Camden Tory leader Piers Wauchope asks why one of the highest taxing boroughs provides some of the worst housing

IN 2000 the government announced that all council tenants should live in “decent standard” housing by 2010. A “decent” home is one that is fit to live in and is in a reasonable state of repair. It should have a modern kitchen, bathroom and toilet, and should be warm.
Since then councils all over the country have been renovating their council homes to reach the target. Westminster expects to achieve the standard for all its council homes by 2006, and Kensington and Chelsea by 2008, but some councils know that this is an impossible dream.
Among those councils to have given up hope is Camden. In the Audit Commission’s Best Value Performance Indicators released last week, 81 per cent of Camden’s homes are shown to fall short of the government’s decent standard. Of the 400 or so local authorities listed, only four are worse than Camden.
The Audit Commission figures place Camden in the worst one percent in the country.
But those figures are last year’s. The most recent figures for Camden show that of its 24,686 council homes (this does not include our 9,000 leasehold properties), 23,324 have not reached the standard and are classified as “non-decent”. That’s 94.5 per cent. The figures show Camden to be, by a long way, the authority with the lowest proportion of decent standard council homes in the country. And it is getting worse.
Only 600 homes will have been brought up to the government’s decent standard by the end of the financial year next month, by which time another 7,000 will have been reclassified as “non decent”.
It is difficult not to be amazed, as we often have been over the years, at the widening gap between Camden’s empty boasts and the pitiful reality. There is continued wastage in repairs not carried out properly, of contractors not properly supervised, in the council’s curious and expensive priorities, and in the amount of time and effort spent attacking the right to buy and leaseholders generally. And of course, most recently, in the £100m Chalcots Estate private finance initiative adventure that rocketed out of control and then crashed.
As is always the case, the Labour Party in Camden have cast around to blame someone else. It is nothing to do, they want us to believe, with Camden’s chronic under-investment over the last two decades.
It is nothing to do with Camden’s cutting off investment in council housing by restricting the right to buy. It is, says Camden, wholly the fault of the government who is punishing us for not accepting an Arms Length Management Organisation (Almo). But that does not begin to tell the story.
Compare Camden’s position with the only other borough in inner London to have rejected the Almo option, Tory-run Wandsworth (also with about 35,000 council properties, but with about half now occupied by leaseholders). The figures published by the Audit Commission show that only 15 per cent of their tenanted properties remained “non decent” last year, but the up-to-date figures show that Wandsworth has made great progress and the figure has fallen to a mere four per cent.
This is without the extra funding that the government would release if they set up an Almo. The stark truth is that in Wandsworth 96 per cent of the council homes have been renovated to the “decent” standard, but in Camden only 5.5 per cent of council homes have reached the same level.
Why, people will ask, is it that the lowest taxing authority in inner London (Wandsworth) should have invested so much in its council housing over the last 20 years, while the highest taxing authority in inner London (Camden) should have done so little?
The mechanics are never simple, but the reality is political. Any Conservative-run council with large housing estates, once natural Labour territory, has to take great care of its council tenants. The Conservatives can never take their votes for granted.
In Wandsworth, where Labour would once have expected to win wards with large council estates, such as Balham or Roehampton, people vote Conservative and get better housing in consequence. In Camden, Labour’s attitude has been different. Some might call it arrogant.
Council tenants are taken for granted. Labour is confident that tenants will be kept loyal, not by action or investment, but by scare stories of what the Conservative bogeymen will do.
Times are changing. Will Labour be able to rely on its council tenants in quite the same way in the future? I doubt it.