Ric Metcalfe

By Ric Metcalfe City of Lincoln Council Leader

There are few more important things than a good home for our health and sense of well being. A place where we feel we belong, can share things with our families or friends and have somewhere we can escape to and relax after the demands of the day.

Unfortunately, many people in Lincoln do not enjoy these things because either they do not even have a roof over their heads, are living in very overcrowded conditions, or whose homes are in a poor state of repair, too expensive to run or unaffordable because of the rent or the mortgage that has to be paid.

At the most extreme end of the housing crisis, the council received more than 200 applications for homelessness in 2012/13.

Council housing still remains an attractive option for many lower income families who also want the security of tenure and the assurance of a responsible landlord.

Although the City Council still owns about 8,000 homes, there are 3,000 people on the waiting list and many people have to wait five to six years before getting re-housed. Given the extent of housing need, the difficulty in getting council housing, and the problems of getting a mortgage nowadays, many low income families have had to resort to private rented accommodation.

At the last census in 2011, more than 8,000 private rented properties were identified in the city, with half of these built before 1911. According to the Council’s own stock condition survey of these properties, it’s believed that nearly half do not meet the Government’s Decent Homes Standard as they lack a decent standard in a number of their basic facilities.

Of the 22,000 owner-occupied houses in Lincoln, a third do not meet the Decent Homes Standard, and again more than half were built before 1911.

On April 1 2013, there were 768 privately-owned empty homes in the city, a wasted resource which brings an area down, can attract anti-social behaviour, and lead to the property reaching the point of being beyond repair.

Currently, homes being built by private home builders are running at about 300 per year, just 25% of what is needed to keep up with projected demand.

This snapshot of our current housing crisis explains why affordable housing is one of the City Council’s priorities and why we are making strenuous efforts to tackle the problems, despite the serious financial problems we face resulting from cuts in Government support.

We have provided money for two new facilities for the homeless, have started building council houses again the first time for 20 years, are working with private sector landlords to improve standards in rented accommodation, and are using the licensing system to do the same for homes in multiple occupation.

The council has awarded £6 million in grants to improve over 1,700 homes and 231 decent homes grants worth £1.8 million to home owners in Lincoln.

Using our Empty Homes Officer, we have brought 82 empty homes back into use over the past five years. Although many of these are notoriously difficult to bring back into use, we will redouble our efforts to prevent this waste of resources.

We have to get the private sector building more homes. We are pushing to make progress on the 3,000 new homes we hope to see in the Swanpool and Skewbridge area (west of Tritton Road) and have been providing support for first time buyers through our mortgage support scheme to help people get their first foot on the housing ladder.

There are 1,000 homes in Lincoln without central heating, and about 15% of people live in fuel poverty. We are looking to enter a bulk buy scheme in order to offer people a cheaper tariff for the fuel.

We are doing as much as we can, but given the scale of our problems in Lincoln, and given the age of our housing stock, the crisis can only get worse.

Much, much more needs to be done. We need more help from Government — give us more borrowing powers so we can build more council housing. Recognise the importance of house building and the favourable knock-on effects of getting economic growth going.

In the 20 years between 1950 and 1970, we built 6.5 million homes in Britain. There was then the recognition of the need for new homes and a national will to meet that need.

We desperately need that same will and determination today if we are going to overcome this crisis.

Councillor Ric Metcalfe is the Labour Leader of the City of Lincoln Council.

By Ric Metcalfe City of Lincoln Council Leader

I have just returned from an enjoyable seaside holiday with my grandchildren and was reflecting during one (rare) idle moment on the beach about the legacy that will be left to them.

These thoughts were prompted by the inspirational address given by Pam Lunn to the Resilient Future conference held at the University of Lincoln in July about the extent to which we are facing, as she put it, a “slow motion, but relentless collapse of the whole globalised, western-inspired and unsustainable capitalism.”

Pam talked about the notion of “Earth Overshoot Day” which is as close science can get to an estimate of the gap between our demand for resources and how much the planet can provide.

“Earth Overshoot Day, a concept developed by the Global Footprint Network and the UK think tank New Economics Foundation, is the marker of when, in each year, we begin living beyond our means.

This year it was August 20 which marked the date when humanity exhausted nature’s budget for the year. We will now operate in overdraft for the rest of the year and this has been going on since the mid 1970’s when we crossed a critical threshold when human consumption began outstripping what the planet could reproduce.

As Pam Lunn pointed out, in Britain we spend at the rate of about 3½ planets every year. The problems of financial debt that the global economy is currently struggling with are nothing compared to the ecological debt we are building up. We can’t refinance, default on, or write off ecological debt, and we can’t indulge in quantitative easing; there isn’t another planet we can borrow from, and we can’t create a new environment.”

Infographic: Global Footprint Network

One of the issues that Pam discussed was the sense of powerlessness that many of are likely to feel about what you can do in the face of what seem to be global forces way beyond the power of an individual’s ability to influence.

There were several helpful things she had to say about this. Firstly, that we all need to take personal responsibility for the things we can do something about (and which a lot of people are already doing)

As Pam reminded us, it’s all those things we already know about but may not yet have fully implemented in our own lives: insulate our houses, use less gas and electricity, reduce our travelling and change our means of travel, eat less meat (or none at all), reduce all consumption and waste, re-use, repair and recycle everything we can, shop less, shop local, reduce food miles, grow your own, compost food waste, buy without packaging, cook fresh food from scratch instead of buying processed food, and so on.

Pam added many of us are already doing some of this, some of the time. We all need to do all of it all of the time, consistently and reliably, forever. I repeat: forever; –this isn’t like going on a diet and then having a binge. It boils down to consume less, consume less of everything, consume much less of everything.”

Secondly she went on to address the issue of the sense of powerlessness and fatalism that can be a reason for doing nothing. The powerful idea, first expressed by Marshall McLuhan that “’there are no passengers on Spaceship Earth, we are all crew”.’

The first essential according to Lunn for turning “passengers into crew” is to prepare for interruptions in our normal supplies of energy, food and goods and services, get used to handling these things and being resourceful.

Of course many people already without some of these things already have, as a matter of course, often become very resourceful and self reliant.

But what Lunn says is everyone needs to learn how to grow food, how to make, mend and fix things. Between us, as extended families, networks of friends, and local groups and communities, we need to take back the hand-skills that the modern world has ‘outsourced’ to mass production on the other side of the world”.

Lunn left us with the salutary thought that we either achieve “one planet living” or we all perish.

Councillor Ric Metcalfe is the Labour Leader of the City of Lincoln Council.