Adam Hug

SPRING is just round the corner and that means it’s budget time.

This year not only are we having to find £20million in efficiency savings and income generation but we are dealing with a tidal wave of homelessness that is being caused by a clash between a housing crisis and punitive welfare policies.

Private rental costs have gone up over 21 per cent in the last year, while the supply of suitable properties for the city council to rent as temporary accommodation is going down. We’ve seen an in-year rise of 700 households come into temporary accommodation and are predicting a further 500 in the coming year.

This means we are facing a temporary accommodation bill that is £38million higher for 2024/25 than was planned for 2023/24.

The council’s finances are robust and we have an action plan in place to bring this bill down, including ramping up further our acquisitions plan to buy 270 new homes for temporary accommodation; but Westminster is not immune from the pressures faced across local government after so many hard years.

It is in this context that the council has taken the difficult, but necessary, decision to raise the general rate of council tax and the adult social care precept this year.

In practice here in Westminster that equates to only a 46p per week increase in the band D bills as we retain one of the very lowest council tax rates in the country.

I and my colleagues at the council have been clear for years that one of the particular challenges in Westminster’s broken housing market, fuelling the homelessness crisis set out above, is the wholesale conversion of homes into holiday short-lets that has taken place since the government decided to deregulate the sector in 2015. Westminster currently has the highest number of short-term lets in the country – around 12,000 – many of which are operating outside of the law but where it is hard to prove in the absence of any regulation or registration.

It seems the government is now finally listening to Westminster and other councils. It has announced a new national registration scheme for short-lets, a new planning use class for future short-lets and powers that councils can use to prevent further properties becoming holiday flats.

The potential fly in the ointment, though, is the way the government proposals risk creating a potential amnesty for existing holiday flats, that have been operating under the radar for years. That is by allowing them to use “permitted development rights” to convert into the new use class without requiring planning permission before a proposed power to allow councils to block unapproved conversions is able to come into effect (the process normally requires a 12-month consultation period).

So we are making clear to the government that they mustn’t fall at the final hurdle, failing to join up the process in a rush to get this done before the general election.

Because if they get this right it could mean not only real powers to prevent noise and rubbish dumping blighting the lives of neighbours but it could potentially bring thousands of properties back into the housing market to help alleviate the crisis in the private rented sector and the pressure on temporary accommodation that hurts so many.

• Adam Hug is Labour leader of Westminster City Council.