32 COMMENT
voluntarily, or under duress from the regulator and the ombudsman.
DEMOLISH & REBUILD OR REFURB? The situation is perhaps best demonstrated in the capital city where a growing number of London councils are consulting tenants on plans to demolish their homes, as refurbishment work is proving to be prohibitively expensive, represents poor value for money and is often incapable of delivering modern living standards.
Among the latest examples of this dilemma are the outer London boroughs of nfi eld and roydon, which are situated on opposite sides of the capital, but face almost identical problems. In the north and bordering the leafy suburbs of ertfordshire is nfi eld Council, where members recently decided to knock down two 17-storey blocks after it estimated their refurbishment would cost more than £50m, or roughly , per at but that is ust the cost of making them habitable.
Shropshire and Cheshire Houses on the Shires Estate in Edmonton were built in the 1960s and comprise 204 homes. According to a report for the council’s cabinet, the blocks have become increasingly diffi cult and costly to maintain” due to the way they were built – using large panel system construction – and “limited resources” for their maintenance.
The council estimates the cost of retaining the buildings in a safe state of repair over 30 years would be £53m, with £40m of this needing to be spent in the next two to three years. This estimate does not even include the cost of such work as replacing external cladding, replacing the lifts and upgrading the lobbies and stairwells. None of this work is cheap!
More than 75% of residents who responded to a recent consultation exercise run by the council, backed plans to be moved into alternative housing rather than remaining in the two high-rise blocks.
WORST HOUSING CONDITIONS Across London to the far south, where Croydon reaches down into the Surrey commuter belt, a similar issue is being wrestled with by the local authority and its tenants on the Regina Road estate in South orwood. The estate fi rst hit the headlines ust over two years ago in March 2021 when ITV broadcast one of
its early features on poor housing in the social sector and the appalling conditions which some tenants were having to endure.
The estate was built in 1965, was re-clad in 1999 and had water sprinklers fi tted after the renfell tower fi re. ut two years ago a T news fi lm crew found that in one of the blocks water was running down internal walls that were black with mould, water was damaging ceilings and oor coverings as well as posing an electrocution risk to the residents. Furniture and personal possessions were being destroyed. Experts called the conditions among the worst they had ever seen. Two years on from then, the council has been consulting tenants on whether they should demolish most of the estate, including three 11-storey high-rise blocks and four medium rise blocks, comprising 191 homes in total. The council is proposing to replace the existing homes with between 380 and 450 new homes, subect to planning conditions and of course, the availability of money for the work. At the risk of tempting fate, I would guess the Regina Road estate tenants will vote for its demolition and their rehousing, rather than for another round of refurbishment works. Writing that sentence is a remarkably easy task, whereas putting it into effect will be a wholly different challenge.
A potentially even bigger issue for the council is that the Regina Road tower blocks are typical of a number of other high rises across the borough, where more than 20 tower blocks are of a similar age, design and construction type. If these blocks experience the same problems as those at Regina Road, then the council is facing an extraordinarily large bill to sort things out.
QUANTITY OR QUALITY You may have noticed that both the Shires and Regina Road estates were built during the 1960s – at a time when councils were
under enormous pressure to build homes in huge numbers and at speed. After the post war building boom was over, the rate of council house building rose again during the 60s to hit another peak in 1967 when 159,300 new homes were completed across England and Wales. To deal with the pressures existing at the time, the new housing was generally built at high density and a relatively low cost. There is an awful lot of this sort of housing up and down the country, much of it in our larger towns and cities or on peripheral estates. Some of it has already been demolished as part of expensive regeneration proects, or to tackle low demand and unpopularity.
Council house building has cut back dramatically since then although attempts are being made to mount something of a revival in recent years. If the country is to build 300,000 new homes a year then councils and HAs probably need to be building between 75,000 and 100,000 of them.
This is on a completely different scale to the house building of the 60s and 70s, but the Greater London Authority and London Mayor have recently been celebrating the news that they have started work on more than 10,000 new homes in the past year and will have met their target of starting 20,000 new council homes by 2024 a year early. The capital’s mayor Sadiq Khan said that work began on more council-built homes in London in 2022 than in any year since the s. ut in a sobering comment he added that London was building double the amount of council housing than the rest of England combined together. The 4,325 council homes that were started in the rest of England (in 2021/22) was a “national scandal,” he said, and called for new government funding exclusively for the building of council homes. However, it was also acknowledged that despite this success with building new homes there are persistent problems. London Councils estimates that 166,000 Londoners – equivalent to the entire population of Oxford – are currently homeless and living in temporary accommodation. With demolitions continuing at pace it is diffi cult to see how the building of new social homes will be able to make signifi cant inroads into the waiting lists. Even with recent falls in the number of ight to uy sales, it is becoming very diffi cult for councils to make real additions to their stock totals.
THE COUNCIL ESTIMATES THE COST OF RETAINING THE BUILDINGS IN A SAFE STATE OF REPAIR OVER 30 YEARS WOULD BE £53M, WITH £40M HAVING TO BE SPENT IN THE NEXT TWO OR THREE YEARS
WWW.HBDONLINE.CO.UK
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76
