Labour's Housing Dereliction Derby

1.16.00pm BST (GMT +0100) Thu 19th Jun 2008

As Lambeth's Housing crisis deepens, as waiting lists for decent housing get longer, as repairs are put on hold, Labour's heartless response is to board up perfectly good homes and leave them empty. Worse than this, they are actually deliberately trashing many of them to make them uninhabitable.

There they stand, many of them in good residential roads, as stark and ugly reminders of Lambeth's failed Housing policy and of cruel neglect under Labour. Rather than spend a few hundred pounds to make them habitable, Labour would rather let the borough's neediest people remain on a housing waiting list for over half their lives.

Almost 1000 properties, according to official statistics, currently lie empty or void. Of these, amazingly, 357 need £500 or less spent on them to totally transform the life of a homeless family.

Quite apart from the strong moral argument, Liberal Democrats reckon that if these empty homes were actually let out they would be returning some £5 million a year to the Council in rents.

But the really destructive part of Labour's brutal and uncaring housing policy is that they actually smash-up perfectly good houses to prevent squatters moving in. An official Lambeth spokesperson denied this vehemently, however, saying that they only removed sinks and pipework in order to deter squatters.

Labour may try to nit-pick over words but the fact remains that at least 125 properties are currently squatted - the numbers always rise under Labour - so their dereliction derby of a policy doesn't seem to be working, either.

In fact the only winner here seems to be the dereliction of duty by Labour to house needy people on the ever-lengthening waiting list. And the sad fact is that if they actually got their act together and let out these empty properties to those waiting families, there would be no room for squatters to move in them.

And no expensive and lengthy court cases to bring to evict them again. And no even higher repair bills afterwards.

Homelessness in the 21st Century in one of the great capital cities of the world is nothing less than a national scandal. Lambeth under Labour is a classic example of an abject failure to tackle homelessness.

There is currently a freeze on all but essential repairs under Labour on the remaining 26,000 properties in its care. Some people on the waiting list, though, would simply be glad of a home - in whatever condition.