It was the worst month in my entire political life
COUNCIL LEADER REVEALS HIS WORRIES OVER LACK OF TOWER BLOCK RECORDS
COUNCIL leader Nick Forbes has confessed that the days following the Grenfell Tower disaster were the worst in his time in local Government.
In a searingly honest interview he’s told how residents wanted to know whether their own homes were safe, but the council didn’t have records of safety checks carried out on privately owned blocks of flats.
And, in many cases, it didn’t even know for sure who owned the properties – because they belonged to overseas investors who were hard to track down.
“I was unable as a council leader to give guarantees about safety, and that really worried me,” said Coun Forbes, leader of Newcastle City Council.
But this was just one example of the way that local councils struggle to cope with the demands being placed on them, according to evidence given by Coun Forbes to a House of Commons inquiry.
He was talking to the Commons Treasury Committee about the impact of last week’s Budget on housing.
He was there in his role as senior vice-chair of the Local Government Association, the national body that represents councils from across the country.
But he also spoke about his own experiences in Newcastle.
Grenfell highlighted the gap between what people expect from their local council and what authorities are actually able to do, as while residents turned to the local authority for assurances that their homes were safe, the council had little information about homes owned by housing associations and next to nothing about the ones rented from private landlords.
“What it did was flush out some huge and systemic failures in our system,” Coun Forbes said.
“One of the things that really horrified me was we knew the situation in the tower blocks the council owns but we didn’t know the situation in other tower blocks in the city.”
He added: “A number of local authorities had difficulties dealing with housing association providers.”
But the real problem was privately owned properties.
“It’s quite difficult to track down who actually owns the building,” said Coun Forbes.
Councils should have oversight for all residences in their area, including a record of who owns each building, and the power, alongside the fire services, to conduct inspections without notice, he said.
Newcastle City Council is committed to ensuring beyond doubt that its buildings are 100% safe. But the Gov-
ernment has failed to follow through on promises to provide funding for upgrades.
And as a result, Newcastle is being forced to borrow money.
Coun Forbes told the inquiry: “There were a number of public statements made... which implied Government would fund any fire safety measures needed.”
The Department for Communities and Local Government has now told councils that local funding will be “the first call”, which means cash will come from central Government only if there is no other option.
“That presents a challenge. In my authority I know that in three years’ time we will breach our internal borrowing cap in order to ensure we are putting those fire safety measures in place.”
This also means that there is less scope for borrowing to build new homes, Coun Forbes said.
Chancellor Phillip Hammond announced plans in last week’s Budget to increase the number of homes built each year across the country by 300,000.
Coun Forbes said this could only be achieved if local authorities were allowed to raise money to build.
The Government has said that authorities will be invited to bid for the right to increase their Housing Revenue Account borrowing cap, allowing them to borrow more money for building in areas where prices are high. However, Coun Forbes pointed out that some areas, including parts of the North East, required new homes even though house prices were relatively low. He said: “Rather than having a competitive process, it’s better to just lift the borrowing cap for all local authorities so that we can all get on with it.” Mr Hammond is reported to believe that the key to increasing the nation’s housing supply is relaxing planning restrictions, so that it becomes easier to build on green-belt land. He was apparently prevented from announcing changes to planning rules by Cabinet colleagues including Prime Minister Theresa May. But Coun Forbes said councils were already allowing building on the green belt. “We’ve already had local authorities make difficult and often controversial decisions”, he said. A more pressing problem was that developers were receiving planning permission and then sitting on the land instead of building, he said.
And a solution could be to allow councils to collect council tax on land after a set period of time, even if the houses weren’t there – forcing developers to get building or to pay the tax themselves.
Coun Forbes also suggested the Chancellor should focus on making more money available to build homes in the first place rather than following his plan to reduce stamp duty.