Karen Buck MP lobbied the Chancellor, Gordon Brown with an urgent message to build more social rented homes in Westminster & Kensington, at a Parliamentary event on Monday 4 December.  She then spoke in a Parliamentary debate yesterday (7^th December) about Affordable Housing.

As part of a campaign by housing charity Shelter, Karen Buck MP posted a red rubber brick to the Chancellor as a symbol of her support for the charity’s call to build more social rented homes for families in the greatest housing need. In
London alone there are currently 3,000 homeless households trapped in temporary accommodation, robbing those children of their health, education and a fair chance in life.

Shelter aims to send a total of 20,000 bricks to Gordon Brown to persuade him to fund an extra 20,000 social homes each year when he sets out his three-year spending plans next summer.   Speaking yesterday in the Commons Karen Buck MP described the situation for the hundreds of families that are moved out of the area into temporary accommodation, “I am concerned about recent evidence of the difficulty of obtaining temporary accommodation to meet the needs of homeless families in my borough. Placements in such accommodation are often responsible for the community tensions… I have seen an increasing number of families in temporary accommodation lose homes—either temporary settled homes or private rented accommodation—in my borough. They are then moved, sometimes after 12 or 15 years’ residence, to temporary accommodation in Dagenham, Barking or other parts of east
London because my borough has been unable to find them the temporary accommodation that they need.  We are pouring public money into temporary accommodation, often via the right-to-buy sector, in order to keep people in accommodation much of which is still sub-standard. My recent experience confirms that those families are not settled in long-term temporary accommodation, but are being moved from pillar to post. They are being moved from a borough that has been their settled home. We are pulling their children out of school, and taking them to the boroughs where community tension is strongest. That makes no sense as housing policy or as social policy, and it makes no financial sense. We must do something radical to stop it.”   Read Karen’s full speech in the Commons 

As part of the Shelter Campaign, MPs are saying to Gordon Brown has to fund more homes for local families when he sets out his spending plans next year.”

In June 2006 the Communities and Local Government Select Committee endorsed Shelter’s campaign for an extra 20,000 social rented homes to be built each year above existing commitments.  In his 2005 Pre-Budget Report the Chancellor acknowledged that new social housing must be a priority in next summer’s Comprehensive Spending Review (2007).

Members of the public can sign a virtual red Shelter brick at www.shelter.org.uk/wallofshame