The end of February’s Housing Scrutiny Committee was greeted with friendly, relieved laughter from the chair. At different stages of the proceedings, participating councillors told us how they wanted to keep the meeting as short as possible. And who’d want to drag out such an empty affair?

The committee received two important reports — one about the existing housing portfolio and one about the housing programme. These were presented by the relevant Executive member in a way that avoided awkward truths about the current situation. 

Leaseholder issues were set out cogently in a candid report from Cllr Slater which pointed to “concerns raised around the quality of housing repairs carried out by Camden and its contractors”. Slater reports the lack of “institutional memory” and “inadequate record-taking of repairs that have been done”. What’s true for leaseholders is true for all council residents although that was obscured.

Meric Apak, the long-standing member for “Better Homes”, didn’t reflect on the leaseholder report when presenting his to the committee. He got through by talking about things like his triumph in transferring repair inquiries from the telephone to online with no acknowledgement that this purported success is contradicted by the leaseholder report that confirms “long waiting times on the phone lines”. More importantly, Apak highlighted that in the reporting period that around 240,000 repairs “conversations” were initiated, down from “350,000 two years ago”, without, in the process, telling us anything about the state of Camden’s property. 

In light of the fact that Camden has about 33,000 homes, how do we evaluate the meaning of 240,000 “conversations” about repairs? Nobody bothered to put that in perspective let alone tell us about the efficiency of the repairs service. It was surreal that Apak closed out his presentation with the claim that “decluttering (email) inboxes” is the way forward for Camden officers dealing with the repairs service. 

Apak seems to have decided to measure the housing stock in terms of “conversations” when he could use the stock conditions survey that came out at the start of the year since when it’s been “buried”. To know the overall condition of Camden’s homes, we need an evaluation of the quinquennial surveys going back 20 years.  

The Community Investment Programme annual report was also presented to the HSC without acknowledging the bigger picture ie. that social housing is decreasing. Camden’s housing programme is not making a difference. Sadly, it’s worse than that because the programme uses up resources including housing department land and project finance to build much more private housing than social.

The HSC chair represents a neighbourhood where since the end of 2010, more social rent homes have been demolished by Camden than built but she kept quiet. In fact, whilst there’s been a loss of Camden-owned social rent homes, Camden has added to the stock of homes-for-sale.

There are important questions to be asked about the efficiency of Camden’s cross-subsidy model for funding new housing. Some schemes produce more social housing for a given quantum of homes for sale than others. We note that the recently completed Maitland Park scheme has a ratio of social to private housing of 3:4. It also produced a 30% increase in social housing. Meanwhile, the huge West Kentish Town Estate scheme has a 1:2 ratio and only offers a 5% increase in social housing. Nothing about these relative efficiencies was said.

Bizarrely, the report on Camden’s housing development, that tirelessly highlights “social rent homes” does not mention the housing waiting list or housing register. Instead, we are told: “the overarching priority for CIP is to deliver more affordable housing in the borough as quickly as possible”. If it isn’t already clear, this formulation gives complete licence to Camden to do precisely as it pleases because “possible” is never defined. Camden’s main housing development policy is untrammelled by rational targets based on in-depth scope evaluation

By way of comparison, we note that Islington’s housing programme is less reliant on building homes for sale on public housing land. Broadly speaking, Islington’s ratio of social to market housing is 5:1. Camden’s is 1:2. It’s a huge difference.

Camden’s housing is represented by two executive figureheads—Apak and Beales. Both refuse to talk about the big picture and put their efforts in context