Comment: ‘A slow-motion housing disaster is forcing Londoners out of the capital’
News that Walthamstow, Leytonstone and the surrounding areas are now “red-hot property postcodes” will come as no surprise to hard-pressed locals.
The reality is that our corner of the capital has been sizzling for quite some time with many attracted to an area brimming with culture and green spaces. The result has been property prices, both sales and rental, rocketing.
To give you an idea of the scale of the problem, in 1997 the average Waltham Forest property was 3.7 times the typical local wage, about average for England and Wales.
The most recent Office for National Statistics data last year shows that figure had risen to 16.5 times, more than double that of the rest of the country, at eight times. Those multiples, if not quite as stark, will be familiar to many Londoners.
In 2010, the average property cost £220,000. In March this year, it had risen to £508,474. Even with the market cooling, it isn’t going back to affordable levels any time soon. This has a huge impact. Communities are being broken up as younger generations are forced to move far from their family homes.
How has this come to pass? Well, it has been a slow-motion disaster 40 years in the making. Right to Buy saw social housing sold off with little or no thought of how to replace it or with what.
Today, you need only look at empty inner-city classrooms to see the chilling effect of that short-termist policy, with families no longer able to live in the places where they grew up.
Once again, it has been up to local councils to fill the gap left by central government inaction. While Waltham Forest achieved the highest proportion (35 per cent) of affordable housing of any borough in London from 2011 to 2022, we know that many of these homes aren’t actually affordable to a lot of people.
Last year we built 190 council homes. This is the second highest number of any local authority. The low figures across London reveal how few council homes are being built and how the housing crisis can only keep getting worse without action.
Because of development in Waltham Forest, we have secured homes for 1,500 households on the council’s waiting list over the past 10 years. We know more can be done, which is why we set up an independent housing commission to make recommendations to provide practical and realistic suggestions to today’s housing problems.
Waltham Forest received £39 million in the Government’s levelling-up funding on top of the £533 million capital investment already planned over the next five years. By leveraging investment we are helping to build the infrastructure and create the growth and jobs that will help build the homes our city desperately needs.
Increasing council housing does not only help those who live in it. It also takes pressure out of the private rental market by decreasing competition, more effectively using public money by building homes rather than paying private landlords via housing benefits, and even stabilising house prices by taking some the heat out of the starter homes market with shared ownership schemes.
Councillor Ahsan Khan is deputy leader and the cabinet member for housing and regeneration at Waltham Forest council
