Red Brick

Red Brick: First, what does the housing crisis look like for people in Brent?

Matt Kelcher: We have many of the same challenges as other parts of London and the country: fundamentally, we need more housing of all different kinds.

We have more than 30,000 households on the housing waiting list, but it’s important to understand what that means. Only a proportion of those households are in priority need. People further down the list are extremely unlikely ever to receive a council home, however long they wait.

I think councils have to be honest about that. Being on a waiting list can give people the impression that if they sit tight for long enough, eventually they’ll get a home. The reality is that’s just not the way it works with the levels of social housing we have available today. The wait can be decades, and that uncertainty can affect decisions about new jobs, where children go to school and how people plan for the future. At Brent, we’ve set up our Find a place you can afford programme to give local people help now to find a private tenancy, rather than leaving them on a waiting list.

The housing crisis in Brent also goes well beyond the waiting list. We’re a young, incredibly diverse borough with strong family and community ties. A lot of people want to live in the borough where they grew up. They don’t want to move miles and miles away from their parents. But often there just aren’t the homes available for them here – whether that’s social housing, private rented housing, shared ownership or housing to buy.

You see young people with decent jobs who can’t move out of their childhood bedroom, young people who want to get on the housing ladder but can’t, and couples living in a one-bedroom flat who want to have children but can’t find somewhere bigger. If you don’t have somewhere secure that you can call your own, it has huge consequences for the way you live the rest of your life. It puts your life on hold. We want to free people from that by delivering secure homes of all types for everyone.

RB: Tell us about your approach to development. What can a Labour-run council actually do to shape development in a borough where much of the building is done by other organisations?

Brent has had a really good reputation for a long time of being somewhere that proactively welcomes development and the regeneration it brings. We are a rare example of a place in London that is managing to exceed our housing and planning targets.

I think being open and positive about development actually allows you to get more out of developers, not less. Development involves risk. If you’re going to spend months or years developing a scheme, but think there’s a significant chance the council will reject it at the end of the process, you either price that risk into the scheme or decide to invest somewhere else.

Brent has built a reputation as somewhere developers can have a constructive conversation with the council and get a fair hearing. That doesn’t mean saying “yes” to everything. It means being clear about what we want and working with developers to see whether they can deliver it.

That certainty makes Brent a more attractive place to invest. And if more developers want to work here, that creates competition for opportunities. If several major developers want to work with us on a regeneration scheme, they have to compete over what they can offer Brent – social housing, shared ownership, social value and other benefits for the community.

So, I push back against the idea we sometimes hear that being pro-development means being soft on developers. If you’re clear about your priorities, create competition and give people confidence that good schemes can actually get built, you can strengthen the council’s hand.

Shillibeer House on the old bus garage in Alperton is a good example. We worked with the private sector on a development of around 450 homes. Three blocks are private, and the fourth has given us 155 council homes. They look exactly the same as the private homes. People who had spent years in temporary accommodation now have a permanent council home. Some of the people who’ve moved in have made videos sharing their stories and the difference a council home has made to them. We couldn’t have delivered that outcome without being prepared to work in partnership with the private sector.

RB: Labour is now running Brent as a minority administration. How do you maintain that confidence when the council’s political position has changed?

There was inevitably some uncertainty among developers after the election. They wanted to know whether Brent’s political direction had changed. My message to them is very simple: it hasn’t.

We’re still the administration and there’s an enormous amount we continue to do. The Leader, the Cabinet and I are completely aligned about the importance of housing and regeneration, and that gives a clear direction to our officers in the planning department. People often want to come and work here , cut their teeth in the sector in Brent and a lot of them stay a long time, because they have the space to see projects through and make a difference.

But we do need to keep providing that certainty externally – maintaining relationships with developers and Housing Associations, being clear that we want growth and demonstrating that Brent remains somewhere where good development can happen.

Housing has also become more politically contested locally. Opposition parties have campaigned against development of all kinds including social housing, so those of us who believe we need more homes have to be willing to make the argument for them.

I do think attitudes are changing, too. On the planning committee we have had young people come along to speak in favour of housing applications because they wanted the opportunity to find a home in the borough where they were born and raised. The housing crisis is increasingly something people can see in their own families and communities.

RB: How do you make sure Brent is building the right homes to meet all those different kinds of housing need?

You have to manage housing delivery as a portfolio across the borough, rather than judge success by one tenure or the affordable housing percentage on one individual development. Our policy aims for 50% affordable housing across development, with 70% of that total to weighted towards social rent and London Affordable Rent products, as that is our area of greatest need. But that doesn’t mean every individual scheme will deliver exactly 50%. Some will provide less and others can provide 100%. What matters is what we’re securing across the programme as a whole.

So there may be circumstances where a development doesn’t achieve the headline percentage, but what it does provide is more three-bedroom family homes. We have to think about the actual benefit to Brent residents, rather than treating every site as interchangeable.

Sometimes the housing debate gets divided into two camps. There are people who focus on liberalising planning and getting the private sector building more, and others who put the emphasis on delivering more social housing.

I don’t think those ambitions are contradictory. We should make it easier to build more homes, because the fundamental problem is that we have far too few of them. And at the same time, we should be ambitious about delivering social housing and ensuring it remains a permanent and important part of mixed communities. For me, being an activist council means using all the tools and partners available to get the combination of homes our residents actually need.

RB: What could national or London government do to help Brent go further?

If I could make one change to support our social housing ambitions, I would end the Right to Buy in London.

RB editor’s note: The Government took early action to reduce Right to Buy discounts in November 2024. The Social Housing Bill currently going through Parliament would further restrict the Right to Buy, though the Bill stops short of ending the programme in England.

We’re building council housing ourselves. At Church End, for example, we’re delivering 99 new social homes. But when we plan new council housing, we’ve had to make assumptions about how many of those homes could subsequently be lost through Right to Buy.

That matters before a single home has been sold. Council housing requires long-term borrowing and investment. If you know that some of the assets you’re building could subsequently be sold at a discount, that affects the risk, the finances and ultimately how much more housing you can build.

And I don’t think Right to Buy has achieved what it was supposed to achieve in London. It was intended to expand home ownership, but many former council homes have ended up being rented out privately at higher rents or lost to the short lets sector. That means people in Brent have to pay those higher rents, which means they can’t save for a deposit, which means they can’t buy their own homes. Therefore, I believe that in London at least, Right to Buy has completely failed on its own terms. That’s why I’d like to see a London-specific policy, in the same way as Wales has ended it.

There is a more fundamental point too. My grandad lived in the same council flat in Sheffield for his whole life. He had no intention of buying it. Why would he? It was his home for as long as he needed it.

Social housing shouldn’t simply be a residual tenure for somebody who happens to be poor at a particular moment in their life. If somebody moves into a council home when they’re young and struggling, then gets a good job, we shouldn’t suddenly think they earn too much to deserve to live in their home or their community.

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