Housing chief and a ‘dead baby moment’
a HIGHLY paid housing chief has called for a ‘dead baby on the beach’ moment to persuade the public to accept social housing tenants as neighbours.
Kate Davies, the £200,000-a-year head of a London housing association, said the deaths of ‘some beautiful young children’ are needed to overcome Nimbyism and prejudice against state - subsidised tenants.
Her cynical remarks l eft MPs appalled and put a question mark against the judgment of the former Trotskyist, who leads a housing group that has received £1.3billion from the taxpayer.
Miss Davies’s comments came a week after pictures of a Turkish policeman holding the body of drowned three-year-old aylan Kurdi provoked a wave of western guilt over the suffering of refugees trying to reach Europe.
Miss Davies, the chief executive of Notting Hill Housing, complained that even ‘respectable’ people object when they learn that there are plans to build council or housing association homes near to their own – and she suggested a way to change attitudes.
she said: ‘Now, you see a dead baby on the beach in Turkey and the attitude to refugees changes overnight because somehow that connected to people personally in a way lots of other people dying as refugees had not.
‘In housing I think we need two things. Either we need an appalling fire where some beautiful young children die, or a riot. we have to get people to feel differently about housing.’
Miss Davies’s comments at a conference at the five- star Celtic Manor hotel near Newport, south wales, drew amazement from the chairman of the discussion, BBC journalist Mark Easton. Challenged by him, she repeated her view that ‘we need a disaster or a riot’ to persuade the public to accept subsidised housing.
The public school-educated housing chief has faced controversy before during her stewardship of Notting Hill Housing, which runs 30,000 homes. Her husband Nick Johnson left a job at Bexley Council in London with a £300,000 pay-off and a £50,000 pension in 2007 after being assessed as permanently unfit to work. Four months later he took a £260,000-a-year job as chief of a housing association financed by Hammersmith and Fulham Council. This led to ‘fat cat’ accusations being made against the couple.
Tory MP sir Paul Beresford, former leader of wandsworth Council, said: ‘I am quite appalled. These are extraordinary words.’
He said her view that most people do not want to live near social housing estates was mistaken: ‘I know that from my time in wandsworth. Relations between people in private and social housing were fine and amicable. You don’t need disasters and deaths, you need discussion and co-operation.’
at the £1million flat in west London which she shares with Mr Johnson, mother-of-three Miss Davies declined to comment further.
During the 1980s she was a leading light in the Revolutionary Communist Party, a Trotskyist group which supported the IRa and which tried to persuade Brixton residents to fight the police. Quaker-educated, she has a degree in sociology.
a spokesman for Notting Hill Housing said: ‘Kate strongly believes the problems faced by those who rely on the sector for a roof over their heads need to be understood more widely. Her comments intended to make this point by drawing a dramatic and shocking analogy.’
‘You do not need disasters and death’