Your editorial on London’s social housing (16 August) makes a persuasive case for treating social housing as economic infrastructure. However, infrastructure is normally monitored and social housing is not, either when it is delivered or across the years in which it is meant to remain affordable. A home is counted as affordable on the day that planning permission is granted and is rarely examined again, through completion, tenure change and the service charges that can make it unaffordable within months of occupation, as your reporting on shared ownership has shown.
Southwark, like almost every local authority, publishes every pound of the financial contributions developers pay, yet offers no scheme-level account of whether the promised social rented homes were built. The consequences showed at Elephant and Castle, where residents needed three years of freedom of information battles to force out the viability evidence behind an affordable housing commitment that ended at 82 social rented homes in place of more than a thousand. By the time it came out, the estate was gone, and a record that arrives after demolition can only count the losses. On the Old Kent Road, where the council plans around 20,000 new homes and only a few thousand are yet built or under way, the record could still be kept in time to shape what is delivered.
You close with Nye Bevan’s idea of housing as an essential service like the NHS, and the comparison is instructive. The NHS publishes waiting lists and inspection results, and is held to them, whereas housing has no equivalent, whoever the landlord is. If social homes are economic infrastructure, they deserve public, dated records of what was promised, what arrived and what it costs to live in them.
Marco Scalvini
London
