MUHAMMAD HAQUE sets out the contextual challenge to Ken Livingstone over London POVERTY. Can ken can it ? Can he get the act together on it?

ACTION reference to an INSIDE HOUSING magazine piece dated 01 May 2009. VERY TELLING insight on how Tory London has been ADDING NEW POVERTY
0400 [0340] Hrs GMT

London

Friday

18 march 2011

By © Muhammad Haque ...

Yesterday’s London EVENING STANDARD’s denunciation of Karen Buck, MP who is also one of Ken Livingstone's ‘mayoral candidacy campaign team members’ [2012], is very timely reminder of where the DISPOSSESSION-creating journalism is heading.
The EVENING STANDARD WANTS MORE DISPOSSESSION in London, not less. And the Karen Buck ‘tactics’, AS REPORTED by the EVENING STANDARD, will make things even worse for people in areas like Tower Hamlets unless she and anyone else who may actually want to stop the Tory attacks on the low income sections of the population get a fast grip of the so-called ‘evidence’.
Evidence that Tories like ex MP [CON] Marion Roe’s daughter Phillipa Roe [Housing chair, City of Westminster and one of the most Right-wing ‘local’ Councillors to be found anywhere in the UK today] have been abusing in their promotion of internal deportation of people already denied basic equality of income and all that goes with income parity.
The ‘tactics’ that Karen Buck has used are false, as they really rely on the emotion of the matter rather than the substance. She should go for the substance and concentrate her energies on showing the truth of HOW the Tories are CREATING POVERTY by using Housing as they have been for the past three years of the reinforced propaganda bandwagon following the take-over of ‘the Onion’ by the truly Right-wing brigade brought in by Boris Johnson.
We shall be detailing the REVERSE of the Tory Right Assault in London via Housing and show just how inept and useless the so-called Official opposition on the London Assembly has been about Housing.
And about CREATING NEW POVERTY via Housing.
[To be continued]
The new blue
01/05/2009
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Twelve months on from Boris Johnson’s election as London mayor Tory politicians are stamping their mark on the capital. Crispin Dowler meets the key players and discovers the national significance of their housing policies.

Boris Johnson’s election as London mayor – a year ago this week – marked a tidal shift in the political character of the capital. That day made Mr Johnson the first Conservative in the role and one of the most powerful Tories in the country. It also made him one of the most powerful figures in housing.

He inherited from his Labour predecessor, Ken Livingstone, sweeping new powers to decide major planning applications, and major influence over the city’s £5 billion housing budget.

For Conservative boroughs, this was a dramatic reversal of fortune. Mr Livingstone’s mayoralty had been marked by wars of attrition over housing between City Hall and Conservative councils like Hammersmith & Fulham. The former mayor thought Tory councils were reluctant to provide new social homes, and would not do so without pressure. The boroughs countered that his centrepiece policy – that half of all new homes should be affordable – impeded development.

But the significance extends beyond London. A post-Budget YouGov/Daily Telegraph poll put the Conservatives 18 points ahead of Labour. With the prospect of a Tory government looming large, the symbolic importance of a Conservative-controlled capital is not lost on the national party.

For anyone keen to know what the next government’s housing policy might be, London has become the Petri dish to examine Conservative power in the 21st century. The mayor’s pledge to abolish the 50 per cent target closely mirrors the animosity to planning targets in the party’s new housing manifesto. And beyond City Hall, London is culturing the spores of a radical new Conservative housing politics. Last week Stephen Greenhalgh, the influential leader of Hammersmith & Fulham council, published a blueprint for sweeping deregulation of social housing.

Now, on the first anniversary of Mr Johnson’s election, Inside Housing meets three figures at the heart of London’s new Conservative housing experiment.

The mayor’s advisor

Richard Blakeway, director of housing at City Hall

It might not have happened as often as he’s had hot dinners, but Boris Johnson has been described as ‘inimitable’ more than most. Meet his chief housing advisor and you might begin to question the wisdom of that tag.

Many have commented on Richard Blakeway’s uncanny similarity to his boss. Both men present a near-caricature of the dishevelled public schoolboy: all well-fed vowels, unkempt manner and captain-of-the-debating-society enthusiasm for political argument.

Both are also willing to court controversy for the sake of a snappy line.

Earlier this year, while arguing that quality of life for social tenants is a ‘joke’, Mr Blakeway claimed ‘46 per cent of social tenants on estates love their dog more than their neighbour’. His speech prompted the late Defend Council Housing chair Alan Walter to call for him to be put on a lead.

