Bleak Houses, the new London Assembly planning and housing committee report on improving London’s private rented sector (PRS), contains nine recommendations and an array of suitably Dickensian facts.

The recommendations, listed on pages 36 and 37, include urging the mayor to develop a London-wide kitemark or accreditation badge to be awarded to homes that meet minimum standards, government tax incentives for landlords to improve the standards of properties and a number of ideas for encouraging them to offer longer tenancies.

The Dickensian facts are that about a third of the capital’s roughly 850,000 privately rented homes don’t meet the “decent homes” standard that applies in the social rented sector, and that the same proportion of its landlords are considered “rogue.” This is at a time when the PRS, which already provides for one in four London households is, as committee chair Jenny Jones AM puts it in her Foreword, “increasingly taking on taking on the functions of the social rented sector.”

At the same time the PRS is more and more providing accommodation for the sorts of people who in the fairly recent past would have been looking to buy their own homes in London (people like me) but these days cannot begin to afford to (people like my children). It may soon cease to be unusual for Londoner couples with average household incomes to start families in privately rented homes and to have, at most, low and distant expectations of becoming homeowners in the capital.

The Bleak Houses report says the PRS in London grew by 83% in the first ten years of this century and is now “the only growing housing tenure in London.” It is, in other words, the housing future of this city for more and more of its people, ranging from the very vulnerable to the reasonably affluent.

The challenge presented in the report for London’s mayors and London’s boroughs is to act to eliminate low standards without risking reducing the supply of PRS homes when social rented accommodation is drying up and homes for sale are priced out of sight.

Some combination of constructive regulation and conditional encouragement is the answer sought here, with tenants and a critical mass of good landlords locating a shared interest in long-term security at the heart of it, though suppressing current soaring rent levels – the other theme of Ken Livingstone’s recent policy speech – is, of course, another huge part of the picture and beyond the scope of Bleak Houses.

The report seems to chime with the findings of a recent study of the PRS in other countries by the London School of Economics, which you can read about here.

Update: Shelter’s Director of Communications, Policy and Campaigns Kay Boycott has responded to the report as follows:

Shelter is glad that the London Assembly’s report Bleak Houses has acknowledged the growing problems affecting families in London’s over-heated private renting market. In the last two years, London has seen a 68% increase in the number of families with children who rent from a private landlord and they are ten times more likely than homeowners to have moved house in the last year.

As London private rents soar, and tenants can be evicted with just two months notice, we welcome the London Assembly’s ideas for improving the stability that private renting offers, and in particular for families with children. If the London Assembly is looking incentives to achieve this, the most important thing will be to identify landlords that are able to offer longer tenancies and find the right incentives to encourage them to change their practice.

Many thanks for that.

Ken Livingstone’s proposals for improving London’s private rented housing sector, unveiled in a speech on Tuesday, have been greeted in some quarters like a sighting of rising damp, with dire warnings being issued about the ruinous impact of introducing rent controls. This is no surprise: the smallest prospect of tighter regulation is guaranteed to have such as Boris Johnson and some landlord pressure groups howling about toadstools sprouting from skirting boards. But were these people aware that rent controls as such weren’t mentioned by Ken in his speech?

If asked about them the Labour mayoral candidate will advocate the principle with that cheery insouciance some love and others, including political media managers of the conventional kind, really hate. But he knows he’d lack the power to put it into practice. And there was no promise to pursue such a path among his words to the IPPR/Centre for London conference.

Two pledges were made. The first was to “establish a campaign for a London Living Rent,” which would learn from the achievements of the London Living Wage campaign by “arguing, cajoling, intervening and collaborating” to persuade landlords that it can be in their interest for rents to take no more than a third of tenants’ incomes rather than the more than 50% now devoured by two-bedroom dwellings in most London boroughs. Longer-term, more co-operative tenants might be one beneficial result.

The second was to “work with other stakeholders” to establish a “London-wide, non-profit lettings agency,” which would “put good tenants in touch with good landlords across the spectrum of private renting so that both can benefit from security of tenure and reduce the costs of letting.” Such an agency, I’m told, would be run from City Hall like a social enterprise and seek to encourage good practice and root out rogues and rip-off artists.

Both are quite large ideas. But coming from a politician who, according to the interwebby chums of his Conservative opponent, is interested only in forcing Chingford to twin with Cuba they have a bridge-building, consensual quality.

Ken’s initiative and the housing policy jousts of the mayoral contest in general have brought a measured response from Richard Lambert, chief executive officer of the National Landlord Association. Commenting on the idea of a London-wide non-profit lettings agency he welcomed “initiatives that seek to improve access to private housing for tenants on housing benefits,” citing an example already working in Harrow.

On the wider question of access to affordable housing, Lambert made the point that, “Rising rents in the private sector do not automatically mean bigger profits,” and said he hoped “the real focus of all candidates in the lead up to next year’s mayoral election will be the overall affordability of living in London. We would welcome a debate on what constitutes a ‘living income’ at a time of rising costs of living, expensive housing, stagnating salaries and decreasing housing benefit.”

