Dear Londoners — We're down an hour of sleep, up an hour of daylight: not a bad trade-off? I have to admit that the full impact of this only dawned on me when I was sat in the Lady Ottoline yesterday to enjoy a pint post a screening at nearby micro-cinema The Nickel, and realised it was 7pm and still light. It was an awareness so heartening, so life-affirming, that it made the weird weather we've been having cease to matter.
What's also been making us giddy at The Londoner are the new members who've joined our community in the aftermath of our investigation into London's billionaires. We're so glad to have you on board, and we can promise that won't be the last you'll hear of us on that subject (and please do get in touch if there's any particular areas you'd like for us to explore).
Now, sit back and relax for your Monday briefing, featuring red-hot council beef, an ideal sunny day pub and a potential peerage for Sadiq Khan.
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Why is Westminster council evicting dozens of people in Richmond to try and combat homelessness?
What's happening: We were fascinated last week when an uncharacteristically scathing press release dropped into The Londoner’s inbox from Richmond council about their fellow London council Westminster, which accused the latter of showing “disturbing disregard for residents’ wellbeing” and being responsible for the “displacement of an entire community”.
The cause of the beef, it turns out, was a block of flats in Kew — Garden Court — owned by a private developer called Dorrington. The residents of Garden Court, many of whom are elderly or vulnerable, are now facing eviction after Dorrington sold the block to Westminster council for £16m — and Westminster has said it needs the building to be empty in order to house the growing number of homeless people in its borough. Yes, you read that right. Vulnerable, elderly residents in Kew are being put at risk of homelessness in order to house homeless people from Westminster.
What's the response? “There's an unspoken agreement that council should not behave in this way to other London boroughs, because we all have temporary accommodation headaches and housing shortages,” said Richmond council leader Gareth Roberts, when we called him last week. “In eight years as leader of the council, I have never known best for there to be another council coming to Richmond, evicting our residents in order to solve their problems on their patch.”
“We want Westminster to intervene,” Roberts added. “This is something that they now know about. They have a moral duty to act.”
The background: More than anything, the fact London councils have been reduced to this level of infighting and cutthroat competition outlines the sheer scale of the homelessness crisis in the capital. Roughly 210,000 people, half of them children, are living in temporary accommodation across the capital, at a cost of £5.5m a day to the city’s hard-pressed councils. Given the cost of it all, it’s not surprising many councils have been left looking for radical solutions. In the past, that took the form of buying up old office blocks or cheap flats in far-away towns, like Harlow in Essex, which is single-handedly home to thousands of the capital’s homeless. But as that policy received more scrutiny, London’s councils turned their eyes closer to home.
Last year in Lambeth, some 163 renters were evicted by the council to make room for homeless accommodation. And in Kensington, the council’s own pension fund has spent at least £100m buying up buildings to use as temporary accommodation — a move they’ve justified not just due to the money it would save the council, but the potential healthy returns it could provide the pension fund.
“It's simply the case that housing is so expensive in London that it's caused so much insecurity that it’s created this massive pressure on individual councils to provide temporary accommodation,” Daniel Reast, a senior researcher at the Centre for London, told us. “It's become very acute at the moment, to the point where social housing and temporary accommodation which councils can provide is simply not enough.” The problem has become so bad, he told The Londoner, that it has forced the various councils in London to compete over housing places as they try to avoid going bankrupt due to their skyrocketing homelessness costs.
Any solutions? The problem is that we’re about two decades too late on the solution — having spent years failing to build an adequate supply of social housing. To make matters worse, keeping the right to buy in place for council tenants has meant local authorities are actually losing housing stock quicker than they can build or acquire new homes to house their growing waiting lists.
Short of a revolution in national housing policy, Reast says a short-term solution would be for councils to be forced to be more collaborative in their efforts to try and source homeless accommodation rather than competing with each other (something that our past reporting on Capital Letters shows is easier said than done). But in the meantime, the saga at Garden Court is unlikely to be the last.
No stay of execution for Ridley Road market traders
A month and a half after we first broke the news that indoor traders on Hackney’s historic Ridley Road market were facing being forced out, the BBC has headed over to the market, after it was confirmed by the building’s landlord that the de facto evictions are going ahead at the end of March.
Andrew Kersley
For those who missed our original piece, the indoor market has been an integral part of the iconic Ridley Road market for decades, selling everything from vintage records to clothes and bedding. Unlike the outdoor market, owned by Hackney council, the indoor market is owned by landlord Larochette, a Virgin Islands based property company owned by London-based property developer Guy Rafael Ziser, who bought it for £6.5m in 2016.
Back in 2018, the traders faced eviction as the new landlord tried to turn the site into a high-end office-cum-apartment complex only for a spirited community campaign to keep the indoor market alive. In mid February, traders got letters informing them that their tenancies would not be renewed in response to antisocial behaviour happening around the building.
Weeks later many of the questions we raised — including why Larochette and the Met police had completely different accounts of what had gone on — still remain unanswered. One new development though, is the announcement by Hackney council that it would offer any affected traders (who were not in rent arrears) alternative premises, including discounted pitches on the main street market.
I now pronounce thee Lord Khan?
Here’s the deal: I offer you a shiny new title, and you stop being mean to me. Such is the proposition being prepared by Keir Starmer, according to reporting by the FT, as he attempts to quell Sadiq Khan’s criticisms by offering him a peerage after the May elections.
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