The story of how 30-year-old Mr Blakeway became director of housing at City Hall offers a useful insight into the mayor’s relationship with David Cameron’s Conservatives. Before joining the mayor’s campaign, Mr Blakeway’s entire professional life had been in Westminster, working his way from researcher to policy wonk. When Mr Cameron became Tory party leader in 2005, Mr Blakeway was appointed to an 18-month review of international development policy, alongside Sir Bob Geldof and others, thinking up new ways to finance foreign aid.

By autumn 2007 the review was complete and he was anticipating a natural end to his political days. ‘It was the last day of party conference, and I was sat outside a café in the rain with [shadow housing minister] Grant Shapps, who I had known since he became an MP,’ he recalls. ‘Everyone expected an election to be called… I was thinking, I’ll probably leave politics and take up publishing.’

But the election never came, and Mr Johnson’s shot at the mayoralty was suddenly the biggest game in town. Mr Blakeway was parachuted in to help draft campaign manifestoes.

In at the deep end

With the election win came Mr Blakeway’s first chance at practical politics. He was brought into City Hall in a temporary ‘transition team’ given 100 days to kick-start the new mayoralty. When Mr Johnson asked him to stay on, the directorship Mr Blakeway wanted was housing. He was intrigued by the new powers and huge budget at the mayor’s disposal. ‘We had a real clean slate, accentuated by the market and by the fact that people were willing to look afresh at things,’ he says.

The appointment raised eyebrows in the sector. When he took the £81,000-a-year post, Mr Blakeway had no experience in housing. But he claims his greenness as a virtue, insisting people have been ‘refreshed’ by the new approach at City Hall. He describes this as a willingness to ‘show leadership in a very challenging market’, without being ‘weighed down by baggage’ built up ‘over decades of working in the sector’.

Ultimately that leadership will be judged on the success of his policies. And the mayor’s defining housing policy is the abolition of London’s 50 per cent target. The pair were so confident of accomplishing more through co-operative negotiation with boroughs, they matched Mr Livingstone’s commitment to deliver 50,000 affordable homes between 2008 and 2011. Since October, City Hall has been in closed-door negotiations to agree individual targets with the boroughs.

More than any other, this approach presents a microcosm of what a Conservative government’s housing policy might look like. In its recent housing green paper, the party promised to revoke the system of centrally imposed building targets, replacing them with ‘incentives to develop’.

So how is London’s localist experiment going? Mr Blakeway says the boroughs have so far been persuaded to agree to ‘more than 40,000’ new homes, a figure he claims is greater than Mr Livingstone could have delivered. In the current market, with few planning applications coming forward, a percentage target is not the right ‘lever’ to deliver affordable homes, he insists.

But the mayor wants negotiations concluded this spring. Can his office get the boroughs up to 50,000 by then? ‘People will be surprised how close we are to delivering an unprecedented number of affordable homes in London,’ Mr Blakeway replies.

Is that a yes or a no? ‘That’s my answer.’

The council leader

Stephen Greenhalgh, Hammersmith & Fulham Council

Stephen Greenhalgh gestures to a map of Hammersmith & Fulham he keeps hanging in his office. Four areas are marked in deep red, indicating their place among the nation’s top 10 per cent most deprived neighbourhoods. They are all, he says, areas where social housing predominates. ‘We need to challenge the needs-based system that underpins social housing,’ he says.

‘We are challenging the current orthodoxy about how social housing is allocated, because the social consequences are so bad, the economic consequences for the competitiveness of our inner cities are poor, and the financial returns are risible.’

Few people have done more to define what right wing Conservative housing policy looks like in the 21st century than Mr Greenhalgh, who has been leader of the council since 2006.

Until now, this has been manifested largely through his own borough’s policies. These include pushing for shared ownership or intermediate housing, in place of new social homes, on developments in the areas marked in red. The borough also uses what little discretion it has over social housing allocations to prioritise those willing to seek work.

To London’s Labour politicians, this approach falls somewhere between social engineering and outright gerrymandering. The council wants to drive down the proportion of social housing, opponents say, because it considers social tenants unlikely to vote Tory. The suggestion provokes scorn from Mr Greenhalgh. ‘This isn’t a political game. What we’re trying to do is achieve decent neighbourhoods. Attract a mixture of incomes in areas of concentrated deprivation. Look at the map – that’s where it is.’

Now the 41-year-old has turned his attention to national reform. Last week he launched a co-authored paper calling for radical deregulation of social housing, to empower councils to break down concentrations of poverty.

