Don't let the Hillingdon Tories take our parks away

The Tory Hillingdon Council propose to build a school on Lake Farm Country Park / Botwell Common. This is a green belt site and as a park it has green flag status. There are alternative sites for schools but the Tory council are determined to sell those sites off .

 

Meanwhile they propose to build over every green space in an already very densely built up area of Hayes.

John McDonnell, Labour  MP for Hayes and Harlington is collecting signatures for a petition and on Saturday 25th Februray at 10:30am John will be leading a Demonstration and March. 

 

The Demonstration will be at the Arch on Lake Farm and the March is into Hayes Town. If you are free on Saturday morning, Please feel free to come and join the demonstration and the march and show the Tory Council that we are not going to take this destruction of our  parks and the erosion of the green belt.

This proposal can be stopped but it needs local people to demonstrate the strength of feeling in order to stop it.

Come and join us and dont let the Tories take our park away

For details of Lake Farm Country Park click here 

Hillingdon Labour leader demands crack down on rogue landlords

Councillor Mo Khursheed, leader of the Hillingdon Labour Group writes:

'With the economy essentially in recession and Tory cuts beginning to bite, there is mounting evidence to suggest that families are struggling to meet the cost of decent affordable housing. Those who cannot are placed in a catch 22 situation; either they approach the Council for statutory help and risk being shunted to other parts of the country or are forced into substandard and overcrowded ‘sheds with beds’.
 
Hillingdon is characterised by mixed and diverse communities, it’s what makes this Borough great. However welfare policies being introduced by the government will change the face of our Borough; by 2016 only 49% of Hillingdon will be affordable to recipients of Local Housing Allowance. It is inevitable that this will force more people into these so called Sheds with Beds. The quality of accommodation can be so bad, it not only poses a risk to the inhabitants, but to surrounding properties and residents through unsound construction and fire hazards. Isn’t it about time we tackle this problem and highlight the threat these unlawful buildings pose?

I have asked the Council for data on the suspected illegal use of outbuildings as homes throughout the Borough, only to be told there is no database that can provide this level of detail – how can this be? How can a responsible Council not have access to this information? Our Borough has merely 2 enforcement officers progressing enforcement notices and prosecutions on specifically tackling this one issue. Is it any wonder then, that members enquires on the issue from Labour Councillors have gone unanswered?

May I suggest that Councillor Puddifoot and his Cabinet take a look at neighbouring, Labour controlled, Ealing. Since October its planning team have inspected over 700 suspected illegal outbuildings used for residential purposes, completed 252 investigations and issued 73 enforcement notices. By pledging £250,000 and 6 dedicated enforcement officers, Ealing Council, who are making similar budgetary savings, have shown our Council how to tackle this problem.

It is to simplistic to hope that by just cracking down on rogue landlords the problem will disappear. As demand for housing continues to outstrip supply, it is imperative that affordable housing continue to be supported. Indeed, at last month’s Council meeting we put forward a motion affirming Labour’s commitment to affordable social housing, only for the Tory majority to demonstrate how out of touch they are by dismissing it out of hand.

Hillingdon Council must take a tougher stance on this issue. It must ensure proactive inspections of suspect properties, it must do more to enforce existing laws, and it must respond to tip offs from residents. However a tougher stance can only be demonstrated through action; Hillingdon Council needs to provide sufficient resources so that unscrupulous landlords can be prosecuted.   

 

My aim is not to weaken the rights of landlords. It is about doing what is right. This means tackling the minority of landlords who are unscrupulous, rogue and are profiteering from the exploitation of the desperate and the most vulnerable by housing them in the 21^st Century’s slums. As we mark 200^th anniversary of Charles Dickens, do we really want a return to the conditions he so vividly described?

UK housing conditions among the worst in Western Europe

 A report being published today by the independent Pro-Housing Alliance maintains that housing conditions in the UK are among the worst in Western Europe and cost the nation about £7bn a year by adding to the pressure on the NHS and other public services.

The  Alliance, made up of a group of leading housing experts, sees housing fundamentally as a public health issue and is calling on the Government to adopt radical new measures to tackle the nation’s growing housing problems, which it claims are costing the country £7billion a year in costs to the NHS, social services and education.

 The Alliance claims a lack of affordable decent accommodation, cuts to local authority housing services, welfare reforms and overcrowding are combining to create stress and hardship for some of the most vulnerable people in the country who live in some of the  worst housing conditions in Western Europe.

The Alliance warns that  homelessness is on the rise and predicts the return of unscrupulous landlords like the infamous Peter Rachman, who exploited his London tenants in the 1950s and 1960s. Almost 4,000 people are sleeping rough on London's streets, an increase of 8 per cent since last year. About half of these are from the UK and the rest from a wide variety of other countries, notably Poland.

The report says there is little sign that the Mayor of London Boris Johnson's target of ending rough sleeping by next year will be met.

A report in yesterday's  Independent newspaper described a so-called "super-shed" in Newham, "a poorly constructed building not much larger than an average garden shed, is one of thousands of similar structures across the capital that housing campaigners label London's secret slums".

The Independent  report supports claims made by John McDonnell, Labour MP for Hayes and Harlington  in a Parliamentary debate earlier this year when he described a housing crisis in the London Borough of Hillingdon which has left families living in "developing world conditions". 

McDonnell was specifically critical of the London Borough of Hillingdon’s housing policies, such as using local estate agents to gain private sector rental accommodation for families. "We have discovered that the estate agents it has been using have often used these buy-to-let slum landlords," he said.

He also believes there is an "informal agreement" in place where estate agents will only seek properties for vulnerable families in the poorer south of the borough, rather than the richer north. This is creating "an apartheid regime," he warned.


He added: "This has resulted in families living in appalling conditions and overcrowding. Some families are living in almost developing world conditions because some of the properties are so poor."

Another concern in Hillingdon is a "planning free-for-all" whereby landlords are erecting "leisure rooms" in their gardens to be rented by families.

McDonnell said: "What is happening is that landlords are constructing these leisure rooms and getting families to live in what are, in effect, garages".

"In some instances we have discovered these places only when the family has turned up to register for council tax and we have found out that they are living in a shed or a garage."

 

According to Bill Rashleigh, a researcher from Shelter, the homelessness charity,  in addition to the health risks of living in this sub-standard accommodation it leaves the tenants open to exploitation, "The danger is that tenants will be made imminently homeless, because when the council catches up with the landlords, you are going to get turfed out,"...... "You also have no recourse to law. If the landlord whacks the rent up then you have no claims to make under the law. You have no laws to protect your rights, and you are left open to exploitation, with your health at risk and with no security." 

In their report the Alliance sets out  recommendations designed to address the growing problems with housing in this country. Key recommendations include a call to provide 500,000 green and affordable homes per year for the next seven years (including the use of empty dwellings), a reform of land supply and land taxation to help fund regeneration and affordable housing initiatives, re-defining the term “affordable” and rescinding recent changes to housing benefit.

 

Dr Stephen Battersby, president of the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health, which brought the Alliance together, said: "The lack of a coherent housing policy for the past 30 years has created an expensive housing market with a shortage of affordable housing. 

(Acknowledgements to The Independent and Children & Young People Now)