Speech delivered at Sands Films Studio event for THE MAN WITH THE PLAN on 12th and 13th April 2025
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LearningTranscript
00:00The next person we've got is Gerry Flynn, who is the founder of the 35% campaign
00:04that was born out of the Haygate redevelopment.
00:10Gerry is a campaigner on housing, social housing, special council housing.
00:15Please welcome our friend Gerry.
00:30Thanks very much, thank you.
00:33William Beveridge, as we have heard, was a man with a plan.
00:38A plan to defeat what he called the five evil giants, including Squalor.
00:44One of the main causes of Squalor is a lack of good housing.
00:49Our new Labour government, it also has a plan.
00:54A plan to build 1.5 million new homes and solve the housing crisis.
01:00How many of them are affordable?
01:02As far as I can see, this plan simply gives free reign to private developers
01:07in the hope that if they build more homes, they will also build more affordable homes.
01:15This is an optimistic assumption.
01:19Affordable housing reduces developer profit.
01:24And so one of their main aims in life is to build as little of it as possible.
01:30As poor equality as possible.
01:32We can see this happening time and time again in where we are.
01:36Not very far from here at least.
01:38At the Borough and Bankside, North Southwark.
01:41At the Elephant Castle, where I'm from.
01:43At Canada Water and soon down the Old Kent Road.
01:46Huge new developments are being built which are doing next to nothing
01:51to meet the equally huge need for truly affordable housing in the Borough of Southwark.
01:57And that is the story of regeneration here in Southwark over the last 25 years.
02:04And that is the story of regeneration across London.
02:07Huge developments of new homes that most people simply can't afford to buy or to rent.
02:13And there is nothing in our new Labour government's housing proposals that I can see that is going to solve this problem.
02:26There is no statutory, there is no mandatory requirement on developers to build affordable housing.
02:32And in fact, things aren't getting better, they are getting worse.
02:41Just a couple of weeks ago Southwark Council again, I'm mentioning them a lot,
02:45felt obliged to give planning permission to a giant schema at the Elephant Castle called the Borough Triangle
02:52that offered as little as 150 social rented flats out of nearly 900 new homes.
03:05Interesting though, they did this because they were scared.
03:09They were scared that they would even lose that small amount of social housing if the scheme was rejected.
03:15That very same developer, Barclay Homes, has actually reduced the amount of affordable housing in another of its big schemes.
03:23Stone's throw from here, Canada Water, 4,000 new homes.
03:27They want to reduce the affordable housing there to 10%.
03:30So, we are not seeing an increase in affordable housing.
03:39We are seeing the opposite.
03:41We are seeing a race to the bottom.
03:43And in the face of such obvious problems with council housing waiting lists bursting at the seams,
03:49why is the government relying on private developers to solve the housing crisis?
03:53Why is it not building council housing?
03:55Because they are getting money from the developers.
03:58Big donations to political parties.
04:00Not for their responsibility.
04:01Well, I'm mentioning Southwark Council again.
04:03This time in a good way.
04:05Southwark Council is one of a hundred councils that has restated the case for council housing.
04:11It's a good report, I recommend it, as the solution to the housing crisis and pitched for money to build it.
04:20The government has responded.
04:22The government has responded with some extra money and has promised £2 billion for 18,000 new social and affordable homes.
04:30Well, this is good, but it's really, really not enough.
04:33Southwark alone has 18,000 households on its council waiting list.
04:37It wouldn't pay for Southwark's council housing waiting list, and this is for the whole country.
04:42And it is no good putting this money in the pockets of private developers where it is destined.
04:49It should go directly to councils for them to build the homes we need.
04:53Yeah!
04:54Yeah!
04:55Yeah!
04:56Yeah!
04:57Yeah!
04:58Yeah!
04:59Yeah!
05:00Yeah!
05:01Yeah!
05:02Yeah!
05:03So it is up to us.
05:05It is up to us to persuade the government and the council that building council housing is what should happen.
05:12Just as it did after the Second World War.
05:15The Beveridge report did not come out of nowhere.
05:19Before Beveridge and behind Beveridge there were mass campaigns of all kinds, mounted by ordinary people, highlighting the evils he identified, including the squalor caused by a lack of decent housing.
05:32And we have to do the same, work together to build campaigns to force the government to build the homes that we need, not the homes that private developers want to build.
05:41Now there are many organisations across London doing this, fighting for new homes that we can afford and fighting for housing justice.
05:59We have just set up an umbrella group for these campaigns here in Southwark.
06:04SHAPE, S-H-A-P-E, Southern Housing and Planning Emergency.
06:13And within a matter of weeks, almost within a matter of days, of setting up that group, we had a mass demonstration showing the strength of feeling in the area.
06:21We had over 600 people marching from Peckham to the Elephant and Castle, from one useless giant private development to another, neither of them giving us the affordable housing we need.
06:33So it's great to be here. It's great that this film about Beveridge is being made so that we can draw some strength and inspiration from previous generations who lived in different times but had to fight the same fights.
06:46Fight for proper healthcare, fight for proper jobs and fights for decent housing. Thank you very much.