Wandsworth is taking bold steps to rebalance years of underinvestment in our social housing

Given how rare and valuable public land in London is, we think it’s important that despite the financial pressures on Housing Revenue Accounts, we try to protect public land for generations to come. That’s why we have decided to build 100% Ccouncil housing, utilising the lifting of the borrowing cap and using a 50-year loan horizon.

We don’t want to be kicking ourselves down the line when (hopefully!) government grant arrives but we’ve privatised our last remaining public sites. Therefore our 1,000-plus council-delivered homes will be 1,000-plus council rent homes. 

“We obviously want to deliver the maximum benefit to residents as soon as possible, but in all our work, we are looking beyond the four-year political cycle”

Another big decision was to end the sales policy that auctioned off valuable council street properties to purchase cheaper units elsewhere. We worked out that sales took place in areas of low deprivation but purchases back were in areas of high-deprivation.

Those remaining properties were also overwhelmingly the larger homes that were desperately needed by our bigger families, overcrowded and on the waiting list.

We know these will have challenges, particularly around Energy Performance Certificate ratings, but we don’t want to be in the business of selling council homes and know what a lifeline these homes can be, so have ended the auctions.

Alongside our own delivery programme, we want to see social housing being delivered by private developers on the land in the borough that we do not own. Rather than so-called ‘affordable’ housing, we consider social rents to be the most appropriate form of tenure for low-cost rented homes and will therefore seek to negotiate the highest percentage of social rent tenures as the absolute priority on all future planning applications. 

Wandsworth has the sixth-highest temporary accommodation use in the country, so in the past year we recruited 24 additional members of staff to our homelessness prevention team.

We saw during COVID that with political will, government can end street homelessness overnight. The Everyone In programme, which gave all rough sleepers a safe place to stay during the pandemic, was an important moment that then sadly ended.

We want to build on our learnings from that work, and so will establish our first in-house rough sleeping hub that brings together council services, SPEAR and other partner agencies to provide a single point of access for rough sleepers, utilising £4.8m of government funding. 

“We are aiming to rebalance decades of underinvestment and weakening of the social housing sector”

Private housing makes up 36% of the borough’s housing market and we are seeking to drive up standards by introducing discretionary landlord licensing to improve the condition and quality of properties in the private rented sector in an aim to crack down on rogue landlords.

We also actively support mayor Sadiq Khan in his call for emergency powers to freeze rents in moments of economic crisis and deliver rent control programmes for squeezed private renters who can’t access social housing but can’t afford to buy either. 

We obviously want to deliver the maximum benefit to residents as soon as possible, particularly in light of the current cost of living crisis, but in all our work, we are looking beyond the four-year political cycle. We want to deliver a fairer, more compassionate and more sustainable borough – not just for our existing residents but for future generations, too.

Aydin Dikerdem, cabinet member for housing, Wandsworth Council