“They’ve lost the plot,” says Slaney Devlin, chair of the Somers Town Neighbourhood Forum, quoted in a Guardian piece on a resurgence of Council Housing, by Oliver Wainwright. June 20 2019.
The Forum vociferously opposed the CIP plans. “It’s brilliant that the council is building more social housing elsewhere, but the social value is being missed when they’re designing segregated developments like this. It’s astonishing for a Labour council to be building a tower of investment units on a park. If this is the answer, then they’ve asked the wrong question.”
Llocal authorities have begun to build their own housing again. They are mostly doing so for the first time in four decades, since Margaret Thatcher took away their powers to build. These were only returned in 2012 and, in the seven years since, London councils have built over 2,000 homes – compared to only 70 in the seven years before that.