Principles for social housing reform advocates scrapping the needs-based allocation system, allowing local authorities to house ‘a higher proportion of economically active households’.

All social homes would be switched to a form of assured shorthold tenancy, modelled on the private sector. Councils and housing associations would be free to let, sell and redevelop their stock largely as they chose. And rents would rise to near-market levels, with government funds currently used to develop social housing shifted to increased housing benefit payments. Local authorities’ new freedoms would be matched by a duty to ‘fix broken neighbourhoods’.

‘If the vast majority of people are workless, or have lots of issues, it’s not a great place to get on in life,’ he continues.

‘We are arguing, as the government has argued, that it’s very important to think about mixed communities.’

But the solution he proposes would demand slaughtering social housing’s sacred cow – security of tenure. Local authorities would have a ‘duty to house’ only a small group of people deemed incapable of housing themselves, such as the severely disabled and the drug-addicted. For the majority, councils would have a duty to help them secure housing in the market. Does Mr Greenhalgh think any government could get away with this?

‘If you want my honest opinion – tenure will be the hardest battle to fight. That will be the hardest one to deal with, and is where the battle lines will be drawn over this issue.’

Does he think that this battle will happen if a Conservative government is elected into power? ‘It’s going to happen sometime, we just don’t know when.’

He argues that the time is right for the radical – and, to many, shocking – reforms he proposes. ‘I was struck by how many housing professionals are beginning to think about the shortcomings of the current system,’ he says.

‘They are not all agreed about what we should do, but their appetite for reform is palpable… The time is now to define the principles that will lead to reform of a system that no longer works.’

The cabinet member

Philippa Roe, Westminster Council

‘Not at all!’ exclaims Philippa Roe. ‘Not at all.’

In a meeting room on the 17th floor of Westminster City Hall, the councillor is energetically dismissing my suggestion she might have difficulty relating to social tenants. She is, after all, a Roe dean School alumnus, a former investment banker and a long-time resident of her ritzy Knightsbridge & Belgravia ward.

‘Everyone’s life goes through ups and downs, and my own has as well, and, you know, the older you get the more empathy you have. Of course I have immense sympathy for people and their problems… I think you’re stereotyping me.’

Ms Roe, 46, has only been in charge of the Westminster housing portfolio as long as Boris Johnson has been in charge at City Hall. She was elected in 2006 and awarded her cabinet post last May. But she is in no doubt that the major change Mr Johnson’s election has brought is the abolition of the 50 per cent target.

‘The biggest difference is his emphasis, not on delivering section 106s and the percentage of [affordable] houses on a development, but on targets for each authority, which gives us much more freedom in where we put them, and how we structure them,’ she says. Westminster is still negotiating its target.

It is an emphasis she hopes to see mirrored in the policies of a future Conservative government. Asked what voters might expect from such a government, on the basis of Mr Johnson’s example, she says: ‘I would like to think it is devolving more decision-making down to local councils in terms of what is right about social housing in their area, and allowing them to finance it themselves.’

Although new to her post, Ms Roe has a pedigree in Tory politics. The daughter of former Conservative MP Dame Marion Roe, she served on the high-level panel of private sector experts brought in by the last Tory government to set up the private finance initiative.

Now she is looking for ways to cement what she sees as the ‘core’ principle of PFI – that the rigours of a competitive market can drive up standards in the public sector – in the relationship Westminster has with its arm’s-length management organisation, Citywest Homes.

Last autumn, relations between the council and the ALMO’s senior management broke down. The chief executive and the finance director both resigned. Chair Kevin Bond was sacked a few weeks later, and he accused Westminster of trampling Citywest’s independence.

Ms Roe believes the ‘root of the problem’ is the way ALMO contracts are structured.

‘I think they were set up with a naive view that ALMOs were going to offer the best of both worlds, where you would still have local authority involvement, but you would have the incentivisation of the private sector.

‘In fact, it’s the worst of both worlds, because they have independence… but from the client perspective it is extremely difficult to terminate the relationship with them.’ This means, she says, councils do not have the ‘normal levers’ a customer has to push up service quality. As a result they become ‘too involved’ in managing their ALMOs’ if they perceive problems.

In response, she wants an arrangement that will make Citywest ‘more like a private sector provider of housing management services’. This would involve regular, possibly annual, opportunities to review the contract, and the ability to terminate and pass it to a housing association if service fell short.

‘There has to be a genuine market there so that there’s real competition, and people are genuinely trying to give you a) the best price, and b) the best service,’ she concludes. ‘And for them all constantly to feel that they’ve got to keep on their toes, otherwise we could terminate.’