Southwark chief concedes quality of existing council homes may have suffered during heady pursuit of new builds

By Robert Firth, Local Democracy Reporter

Southwark council’s Labour leader has admitted his party should have focused more on improving the quality of council homes, after it was revealed over 70 per cent of council homes lack an up-to-date electrical safety certificate.

Cllr Kieron Williams told a scrutiny meeting on Monday evening that, looking back, he would have paid more attention to the condition of council housing in the borough and concentrated less on building more council homes.

Asked by Labour councillor Sam Foster if he thought ‘more political will’ should have been put on reforming management of the council’s housing department in previous years, Cllr Williams replied: “Hindsight is a great thing isn’t it? We went for the building the maximum homes we could route.

“That’s clearly a really important thing to do. We now have 18,000 families on our housing waiting list. It has gone up and up. Do I think now we should have gone for a little less of the building and a bit more of the quality of homes? Probably yes.”

Cllr Williams added: “At the time, would I have made the same call as the council made then? Probably yes. With hindsight, I might make a different choice. If I was back there now today, I would probably make the same choices as made at the time.”

Labour took control of Southwark from a Liberal Democrat-Conservative coalition in 2010. Williams has been leader of the council since 2020.

Out of Southwark’s 33,430 properties, 24,256 (72 per cent) are missing an up-to-date Electrical Installation Condition Report—a document issued to confirm sockets, switches and wiring have been checked and are safe, according to a report presented to the same meeting on Monday.

In November last year, the government’s social housing watchdog gave Southwark council a grading of C3 (the second worst rating) for consumer standards and said the local authority needed to make ‘significant improvements’.

The Regulator of Social Housing (RSH) found that over half of the council’s homes had not had an election safety test for over five years and over 50 per cent of properties were missing smoke alarms.

Southwark, which is London’s biggest council landlord, has ambitions to build 11,000 new council homes by 2043.

Southwark met its target of starting or completing 2,500 new council homes by May 2022, but in June 2023, the council’s former housing director Michael Scorer admitted it only had the money to construct 3,200 of the 11,000 council homes it had pledged to build.