• IT’S been recognised for many years now that London has a housing crisis.

Home ownership is largely out of reach for ordinary working people and the private rented sector is both expensive and insecure.

Social housing provides long-term security and affordability, but the failure of successive governments to build means that demand greatly outstrips supply.

As a local authority housing officer, I see for myself on a daily basis the distress and suffering caused by the shortage of social housing; families crammed into one-bedroom flats; tenants with complex needs unable to move to more suitable areas; young people unable to move out and begin living independently.

This is a crisis of wasted human potential, a crisis often overlooked by the comfortably housed.

In Islington we’re lucky to have a council that is committed to social housing and has ambitious plans to increase supply, despite the lack of support from central government.

The council has pledged to build 1,900 genuinely affordable homes in the borough by 2022.

That means single homeless people off the streets; it means children with a room of their own for the first time; it means families finally able to put down roots in a community.

Regrettably even this ambitious programme will only house a fraction of the 14,000 households on Islington’s housing register.

If we are to truly end the housing crisis, central government must step up and provide the necessary resources.

In the meantime, let’s not succumb to the “not-in-my-back-yard” attitude that supports new homes in theory but not in practice.

Building new homes in a densely-populated inner-London borough will always be a challenge. For the sake of the homeless and overcrowded, it’s a challenge we must embrace.

JACKSON CAINES,
N19