G15 chair Fiona Fletcher-Smith: ‘If I was in the police, I would be very worried about social unrest linked to housing’

Ms Fletcher-Smith says the approach must change. “It’s slightly disappointing that the state of the country’s finances are still being put forward as [the reason] there will be no new money – that we’ve just got to make do and mend,” she says. “I’m really frustrated with that, because we have to have long-term thinking about the fact we are spending incredible amounts of money on housing every day [via the vast housing benefit bill]. We’ve got to break into that spending of money in the wrong way and try to spend it to create national assets in the right way.”

The Treasury regards housing as national debt rather than a national asset, and this needs to change, she states. “While you keep having that mindset, you’re not going to think about it as an asset that you need to build for the country’s infrastructure.”

If that is the problem, how will the G15 make a more effective case for change? First by working with others to build a coalition of voices on the subject. New work is imminent from the G15, London Councils and the London mayor, making the economic case for investing in new housing in London.

“The fact that one in 23 kids in London doesn’t have a permanent home doesn’t land [with Treasury],” Ms Fletcher-Smith says with annoyance. “We feel very sad about it, but it is not hitting the Treasury officials that we need to change their thinking. If you start to talk about the economic drag of a lack of affordable housing in London, and start to make the case for investment in an economic argument, you start to get more traction.”

Expect to see the G15 working more with business leaders to make the case for investment in housing, too. “If you talk to business leaders, they are very concerned about the ability to attract the staff they need,” she says. It is a case that Inside Housing has also been making, through our Build Social campaign. The campaign calls on political parties of all colours to commit to building substantial numbers of homes for social rent in their manifestos for the next election.

There is a wake-up call coming for government, too. Many associations have been warning that increased costs in other areas of their business, coupled with rising build costs and skills shortages, will eat into their ability to build new homes. The drop-off is dramatic in London. G15 forecasts, seen by Inside Housing, suggest its members will start just 2,222 homes in London in 2023-24, down from 10,255 in 2022-23, and a previous low of 6,462 over the past six years. If you include the homes G15 members build outside of London, the picture is similar. G15 members forecast they will start 6,387 homes this financial year, down from 14,658 last year, and a low of 10,605 over the past six years.

“It costs us about £400,000 to build a flat in London,” she says. “The maximum grant we will get is probably just over £100,000. So we have to find the rest from borrowing. And when I’m doing fire safety work, Decent Homes, carbon neutrality… there’s nothing left.”

That means that the current appalling housing situation for the people who are struggling most – there are currently a record 139,000 children living in temporary accommodation in England – is “just going to get worse”, Ms Fletcher-Smith argues. In turn, in an environment where a number of local authorities have already declared themselves bankrupt, this will leave “ordinary local authorities, who haven’t done anything strange or unusual, teetering on the edge”, she adds.

In making the case for a new approach to the Treasury, the G15 will be talking about the impact on the health service and educational attainment of those shocking figures.

“We’ve put all of that together as a package to say to the Treasury, ‘Look, it’s a no-brainer surely, that we invest in housing, and particularly we invest in social housing, because that frees up everything else.’” (On the latter point, both the G15 and L&Q have been strong backers of Inside Housing’s Build Social campaign.)

Earlier this year, housing secretary Michael Gove said he feared the housing crisis could endanger democracy in this country. While that concern clearly did not shake up the Treasury or chancellor Jeremy Hunt too much, given this month’s housing-light Budget, does Ms Fletcher-Smith share those concerns?

“You can see that we are creating this unequal, divided society between the people in this room – we are probably going to be OK and our kids are going to be OK because they will inherit from us,” she says. On the other hand, she tells the story of an 18-year-old she had spoken to who spent her entire childhood in temporary accommodation. “The leader of Hounslow Council told me a few weeks ago that it is a 12-year wait for a four-bedroom house [in the borough] if you need one. So that is your entire childhood in really unsuitable homes. So we are creating this massive divide. If I was in the police, I would be very worried about social unrest linked to housing and acquisitive crime linked to the haves and have-nots.” As for democracy? There is a danger that some people might think “democracy and rules and voting have got me nowhere”.

In full flow now, Ms Fletcher-Smith tells the story of a safeguarding referral she made to a local authority just before the pandemic after finding a mother and a young child “in a tent under an underpass”. “It makes me so bloody angry,” she says. “But I’ve got to stop being angry and passionate and going, ‘this is a disgrace’, and actually, just in a very cold manner, arm the Treasury officials with what it is doing to the economy.”

It is difficult to imagine Ms Fletcher-Smith talking dispassionately about the subject, but point taken.

Broken system

Throughout our interview, Ms Fletcher-Smith provides examples of a system that is currently broken. Wider public sector cuts and the struggle councils have with resources are causing stresses throughout the system, with the state “receding all the time”.

“We had an example of a chap in reception downstairs who had a can of petrol and said he was going to set light to himself because he said, ‘I can’t carry on any longer.’ So, we rang his mental health team in a London borough. And they said, ‘We can give you a case conference in four weeks.’”

The social housing sector itself has been criticised recently for the conditions some tenants have been left living in. Ms Fletcher-Smith says that she is determined to make solving these failures her top priority – “which is why the last thing I’m going to do is build, because I am going to use all my money to fix that problem first”. However, while the criticism over conditions might make some leaders consider keeping a low profile, Ms Fletcher-Smith says that cannot be an option.

“I think that connection with the social purpose of why we are here is just getting stronger and stronger, which is making us really quite angry, because we work in the sector and we want to give people a secure, safe, affordable home. If we just keep keeping our heads down, nothing is going to change.”