Solving England’s social housing conundrum: In conversation with Kieron Williams

In this article, we interview Kieron Williams, Leader of Southwark Council. He discusses his council’s role in leading a cross-party coalition proposing solutions to the government for more council housing. He emphasises the societal benefits of secure housing and the need for pragmatic local government collaboration to tackle the housing crisis.

When Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves stepped up to the despatch box to deliver the Labour government’s budget on 30 October, she included a raft of measures to fix the UK’s housing crisis. Included in these measures was a response to a series of recommendations made the previous month by a cross-party coalition of more than 100 council landlords responsible for 1.2 million homes across England.

Led by Southwark Council in central London, the councils published a seminal report, Securing the Future of Council Housing, outlining five solutions and more than 20 recommendations to help ensure that councils can provide more and better publicly-owned housing. Spearheaded by Southwark Council Leader Kieron Williams, the report was developed after Southwark Council hosted a summit with 20 of the largest council landlords in England in March to discuss their shared challenges and ambitions.

The five solutions set out detailed and practical recommendations to the new government:

• a new fair and sustainable Housing Revenue Account (HRA) model, including an urgent £644m one-off rescue injection, and long-term, guaranteed rent and debt agreements
• reforms to unsustainable Right to Buy policies
• removing red tape on existing funding
• a new, long-term Green and Decent Homes Programme, and
• urgent action to restart stalled building projects, avoiding the loss of construction sector capacity and a market downturn.

Challenges in expanding housing stock

Despite its overall reach, the impetus to develop the report on the future of council housing was borne from the challenges Southwark faces with the expansion and improvement of its housing stock. Kieron says that he soon realised that other councils were also facing these same challenges. “I looked around the country and it was very clear that whilst there was a huge national debate on the importance of more social homes and overall policy, actually there was not enough local government voice on ‘what do we really need to do about existing council homes’”. He reached out to leaders around the country and across the political spectrum to explore whether there was a collective view on how to solve the challenges. Initially unsure whether there would be a consensus, he says the shared challenges made this easy to develop. There was also a level of pragmatism among councils who recognised that they needed to provide a cohesive strategy in order tohave a mature conversation with the government.

While there were strong differing views on some issues such as right to buy, these were discussed and a consensus found. Kieron says the key behind the success of these discussions was the understanding between the parties that the report needed to be something that all parties could agree on.

“We don’t want to put anyone in a position where they feel unable to sign up to it” he says.

Gaining this consensus across the political divide was potentially easier at a local government level than is often seen at a national level due to the pragmatic nature of leading a council, he says. “Whilst people clearly have different political views, nonetheless it is broadly a set of people who are pragmatic and focused on getting things done,” he says.

“I think the second thing is that there is that real focus of local government on delivering services for people, being on the ground, being responsible and accountable for their delivery. That means that across the political spectrum, people are experiencing the same homelessness, they’re experiencing the same levels of demand for social care. And so the points of common cause are not hard to find”.

Being responsible for both the policy creation and implementation meant that it is also easier to hold councillors to account when things go wrong. “Whether that’s building homes, or providing support for children with special educational needs, or running a library, or emptying the bins, you can’t hide behind the fact that you’ve set the policy and somebody else is on the ground doing the work. You’re responsible right through the journey.” 

Societal benefits of housing

Kieron says that the goal of council housing, to provide good quality housing without the pressure to provide profit while ensuring long-term security, is fundamentally important to society, and the latter goal is a benefit that is often overlookedin the housing debate. He agrees that the majority of the cost to provide this should be borne by tenants paying rent, but says public investment should be used to ensure this remains available and affordable due to the wider societal benefits that housing security brings, such as a workforce to fill jobs and the reduced burden on the NHS. The question, he says, is getting the balance right between funding the costs through rents and public investment. “It’s a real challenge to bring your kids successfully if don’t know whether you’re going to be at that school in a few months’ time,” he says.

“That’s the same for your own development and retraining through life and getting a good job and retirement, the whole life journey. “An innate human desire is to put down roots somewhere, be part of a community, but then also that gives you this foundation for everything else, bringing up your children, having a good job, being able to retire, and good health and wellbeing. “And so that model of the council home, homes held in trusts for the community, that people can have as a secure home, and rent they can afford for the full time that they need it, is just a basic, straightforward, sensible, pragmatic solution, so everything else flows from there.”

