Workers' Liberty

This is a one-off issue of Hackney Solidarity devoted to the Council's new 'estate regeneration' (aka. privatise and build on open spaces) policy. Click 'read more' to read the text; 'download' to download PDF.

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Hackney estates face a fight to defend the places we live. Hackney Council has a plan for its estates: to sell pieces of their land to Registered Social Landlords (RSLs) to build new ‘affordable’ homes on.

Their charming word “infill” means that open spaces on estates will be built on, closing in our environment and reducing our quality of life. They have named 28 estates, but if yours in not on the list, don’t think you’re safe - you’re just next in line. Five estates will be demolished, and one (Aspland & Marcon) dealt with separately under a privatise-demolish-‘regenerate’ plan.

Objection no.1: selling public land

Transfer to an RSL is a move away from public accountability, a form of privatisation. The experiences of residents on estates transferred in the past eg. the Pembury, are not good.

One reason that local authorities began mass house-building in the first half of the twentieth century is because the charities of the day - like Peabody, now called an RSL - were not meeting working-class housing needs. They still do not today. And unlike the Council, you can not vote them out if you don’t like what they are doing.

Publicly-owned land is an asset that should not be given over into private hands.

Objection no.2: divided communities

This policy will see estates divided between two separate landlords - Hackney Council and the RSL - which will divide the community. There could be two different rent levels, two different repairs services, and endless squabbles between the two as to who is responsible for maintenance of the common facilities.

The Nightingale estate already has this kind of set-up, and Nightingale residents’ representatives can tell you what a nightmare it is, with the various landlords forever bickering with each other as to whose responsibility it is to clean the playground, fund the old folks’ club etc.

TRAs are recognised by the Council - but who will they represent? Just the tenants and residents of the Council-owned parts of the estate? Or everyone?

Objection no.3: crammed in like sardines

When Hackney Labour promised 2,000 new homes in its manifesto, it did not say that they would all be crammed in to existing housing estates. There may be a few ‘underused’ areas on a few estates, but residents, given the opportunity and resources, would welcome the chance to develop these into gardens or play areas.

There is not enough ‘underused’ land on these 28 estates to fit in 700 homes (the figure agreed by the Cabinet after the Labour Group was told 550), so the Council must be defining areas as ‘underused’ which residents do in fact use. To the Council and the developers, ‘underused’ probably means ‘not making money’. But residents use our open spaces whenever we walk across them, let the kids out to play, get a breather from pollution, kick a ball about, sit under a tree, enjoy the sights, sounds and smells of plants and wildlife, or just look out of the window and see the sky rather than another building.

How many of our Councillors live on one of these 28 estates?

Hackney is already a densely-populated area, one of only six London boroughs with more than 10,000 people per square kilometre. There is far more ‘spare’ land in the favoured living areas of the rich than in working-class Hackney.
And can we be sure that local infrastructure eg. schools, leisure facilities and transport, will be improved to cope with the new popluation?

Objection no.4: ‘affordable’ to whom?

The new homes will not be Council homes. They will not even all be social housing for rent - some will be private homes for sale.

The Council says that these new homes will be ‘affordable’, but defines this as being affordable to households on an income of between £20,000 and £30,000. So - unaffordable to pensioners, or to unemployed people, or to any of Hackney’s thousands of low-paid workers. Teaching Assistants get £15,000; cleaners get even less.

Objection no.5: where’s the democracy?

Hackney Council claims residents will be consulted. But we are not worthy of being consulted about the policy itself, only about the detail of its implementation on our estate. Many of us have bad experiences of what Hackney Council means by ‘consultation’ - loads of meetings where you tell them your views only to be ignored.

Hackney’s Cabinet seems pleased with itself that it has discovered a way to ‘get round’ the limited amount of democratic rights that tenants have to prevent their homes being privatised. If the Council proposes to transfer your home to a Registered Social Landlord (RSL) via ‘stock transfer’, then it has to ballot you and your fellow tenants, and if you vote ‘No’, they can not go ahead. However, if it proposes to demolish your home, ‘decant’ you elsewhere, and sell the land to an RSL to build on, then you have no such right to a vote!

Without a democratic vote, tenants and residents have no choice but to actively fight this attack on our estates.

The Council says that redevelopment work will not go ahead on any estate where residents oppose it. But this may turn out in reality to mean “If you don’t accept the privatisation and ‘infill’, then you won’t get your Decent Homes work done”.

The government brought in the Decent Homes policy, so it should ensure that local Councils can implement it without having to “sell the family silver” (as we used to call it when privatisation was a Tory policy and the whole of the Labour Party was against it). It seems that Hackney Council embarked on its Decent Homes work whilst keeping secret that it did not have the resources to see it through. It is only now that Decent Homes is underway - and that Hackney’s Councillors are safely re-elected - that they admit their shortfall and unleash this attack on where we live.

Is there an alternative?

The recent Labour Party conference, for the third year running, voted for the ‘Fourth Option’ - that Councils should get public funding to build and run their own housing without having to privatise it. Labour in government should do what its party conference tells it to. While it ignores decisions like this, it continues to lose members and support.

The most recent statistics showed that there are 250 empty homes in Hackney Central alone - and there are 18 other wards in Hackney! The Council should rent out its own homes more quickly, and should take ownership of homes left empty by private landlords, make them fit to live in and rent them out.

Its new plan will need Compulsory Pruchase to buy out those leaseholders whose homes it wants to demolish - instead, it should use these powers to buy out landlords who leave homes empty.

The Council will fund the improvement works to its offices by selling a two-acre site on Hearn Street in Shoreditch for development of private business tower blocks. We have no objection to Council offices being improved if needed. But the Council is saying that it has to sell bits of estates to provide housing as though there is nowhere else it could build. How about building on this site rather than selling it off?!

Our response

A swift response from residents’ activists in the Gazette forced some statements from Labour Cabinet member Jamie Carswell that we will fight to hold him to. He says, “We are not talking about the green spaces on estates or the children’s playgrounds. We ar talking about the derelict pram sheds and the corners of estates that need work as a living environment at the moment. ... We are not looking to build tower blocks.”

However, Jamie Carswell’s idea of what constitutes a green space or a corner of an estate may well be different from residents’.

Aspland & Marcon TRA has already responded by reaffirming the five principles that formed the backbone of its last successful fight against redevelopment: no transfer to a new landlord; keep our green space and facilities; no rent rises; no loss of Council housing; minimum disruption to residents. It would be good to see other TRAs doing the same.

But we can not leave every estate’s TRA to respond individually. We need a Hackney-wide campaign to defend ourselves and our estates. If the official Tenants’ and Residents’ Convention is not up to leading this fight, we’ll need a rank-and-file link-up of TRAs, trade unions, supportive Labour Party branches, socialists and other activists.

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