Cllr Diarmaid Ward

I BECAME an Islington councillor because I wanted more much-needed safe, decent and genuinely affordable homes for local people. Each and every new council home changes lives.

After a decade at the Town Hall, I’ve seen amazing new housing like the award-winning Dover Court, Telfer House, Kings Square and Redbrick estate (to name a few).

Hundreds more Islington residents now live in affordable, high-quality homes and communities have been transformed with new community centres, play parks and landscaped grounds.

And we want to create hundreds more council homes, to change hundreds more lives.

But the truth is it has never been more difficult. Across England, all local authorities face the same challenges.
For years, the Right to Buy scheme and a lack of proper government funding have robbed us of precious council homes.

Construction costs are rising, and sales values are falling. There are new standards for council houses, which are absolutely right, but also increase the costs of building, with no increase in funding.

Nationally, contractors are going into administration, reducing the number of builders who can carry out the work, driving up costs and delays.

And just last month, the government scrapped its scheme that allowed councils to keep all the money raised by sales of council homes through Right to Buy to build more council homes.

Instead, nearly half of sales money now goes straight to the Treasury. Imagine if that happened with sales of private homes.

On top of that, the government’s red tape means that councils like Islington can’t even spend the Right to Buy sales money we are allowed to keep in the best way. We aren’t allowed to fund more than half of a new-build scheme with money from Right to Buy receipts. We can’t add it to affordable homes grant to build new homes.
These rules tie us in knots.

But doing nothing is not an option. With 15,000 households waiting for a council home in Islington, we urgently need more homes.

We are not giving up and we are working to build another 750 new council homes, on top of the 161 homes we are already building on Andover Estate, Beaumont Rise, Dixon Clark Court, Elthorne Estate, Parkview Estate and Windsor Street.

We also have some of the toughest planning rules in the country to make sure that other developers build genuinely affordable homes. At Holloway Park and Barnsbury Estate, we have secured 550 new social rent homes.

It’s a tough goal, especially when other councils are scrapping their plans, but we’re not backing down. We have to adapt in order to keep building. We’ve started work on some new schemes and have ended some that no longer stack up financially. We’ve already got plans for around 180 new homes across different sites including Finsbury Leisure Centre, Bemerton Estate South, Vorley Road and the Harvist Estate, and we are designing new schemes for another 570 council homes.

However, we cannot tackle this crisis alone. We need change from government. They must let local authorities keep all income from Right to Buy sales and let us spend more flexibly. This would give Islington Council an extra £3.7 million per year to put directly towards creating more council housing. We need it to be easier and cheaper for councils to borrow money to build council homes.

Nothing is more important than the roof over your head. There’s no justice without housing justice. Islington families need safe, secure and genuinely affordable homes to live and thrive.

We will keep fighting to build council homes, but we need the government to work with us, not stack the deck against us.

• Cllr Diarmaid Ward is deputy leader of Islington Council and executive member for finance & performance