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Affordable? For whom?
• MATTHEW Humphreys uses the word “affordable” (housing), in reference to plans for Finsbury Leisure Centre, to obscure what he really means (Letters, May 22).
Latest reports on how well or not councils met housing targets set by the London Mayor in 2007-08 provide the evidence. That year, Islington’s Lib Dems oversaw the development of double the target set for private/luxury homes. They achieved about 350 per cent of the target set for intermediate homes. These part-rent, part-buy homes are the “affordable homes” particularly favoured by Islington’s Lib Dems and EC1 New Deal. Shamefully, many of them sit empty, because they are anything but “affordable”. But when it came to homes that might actually help overcrowded families in Islington, the Lib Dems fell 40 per cent short of the target.
Mr Humphreys and his cohorts on EC1 New Deal board, with the Lib Dem council, originally planned to build 300 luxury flats on council estates in Bunhill to help fund plans for Finsbury Leisure Centre. Since then, they have formally supported plans for a massive development at City Road Forum, comprising 544 luxury flats and a 125-room hotel yet only 94 social rented homes.
EC1 New Deal and the Lib Dems’ recent “area action plan” (stretching to 2025) aims to further “diversify” this predominantly working class area. It specifically suggests “formulating individual plans for housing estates... the council could ‘replace’ deteriorating residential buildings and/or build new housing with more than one type of tenure” (that is code for housing ordinary working-class people will never be able to afford). Not that you would be aware of any of this by reading the “consultation paper” recently pushed through doors in EC1.
Phil Cosgrove
Finsbury estate, EC1
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