The Green tide rose high in Hackney in May, sweeping away Labour with promises to put people before profit, listen harder to communities, ensure that (in their manifesto’s words) “the council’s funding is not being used to fund genocide” and to take a stricter approach to the council’s relationships with property developers. Last night, a meeting of the full council opened some windows on how it’s gone so far.
“Not everyone has felt heard when the borough has changed,” said Mayor Zoë Garbett in her formal statement, by way of introducing her administration’s Hackney Is Yours initiative, complete with stated aim of giving people more say in how council decisions are made.
It has a strong emphasis on planning policy, led by the view of Alastair Binnie-Lubbock, cabinet member for regeneration, planning and inclusive neighbourhoods, that “too often, new buildings and developments are built for developers’ profit, not for the people who live here”. Responses to Hackney Is Yours will, he says, inform the creation of a new borough Local Plan, “one that reflects residents’ views and prioritises the affordable homes, workplaces and community space we know they want to see.”
The challenge here, of course, is that much provision of affordable homes, workplaces and community space in Hackney has, as elsewhere, been funded out of developers’ profits. Without those profits, the risk is that there might be less of the “affordable” stuff everyone wants than would otherwise have been the case.
Even though development activity as a whole has sharply slowed in London of late, that remains a circle Hackney’s Greens will need to square if they are to do better than Labour at meeting high local need. Meanwhile, they are parties to a legal challenge to Sadiq Khan’s emergency easing of the “affordable” requirements he places on developers, a change made on the grounds that some “affordable” is better than none.
The early months of the Green ascendancy have also produced a bit of a case study of the challenge of turning aspiration into delivery. For months, indeed years, prior to May’s elections, Hackney Greens were strongly critical of the huge and long-running regeneration of the Woodberry Down estate in the north of the borough through an agreement between the council, a housing association and Berkeley, one of London’s bigger property developers. In a report for the London Assembly, published in March, the then future Mayor Garbett accused Berkeley of “running rings round the community”.
However, in July, she and her cabinet gave a go-ahead for the next phase of the regeneration, which Binnie-Lubbock described as “exemplary”. The green light was switched on even though it will entail social tenants in one of the original estate blocks now lined up to be knocked down being unable to move straight into the new, replacement homes to be provided for them. Instead, they will first have to be temporarily rehoused somewhere else.
This is known in the sterile jargon of the trade as a “double decant”. The reason one is going to happen on Woodberry Down is that Berkeley has persuaded the council that a different choreography of demolition and rehousing would reduce their profits to such an extent that the finances of the scheme as a whole would be imperilled. Earlier phases, presided over by Labour, saw no double decants. It was therefore unsurprising that Sarah Young, a Labour councillor for the Woodberry Down ward, saw fit to point this out in the form of the Labour group motion, shown below, and with a speech.
The Woodberry Down regen hasn’t gone entirely smoothly. There have been long, costly delays, the most recent largely down to Berkeley having to redesign its plans in order to meet the new, post-Grenfell safety regulations. Young, paraphrasing Berkeley’s position, said, “if they can’t start knocking down the Phase 5 homes now, before the new homes are built, it’s going to cost the project £13.2million”.
But she added that developers are allowed to get a return on their investments of 20 per cent, that Berkeley will expect to make a lot more than £13.2 million over the lifetime of the scheme, which is still only about halfway complete, and that solemn pledges were made to social tenants by all involved that double decants would be avoided.
“People have waited well over 15 years, now nearly pushing 20 years, to move from their condemned homes to their promised new homes,” Young said. And while the young and fancy-free might not mind moving from flat to flat, the Woodberry tenants in question did not fit that description.
Some of them, said Young, “are very elderly and frail. It’s not clear they’ll survive two moves. Some of the people have complex disabilities or their children have complex disabilities, and moves will be really difficult for them.” Her closing words to the Greens were: “This is about things that are within your control. I hope that you will vote with your conscience and support this motion.”
They didn’t, of course. But Binnie-Lubbock did offer a spirited defence. He said Labour’s was “not a very serious motion” and “could further risk the council’s finances very significantly, and the wider project delivery”. He assured the meeting that he didn’t want double decants either, but characterised them as “the inevitable consequences of the serious delays that began under the previous [Labour] administration”.
However, noting that “sale values are falling, costs are rising” and maintaining that “we’re very happy to hold developers to account”, he concluded, “we’re not naive enough to jeopardise a project on this scale”. Moreover, he “understood, to a certain degree” why a 20 per cent profit was allowable in national planning policy, “because there is a large amount of risk involved” in a project such as this, as events were bearing out. Spoken like a built environment sector pro.
He also claimed that Labour had known in advance that this uncomfortable decision was looming and that he could find no sign that they had worked out how to avoid it. Labour, in his eyes, had handed on a situation about which nothing could be done and were now pretending otherwise.
Young’s response to this was impassioned, stating that she had been raising the matter at meetings with officers since the start of the year. “I do not want these people moved twice, because I think people will die, I think people will suffer, I think families will be broken up,” she said.
High feelings aside, and as Young remarked, the rival parties aren’t actually so far apart on this issue. The difficulty for the Greens, though, is that their pragmatic approach to the Woodberry Down double decant is somewhat at odds with their pre-election rhetoric, and brings a sobering old adage to mind: “To govern is to choose.”
Watch the whole of the Hackney Council meeting here (the Labour motion and discussion comes near the end). Follow Dave Hill on Bluesky, LinkedIn, X/Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
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