Don't grow tired of caring about London’s housing emergency

In a talk for The London Society, Housing Ombudsman Richard Blakeway has warned of the danger of tolerating the intolerable

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In theory, Britain’s Housing Ombudsman is not one of London’s emergency services: the office’s primary role is to resolve disputes between social housing tenants and their landlords. In practice, there is a flashing blue light quality to its work. Ask Richard Blakeway, the Housing Ombudsman himself. “The housing emergency is starting to make us feel like an emergency service,” he said at a London Society event last week. “Every 30 seconds someone calls us for help.”

Not all of those calls are from Londoners. But Blakeway told the gathering at the Clerkenwell office of architects BDP that 47 per cent of his team’s casework comes from the capital. That is striking, and yet no great surprise. Councils and housing associations own about 800,000 homes for low-cost rent in London. All of those providers have to sign up with the Ombudsman, and with some private landlords also doing so voluntarily, one Londoner in four or five is entitled to seek the organisation’s assistance.

Demand is a daily deluge. This, too, is to be expected given the daunting stats. Drawing on research from cross-party local authority group London Councils, Blakeway reminded his audience that on average every classroom in the capital contains a child living in temporary accommodation. At the other end of the age range, he pointed to an increase in the number of over-55s housed by the private rented sector, which has been growing in recent years as the number of mortgage-holders has declined. “At some point, they will retire,” Blakeway said. “How will they afford their housing costs?”

To these numbers can be added the more than 323,000 London households on waiting lists for social housing – twice the population of Cambridge. In inner London, where lists are longest, the average waiting time for a one-bedroom property is well over three years. City Hall’s latest evidence base says there was a small increase in the total amount of social housing in London between 2022 and 2023, but that was nowhere near enough to keep pace with demand, and supply has lately ground to a near-halt.

The same data source says at least 6.6 per cent of all London’s homes are overcrowded. A government estimate in 2020 found that over 400,000 London homes fall short of the national Decent Homes Standard. The other week, I spent two hours with tenants of a two-year-old housing association block in Purley. I headed home with my head ringing with their stories of doors that won’t close, a lift that doesn’t work and rats scratching in cavities behind their walls.

I could go on. And on. And on. And the awful thing is, you might get bored. So might I. After all, voices have been raised about London’s housing crisis for much of this century. As Blakeway said, the term embraces a number of different crises covering quality, availability and affordability across every tenure in different ways. With the big picture getting grimmer and borough budgets buckling under the financial strain, the word “emergency” has been recruited to bring home just how alarming these crises are. But how much impact does that have when even some of those with the most direct responsibility for putting things right display symptoms of commitment fatigue?

“I worry that the numbers are so huge or so often repeated that people may become desensitised,” Blakeway said. He expressed concern, echoed the findings of recent Ombudsman investigations, that the pressures housing associations have come under, due to new post-Grenfell safety standards, ongoing grant reductions, the disruptive effects of mergers and the combination of market conditions that has hit home-building across the board, have seen what he called “a creeping normalisation of responses, a sort of tolerance of things that aren’t tolerable”.

To illustrate the scale of the task to be addressed, he spoke about the landmark Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes, published in 1885. We would be struck if we read it, Blakeway said, by the similarities between the issues the commissioners addressed back then and those clamouring for attention today, not least the link between housing conditions and health. An Act of Parliament about the issue was assented in the same year and another five years later, the latter giving new powers to the London County Council.

Descriptions of London’s housing conditions in George Orwell’s Keep The Aspidistra Flying, published in 1936, advise us that these initiatives did not instantly make everything right. They did, though, represent a coherent effort to cure an often unspeakable social ailment of the Victorian age, one that debilitated much of the city and left hundreds of thousand of Londoners trapped in grim conditions that ruined and cut short lives. Today’s London may not be synonymous with dire hovels and hellish rookeries. But it is in danger of moving back in that direction. The very thought can prompt you to avert your gaze. It is an impulse to fiercely resist.

Photo: Early London social housing near Westminster Abbey.