Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Cllr Claire Kober: You have No mandate for the HDV
Tags for Forum Posts: haringey development vehicle, hdv
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Michael Anderson on
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By allowing local authorities to borrow money to fund capital projects like building social housing. That’s how most the social housing we have now was constructed up to 1980. Each local authority submitted an annual Housing Investment Programme bid to government who then gave permission to borrow to build, either themselves or with Housing Associations. The income from rents paid back the loans.
The system was changed radically by the Housing Act 1980 which placed severe restrictions on borrowing. If you look at statistics for new social housing you can chart the decline in new homes from around that date. As the 1980 Housing Act also introduced the right to buy, exisiting social rented homes were taken out of the housing stock with no new homes to replace them because as the income from sales went to central government, not the individual local authorities.
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Permalink Reply by John McMullan on
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It's exactly what Michael said above. With two quite fair assumptions I will expand upon what he said to try to answer your question. One assumption is that the council already own the land which is the most significant cost of a development in London and the other is that interest rates for governments to borrow are historically low and consensus is that they will remain so.
Then the council can be just like a buy-to-let landlord. They don't need to borrow as much as private landlords as they already own the land and the rents charged will pay off the loan in a reasonable time. All they need to borrow is the construction costs but at the moment they're not allowed to even do that hence the "deal" with Lendlease.
I think they're also worried that if they build flats, people will RTB them, another tweak to the system that favoured landlords.
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The borrowing permission covered all capital works, including estate modernisation. Disclaimer - I used to work managing social housing and estate modernisation for Camden
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I think they're thinking of the "future" (less than 25 years). Yes the top of the housing list (good old English ordering of people - how far are you away from being King or Queen for instance) is full of people who really, really need a home. Then after we get going we're into the people who are currently prey to the private sector landlords.
So does your tenancy finish if you've been in a flat for 20 years and they demolish it to build you a new one?
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No I meant what about without the HDV? What if the council could just rebuild homes in a process the way they install new kitchens and bathrooms on a cycle? So you'd get a new flat in a similar location but if you carried over your RTB from 20 years in the old one, what would that mean?
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Actually I work with some Russian guys and they've been cluing me on how that all went down. The world is apparently concentrating on the Oligarchs and forgetting that people were also handed the keys to their houses.
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Permalink Reply by Gordon T on
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Eh? Mrs Thatcher influenced by Yeltsin?? Right to Buy 1980. Yeltsin in power 1991-99.
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Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek then, and Keith Joseph who was her Number 10 ideologue-in-chief. Plus Alan Walters who was the cause of Nigel Lawson's resignation (dammit he's still active, in denying climate change at any level).
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Also, as the loan is backed by government it is (or was) at a lower rate of interest than commercial loans. It was excellent value as the rate remained below the cost of living increases of rents so the excess money was used in the Housing Revenue Account to fund non-capital work (redecoration of common areas, grants for making homes easier to live in for disabled residents etc)
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Permalink Reply by Chris Setz on
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I'd like to help end the myth that Councils cannot build enough social housing due to Central Government restrictions. If the political will was there, our Council can find ways to build everything we need at the cost of giving the construction companies a profit. The profit lost is relatively small over the long term.
One example is in Luton, where the "socially-minded" construction company borrowed their construction costs - they still end up with a profit and Luton Council ends up with 100% of the social homes and, eventually, the rental income. Another is the Mayor of London, who found 13 bidders happy to bid to build 330 homes in Walthamstow, 100% of which are affordable. How many bidders could we find here?
That we haven't means to me that our Cllrs do not want a series of smaller construction-only projects, they want to give away a lot more to have one big "partner". I agree with most of the anti-HDV comment - that's far too risky and I too resent a massive foreign corporate with no 'stake' in our society getting richer.
Hopefully the HDV will be split into smaller, less wasteful chunks but there is another big problem - secrecy.
Despite having signed the Govt's Transparency Code, which tries to commit signatories to not use "commercial confidentiality" in public projects, our Council have always hidden their major property transactions behind a wall of secrecy - I suspect this is the senior "suits" in the Planning Department actively refusing to cooperate.
Commercial confidentiality mean no FOI requests allowed, there's not even a 30 year rule - the contract (the heart of the issue) remains secret in perpetuity - that's terrible! How can they claim to be open when the most important things they do are 100% confidential in perpetuity?
I hope the new regime will face residents squarely and inclusively with our housing problems. We don't have much money so need to work with the private sector and get ripped off, but we can minimise the loss and become enriched long-term if there are many eyes on the prize during the process. That's our real strength.
This can go some way to correcting the "power without responsibility" of the many people here who constantly criticise everything our Council does on our behalf - it's our Council, acting in our name and we can all help it do better if we get involved, and take responsibility when things go wrong.
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