1500 new homes for Havering

Havering has a housing shortage. That’s a fact, with our housing waiting list being years long and hundreds of families housed in temporary accommodation.

Things are so bad that this costs us £millions ever year. Havering pays out around £7m a year to private landlords and a further £6million for temporary accommodation.

So, when we hear about new homes for Havering this should come as a bit of a relief. But, far from it, these 3 new proposals are going to cause real problems for us, financially and otherwise.

I take a quick look at each one, below.

Bridge Close

This development is the biggest and nastiest of them all, and it was just approved by the planning committee. It snuck through, with Conservatives and Labour voting against, but the HRA all in favour and the Chair (Cllr Reg Whitney) casing the tie vote.

Bridge Close is going to be over 1100 homes, a primary school, and maybe a GP. The last two are depending on the Department for Education and NHS wanting these.

The scheme will give 35% ‘affordable’ housing. Sounds good, but only 10% is actually going to be social homes. The rest will be things like shared ownership. It’ll consist of some of Romford’s tallest tower-blocks, be filled with yet more retail, and was described by TFL as encouraging dangerous pedestrian crossing of the roads.

The scheme relies heavily on the council upgrading the Oldchurch roundabout, will evict and then demolish a mosque with no suitable alternative, and cost us tens and tens and tens of £millions – all debt.

The scheme is not financially sound. A report in the planning documents basically said this. So, despite Havering Council being told to scale back on the debt-fuelled developments by independent reviewers for the government, it is pushing ahead. Compulsory purchasing small businesses premises, forcing out the mosque, and building 1000 new flats with absolutely zero parking.

Como Street

This one stinks.

Como Street car park is, according to council reports, underused. This isn’t a surprise, it has been neglected for years. Every week it faces fly-tipping, litter can be reported but left for weeks, it’s entrance is covered by giant concrete bollards, signage is poor, and the prices are too high.

But, despite all of the above, this car park located just the other side of the road from our town centre is not needed by Romford.

So, the council sold it. It sold it to itself (or, a developer that they own 100% of). The developer is taking a loan from the council to buy it, to pay the council. It’ll take another loan to cover construction costs, and when planning permission is given it owes the council more money and so will take another loan, from the council. All of this means the council taking more loans from the government.

Your taxes in action!

With all of this borrowing and debt, pushed onto you the taxpayer, you may be asking “Is this going to be a great asset to the community?” Don’t bother asking that, we’ve learnt now that the answer is almost always no.

This will be a 9 storey towerblock, overlooking dozens of historic family homes, with more retail underneath (new vape shop anyone?) and with next to no social housing.

Like Bridge Close, planning documents tell us that they have had to scale back on plans to improve the River and give social housing because of financial viability.

Here’s an idea…

Instead of a complex scheme of borrowing and paying ourselves, why not just build it directly from the council? This would mean we don’t have to sell and buy the land, saving at least £8m. That’s a huge saving and would allow us to put some social homes in.

You know, the homes we actually need to cut down on our £6m housing bill?

You can read more about the Como St development on a resident campaign website.

www.comostreetcarpark.com

Angel Way

This development bothers me less, but is still going through the same silly scheme of borrow, lend, buy from ourselves, oops we can’t afford to do nice stuff anymore route.

The also ‘underused’ Angel Way car park is going to be town down and turned into two smaller blocks, Strangely, smaller than Como St despite being closer to the town centre.

It’ll ‘open up the river Rom’ between the blocks and provide a private garden for those living in the flats. No parking, again, and yes it’ll have more retail.

Moan moan moan

Reading all of the above you begin to wonder if I have any positive to say. Am I just moan moan moan?

Look, I am not a NIMBY, I am a SIMBY. I want something suitable in my backyard and this stuff just isn’t it.

Havering’s debt is rocketing. Not just from having to borrow for our deficit, but also because we continue to borrow tens of £millions for these housing projects.

Havering now has over £600m of debt and growing, and in finance meetings we’re told that this is OK because we can actually get up to nearly £1bn in debt if we want to.

Well I don’t want to.

What I want is schemes that actually fix the problems we have.

We have hundreds of families needing social housing and instead we’re getting into debt to build homes to stick on the market. Meanwhile, vulnerable families are going to be punted out to Basildon and put into an old office block that we’re going to rent.

Next week I’ll be tabling a motion at council. I am asking the council to transform the private developer it owns into one that builds social housing. The HRA have already made it clear that they will vote against this and instead ‘recognise’ that the developer meets our need through ‘affordable housing’.

We’ve been warned, by the government review, that this developer is a risk to us and that we must scale back this debt-ridden development.

Will the HRA listen? I doubt it, they wouldn’t agree with me if I said today had a Y in it. But, I’ll plough on anyway!

T