Andy condemns demolition plans in Commons housing debate

On the last day of the Parliamentary session, I was able to speak in the housing debate and draw attention to the appaling plans of Hammersmith and Fulham's Tory council to demolish thousands of homes in the borough.

I was also able to take Fulham Tory MP Greg Hands to task, who dismissed the accusations as being "wholly untrue" in a recent Parliamentary debate. Now that the truth is out, I'm keen to hear when he will set the record straight.

My speech is below.

Mr. Andy Slaughter (Ealing, Acton and Shepherd’s Bush) (Lab): I wish to speak about a despicable act of vandalism perpetrated on the homes and lives of thousands of my constituents. Some 3,500 families, the majority in Shepherd’s Bush and some in Hammersmith and West Kensington, face demolition of their homes and uncertain futures.

Let me be clear from the outset: we are talking about good quality homes, built to a high standard, modernised at the cost of tens of millions of pounds in the past few years, thanks to the Decent Homes programmes, in neighbourhoods in which people are proud to live. They are on the White City, Batman close and Wood Lane estates in Shepherd’s Bush; on Ashcroft square and Queen Caroline estate in Hammersmith, and on the West Kensington and Gibbs Green estates in west Kensington. The last two are outside my current constituency, though in my prospective constituency. I have had the honour of representing the area for 20 years on the council and they are all areas that I know well. The homes are designated “not decent” by Hammersmith and Fulham council, which has, in the most disparaging terms, condemned not only the buildings and the areas but the residents. It is the nastiest piece of social apartheid in this country for many years.

A year or so ago, rumours, which were hard to credit at the time, began to circulate that the relatively newly elected Tory council in Hammersmith and Fulham planned to pull down the seven estates. Freedom of information requests were dodged and answers to questions were evaded—there was nothing in writing at the time. Plans were held up because of the continued presence of Ken Livingstone as Mayor of London, but when Boris Johnson was elected last year, the council moved swiftly ahead, first by dropping all plans for new affordable housing, by accelerating small-scale demolitions, by designated sales and by handing back hundreds of affordable homes to developers, saying that they were unwanted.

However, last month, as a consequence of a document called the local development framework core options strategy, the seven estates were named as requiring complete redevelopment and demolition, even though some will have Decent Homes work done, at a cost of millions of pounds, next year. The plans are to replace them with luxury housing and commercial developments such as conference centres. That has already been extensively reported in the Evening Standard and I am grateful to it for featuring the story as a double-page spread the week before last, to the Daily Mirror, which did an excellent editorial on the subject, and to The Guardian and other newspapers.

The leaseholders and freeholders will get a price, which will not enable them to buy equivalent accommodation in the area, and they will have to move considerably further out. The tenants have an uncertain future. At least a third fewer units of housing will replace existing affordable housing. The replacement affordable housing will be registered social landlord housing: typically, it will be half the size, more expensive to run, and the rents will be 50 per cent. more. For many tenants, the only option will be to move out of the borough—Barking, Dagenham and Thamesmead have been mentioned as destinations for them. Many are elderly people, who have lived on the estates since the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s when they were built. The greatest irony is that those estates are already mixed communities. Half the flats on many estates are leasehold—they contain many professional people and many people in employment on average wages or above.

The side effects will be on the local waiting lists. For 20 years of the redevelopment strategy, nobody will move on any other estate or RSL property in the borough. In the meantime, as the estates are developed—it has happened elsewhere—there will be complete neglect. Flats will be boarded up, there will be temporary housing and infestations, and only health and safety repairs will be done. All that was confirmed to me by not only the published document but the assistant director, Lyn Garner, whom I saw for an hour and a half the week before last. She admitted to me for the first time face to face that all those things would happen.

I have given notice to the hon. Member for Hammersmith and Fulham (Mr. Hands) that I would refer to him. He represents four of the estates. He needs at some point to correct the record because earlier this month, he said that the plans

“‘to demolish the estates and force everyone to move’”

are

“wholly untrue.”—[ Official Report, 29 June 2009; Vol. 495, c. 42.]

His own council—his colleagues—has published the fact that that is true, so it is wrong that those remarks should remain on the record in that form.

However, that is not the end of the matter; it is the beginning. We are not talking about just an attack or gerrymandering that goes far beyond anything that Shirley Porter tried in her time. We are talking about something that was designed by the leader of Hammersmith council, who is the head of the Tories’ local government innovation unit, as a blueprint for the rest of the country. How do we know that? We know it because he published a document earlier this year called “Principles for Social Housing Reform”. We also know it because, at the council’s expense, he held a round-table discussion with Tory Front Benchers, other senior Tory politicians and, shamefully, local government officers on 3 March that agreed to the most extraordinary blueprint for the future. Market rents for all housing; no security of tenure; no right to buy; no duty to house the homeless; no capital investment at all in social housing—is this really the future for housing under a Tory Government?

I believe that what happened was unlawful—the involvement of local government officers, the employment of Tory activists to carry out the work and the funding of Tory think-tanks by a local authority—and a complaint is being made to the district auditor. More importantly in the long run, however, we are talking about the destruction of communities for political advantage and in the interests of warped social engineering of a kind I had hoped I would never see a mainstream party in this country support. It is now up to the Tory Front Benchers to dissociate themselves entirely from what is being done in Hammersmith and Fulham. If it really is a right-wing fringe taking such action, let them say so; but if they wish to endorse such appalling attacks on the lives and livelihoods of my constituents, let them say that also.