Cllr Kieron Williams, Leader Southwark Council

Future steps to strengthen council housing

While the government has already implemented some of their recommendations, including increased funds for the Affordable Homes Grant, changes to rules around right to buy, and launching a consultation on a new social rent settlement, Kieron says there is still work to be done. “We were very clear in our report that it will take a decade to get council housing to where it needs to be again,” he says. He says this revolves around three steps. While the government is reviewing the long-term financial sustainability of HRAs, Kieron says the £29bn of historic debt currently held by councils also needs to be reviewed. This figure was agreed by government and local authorities in 2012, but a report from the Chartered Institute of Housing released in July suggested that the HRA debt settlement should be reduced to £11bn to meet current and future quality and regulatory standards. Kieron says the second step is the implementation of a Green and Decent Homes programme, which as well as improving the condition of housing, is also important to meet net zerotargets. “We’re not going to hit that as a nation if we don’t improve the quality of homes,” he says.

“But actually, the historic failings in the quality of building across all sectors need investment, and their historic nature means it’s simply not viable to rely on tenants’ rents to pay for all of those costs.”

The final step, he says, is investment in new homes.

“It’s great that the government have made an immediate investment to keep the formal house building programme going up to the spending review, but the comprehensive spending review needs to see more investment,” he says. A further challenge, while not mentioned in the report but still affecting councils, is their ability to deal with speculators, who can drive up prices and clog up the planning system. “In my borough, there is no shortage of planning permissions for new homes,” Kieron says. “We have two types of people seeking those planning applications. We have people who want to build homes, and we have people who want to speculate on the land value, and we need the tools to deal with the second group and push them out to the market, because the people we need are the ones who are going to build.”

Securing government support

Developing a report that garners cross-party support and a mention in parliament is a significant accomplishment. For those looking to replicate its success in other areas, Kieron says a few early decisions were key to its success.

The first, he says, is not to underestimate how much work is required, and only start “if you really mean to do it and have got the time for it.”

The second is to ensure that the report or review is filling a gap, he says. “The reason that I embarked on this process was that it became really clear to me that on so much the work around council housing, there just wasn’t a clear collective response on the detail of existing homes. You’ve got to be clear that you’re doing something that’s going to be useful for everyone”. The next step was building relationships with those who could either input into the report or implement its recommendations. Kieron began speaking to council leaders across the country, personally reaching out to the 20 largest council landlords, while asking Southwark’s chief executive, housing director and others to do the same with their counterparts.

“That layered approach to the relationships… has been really important” he says. The final step is to be clear on what is possible. “We’ve been very clear in focusing on the areas where we think there is potential to get government to do something different,” he says. The councils were also clear with government on their intentions during the process, releasing a statement from the 20 councils initially involved in the report and starting early discussions with both political figures on both sides of the house and government departments. “This is why it was so important it was a cross-party piece of work, ”he says.“We were really clear that we wanted to come through with something that would have the sector’s support.“And I think that’s why it’s been responded to specifically as well, because it’s not the views of Southwark, it’s not the views of one policy organisation. It is clearly, and has been seen as such, the views of local government on council housing.”

The path to local government

Local government wasn’t Kieron’s initial career choice, but he says it is a place where he found a home.

“As a young person, I got really interested in making the world a better place,” he says. “That’s what my parents were all about, particularly doing that through policy.”

Kieron initially began working with the civil service, but quickly realised he wanted to be closer to the people he was working to provide change for, and landed a job in local government “by accident”. “In doing that, I found that there is that point where you can really think big… but be doing that hand-in-hand with the people who those changes are for. And I had the opportunity to do that professionally for a period of time, and then the political landscape changed. I decided that the politics really mattered to me too, and I made the deliberate choice to step over into the political leadership and local government.”

He was elected as a Labour councillor for Southwark in May 2014, and has been Leader of Southwark Council since September 2020. Moving to an elected position required a shift in perspective, Kieron says. “I had to very quickly understand that as a politician, your role is not to be a professional expert”.

“It is to be a voice and an advocate for your residents and a leader and to do something different to the experts. And so I had to really rethink my role and the place for my expertise.”

However, the understanding of how council works was still helpful. “Local government is fiendishly complicated”. We deliver hundreds of different services. We are organisations that are labyrinthinely complex, from the finances to the governments. So coming into it and understanding how those things work has been a huge help. And I have huge respect for people who come in without that and still manage to be really effective leaders.”

Kieron emphasises that working in the local government sector provides a unique opportunity to change people’s lives,and encourages others considering it to take the plunge.

“It’s hard work,” he warns. “We don’t have all the tools we need to do everything we want to do, but it’s a role that allows you to have that real connection between the people that you want to work with, the people in your community whose lives you want to help change, and to do that work hand in hand with them. There is nowhere to hide in local government. When you get it wrong, the public are at your door outside the town hall as you walk in to tell you what you need to change. But at the same time, I get to spend time with people who’ve moved into the new council homes we’ve built,whose family are in the new care home that we’ve opened. As a ward councillor, I’ve also had the opportunity to be the person that’s helped someone when many other parts of the system have let them down, the rewards and the thanks are very real.”