tackling our chronic housing problem. It's good that the Government has given housing the priority it demands; I'm optimistic that they'll bring forward ideas next week upon which we can - pardon the pun - build.