ONE hundred and eighteen council housing sites in London are facing privatisation, demolition or ‘regeneration,’ which will mean, according to council responses to a freedom of information request, that more than 31,000 residents will be evicted.
Campaigners say that as a result as many as 8,000 homes in London will be lost over the next decade. There are no plans to replace the council homes. Of the estates to be regenerated, more than 80 will be fully or partially demolished.
One of the sites set to see the biggest loss of homes is the Heygate estate in Southwark. More than 1,200 council properties were torn down between 2011 and 2014 and replaced by a luxury development called ‘Elephant Park’. Just 82 of the 3,000 new homes on the site were for social housing.
Housing campaigner Jerry Flynn said: ‘All the promises made to the residents about new homes, which the residents could move into immediately, were all broken.’
Figures from the Ministry of Housing showed the number of local authority homes in London has fallen by 100,000 since 2003, when Right to Buy and stock transfers to housing associations were taken into account.
There are currently about 250,000 Londoners on housing waiting lists.
In Westminster, the city council plans to flatten 300 homes at the Ebury Bridge estate in Pimlico to make way for 750 new properties, the majority of which will be sold on the private market. The council said all secure tenants would have the opportunity to return and more than 80 additional social rent homes would be built.
London temporary housing costs have gone up 50% while over half of homeless families are in work.
Meanwhile the founder of Berkeley Group which is meant to build so-called ‘affordable’ housing has taken control of an additional 4.4 million shares, worth £163m. The housebuilder Berkeley Group’s founder and chairman, Tony Pidgley, has earned £174m over the past decade, and is set to be paid another £48m by the company over the next five years, which will make him one of the highest paid bosses of a public company in Britain.