Judging by Ken’s speech, which majored on living standards in the capital, he’s not the only one.

Hammersmith and Fulham Council is to receive £15 million from the giant property company Capital and Counties (CapCo) in return for the exclusive right to negotiate a land deal that would result in the destruction of 750 homes to make way for the huge Earls Court redevelopment project. The “exclusivity and collaboration agreement” was agreed by the flagship Tory council’s cabinet last night and paves the way for CapCo and the Council to work together towards demolishing the neighbouring Gibbs Green and West Kensington estates despite a passionate campaign by residents to prevent it.

I was unable to attend the meeting myself due to being sucked into the phone-hacking vortex all day, but three people who attended have described around 50 anti-demolition campaigners from the two estates lobbying councillors and between a third and half that number wearing T-shirts bearing the legend “Yes to our Future” ostensibly in support of the council’s plans. However, according to local Liberal Democrat activist Paul Kennedy , some of the latter group appeared unsure of exactly why they were there:

Several of them told us they were campaigning to save their homes, so we thought for a while they must be campaigning against the development. They didn’t seem to realise that they were being used for propaganda by the Council and developers who want to demolish their homes.

The allegation that the “Yes to our Future” group had been “bussed in” by the Council to create a false impression of local enthusiasm for their scheme was also made by the anti-demolition campaign, which accused “council officers” of assembling “an unrepresentative and unelected group” in the Holiday Inn hotel on North End Road, issuing them with their T-shirts and sending them to the Town Hall in a minibus, together with a deputation statement that had been prepared for them.

I contacted the council for a response to these claims just before two o’clock this afternoon and have been promised one tomorrow [See my update below]. A leaflet distributed on the two estates urging residents to gather at the hotel and attend the cabinet meeting, and claiming that “most local people” support the redevelopment plans, said it was “printed on behalf of the West Kensington and Gibbs Green steering group,” a rival residents panel set up by the council, but it does not say who had actually done the printing. The anti-demolition campaign has accused the Council of paying for propaganda.

The exclusivity deal between Hammersmith and Fulham and CapCo lasts for one year and represents a step forward for the wider Earls Court Project, which also envisages the demolition of the Earls Court conference centre. The land it and the estates stand on, together with a disused Transport for London rail depot, would create a 77-acre site on which CapCo say 7,500 dwellings could be built, along with hotels and offices.

The Council has promised residents new homes within the development area, but at the meeting opposition Labour group leader Stephen Cowan called for a ballot to be organised to determine residents’ wishes before proceeding, and the anti-demolition campaigners are hoping that “stock transfer” powers the government has promised to activate as part of its Big Society agenda will enable them to take ownership of the estates and run them themselves, thereby thwarting the Council and CapCo. They have more than two-thirds of residents signed up for the project.

Recent correspondence between Hammersmith and Fulham leader Stephen Greenhalgh and minister for decentralisation Greg Clark suggested that Greenhalgh had been rebuffed in his attempts to have the new powers watered down to prevent the campaigners making use of them. Yet the regulations required to bring the powers – set out in section 34a of the 1985 Housing Act – into effect have not been published in draft by the department for communities and local government, despite it’s saying in December that they would appear early this year.

I have contacted the DCLG to find out why this hasn’t occurred. When they get back to me, I’ll let you know. Details of the exclusivity deal can be read on page 203 of the cabinet agenda.

Update, 20 July. The council’s statement has now arrived:

Council officers did not meet anyone at a nearby hotel, nor did they provide T-shirts or leaflets. They did not brief residents on what to say. All of the campaigners in favour were estate residents. They knocked on the doors and delivered the leaflets themselves.

Maureen Way [a long-standing estate resident] and the other residents who came last night spoke very passionately, organised their own support and would take great offence at any suggestion that the council orchestrated it.

While the Council understands that there are a large number of residents on the estate who remain unconvinced about the merits of regeneration, there are also a large number of people on the estate who want to see change and want to see new homes built.

Residents on the estate have established their own independent steering group. The Council will provide funding to enable them to represent and negotiate on behalf of other residents. Membership of the steering group is open to anybody who lives on the estate who wants to be part of the negotiation.

It concludes:

Any future land agreement with EC Properties will be on the condition that a series of council tenants, leaseholder and freeholder guarantees, negotiated with an 80-strong resident steering group, can be met. These include:brand new, modern homes in the development area for all secure council tenants; council tenants will be moved with neighbours where possible and will only have to move once; compensation for tenants, leaseholders and freeholders; discount schemes for resident leaseholder and freeholders who want to buy back into the scheme; early buy-out clauses for resident leaseholders and freeholders.

The saga continues….

This article originally mistakenly described local Liberal Democrat activist Paul Kennedy as a Councillor and has been amended accordingly.