Ealing Council has demolished more social-rented homes since 2012 than any other London local authority a new report from the London Tenants Federation (LTF) has found.
Since 2012, 4,986 homes have been demolished across Ealing out of 22,892 in all of London. By comparison, neighbouring borough Brent demolished 722 homes, Hounslow 322 homes, Harrow 129 homes and Hillingdon 17 homes.
LTF looked at the delivery and loss of homes across the capital from highest to lowest number of social-rented homes demolished in London boroughs and used the Mayor of London’s online residential completions dashboard. It discovered Labour-run Ealing Council was the borough with the highest number of demolitions.
According to LTF, the demolitions, combined with the 2012 introduction of affordable rent homes with up to 80% of market rents – instead of social-rented homes – significantly contributed to the increase in London’s backlog of need for social-rented homes.
Pat Turnbull, an elected regional officer at London Tenants Federation told EALING.NEWS: “Boroughs that have demolished high numbers of council homes, like Ealing, have often been informed by or promoted ‘mixed and balanced communities’ policies.”
Ms Turnball added: “The result of this has been displacement of less well-off communities and replacement with more expensive market, intermediate or ‘affordable rent’ homes and thus wealthier households. At the same time tenants have often been sold promises of better homes – but have been poorly informed about the social, environmental and economic costs of demolition or preferable refurbishment alternatives.”
An Ealing Council spokesperson told EALING.NEWS: “There are eight large regeneration programmes in the borough covering over 3500 homes which are being replaced by new, spacious and energy-efficient homes. Ealing has one of the largest new-build programmes of affordable homes in London, and has been granted more than £100 million from the GLA to make this happen. This will provide even more social rented homes for the borough.”
Ealing Liberal Democrat Leader of the Opposition, Councillor Gary Malcolm told EALING.NEWS: “Liberal Democrats want to see more affordable and social homes being built but if the Labour council are knocking down as many as they are building, people are not getting a good deal.”
Councillor Malcolm added: “Liberal Democrats fear many planned homes to be built will not happen due to the rise in costs of building new homes. Many people will be left out in the cold.”
At a Full Council meeting on 13 December 2022, Councillor Jon Ball, Opposition Planning and Housing spokesperson, raised the issue. He said: “With increasing numbers of development schemes stalling due to the financial climate, the nightmare scenario is that some council homes will be demolished and then the sites left empty for years until the Council and their developer partners can afford to go ahead and build replacements.”
Reflecting on the overall numbers across London, Ms Turnball said the loss of these social-tented homes should have been protected.
“A sensible strategy in response to the government policy changes of 2012 would have been to protect as many social-rented homes as possible. However, the demolition of 23,000 since then has simply escalated the problems, with increasingly high numbers of homeless families living in temporary or overcrowded homes.
“Money intended for building additional social-rented homes is often used to replace demolished homes, with replacements being at ‘affordable rents’ rather than the housing type actually need. In addition, demolition and rebuild is almost certainly more expensive than the refurbishment.
‘We need the government to provide positive investment in both new and refurbished social-rented homes and the Mayor of London to ensure that proposals for social-rented housing demolitions are rejected unless the homes are structurally unsound.”
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