Housing
We all deserve to live in dignity, yet millions of people across the UK do not have access to safe, secure or affordable housing. But it doesn't have to be this way. We're bringing everyday people together with powerholders to tackle poor housing and increase affordable housing in communities up and down the UK.
National priority areas include:
Affordable housing.
The UK doesn’t have enough genuinely affordable homes. We are working to ensure more affordable homes are built, particularly on sites like the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham and the Olympic Park in London.
Community-led housing.
We have set up the first Urban Community Land Trust (CLT) in the UK at St Clements Hospital in East London. CLTs put communities at the heart of local developments and ensure that the homes built are genuinely and permanently affordable. In London we have five sites we are actively working on.
Emergency and temporary accommodation.
Citizens UK Birmingham are putting together a training program for communities to get advice at the right time to prevent people needing emergency accommodation. In London we are working with the Mayor to ensure that temporary accommodation remains temporary, and challenging them to improve the quality of such accommodation.
- According to statistics collected by Shelter, around three in ten people live in bad housing. 3.6 million of these people are children, and 2 million are pensioners.
- The average house price in the capital stands at £592,900 — 15 times higher than the average salary.
Thousands of Citizens are winning change for housing across London
From 2018 London Citizens spent 4 years working with Trust for London and the housing advisory board on an ambitious project to tackle London's housing crisis.
This work focuses on:
The People’s Legacy.
A campaign to secure a genuinely affordable Olympic housing legacy for the people of East London. We want to increase the percentage of affordable housing on each site to at least 50%.
Building a powerful tenants-led campaign that is tackling bad and criminal landlords in the private rented sector across the capital.
Ensure London’s biggest development this decade – the Old Oak and Park Royal Development – delivers homes that Londoners on low incomes can afford.
During this time at least 11,535 people across the Capital have been involved in political assemblies where housing has been on the agenda. Together, with hundreds more who received training in Community Organising and took action, community leaders have made incredible progress on these campaigns. Securing numerous local wins as well as some high-profile strategic victories in the capital:
- A commitment from the London Mayor to ensure that 50% of the housing on the Olympic Park and on the Old Oak Common is genuinely affordable.
- Five local authorities in London have committed to selective landlord licensing schemes. Selective licensing allows local authorities to penalise rogue landlords.
- We have seen an increase in affordable homes being built under the current Mayor due to his implementation of London Citizens’ Good Development Standard. This was a commitment to ensure 35% of homes built on private land are affordable and 50% of homes built on public land are affordable.
- We have also campaigned for our partner organisation London CLT to be given the land and money from the Greater London Authority to build CLT homes in South, East and West London. CLT homes are genuinely and permanently affordable homes to buy.
But there's still more work to do...
Ten years on from the London 2012 Olympics, East London Citizens (TELCO) reflect on the legacy of the games. Through Community Organising, leaders won the world's first Living Wage Olympics and big commitments for new training, jobs and affordable housing.
However, despite these incredible wins, delivery of some of these initiatives fall far below expectations. That's why we we’re calling for the Mayor of London, the LLDC and elected leaders to be more ambitious on plans for affordable housing and Community Land Trust homes, creating the change and legacy promised to local communities.
Community Land Trusts
Our work began with an innovative solution for affordable housing. Citizens UK community leaders took action outside City Hall in London in 2006 that involved tents and a demand for a meeting with the-then Mayor of London Ken Livingstone.
The meeting led to a commitment for the UK’s first urban Community Land Trust (CLT) - CLTs are a community-led solution to the housing crisis, where ordinary people develop and manage homes. The homes remain under community ownership, ensuring they remain genuinely affordable, based on what people actually earn in their area, not just for now but forever.
London Citizens campaigned for the first urban CLT as part of getting a fair deal from the Olympic Legacy. The decision in 2007 to formally constitute as a CLT came out of hundreds of conversations where people talked about the pain of seeing friends and family having to leave the area they called home.
The wins kept coming
In 2016 in front of 7,000 Londoners, Sadiq Khan agreed to work with us on affordable housing, temporary accommodation and more. This gave birth to an important partnership with Trust for London, aimed at tackling the housing crisis in the capital.
In 2018, 23 permanently and genuinely affordable homes priced according to local wages at St Clements in East London were sold to Londoners on median incomes. Now campaign teams across London are working on identifying sites that can be used to build CLT homes.
To help with this work we set up a new organisation, London Community Land Trust. Together, we now have 150+ genuinely & permanently affordable homes in development across the city.
Our first Citizens House opened this year!
After 10 years of campaigning and hard work, 11 genuinely affordable and permanent homes are now complete and opened in Lewisham. It is the first community land trust in London that has been directly created by the community using London CLT’s unique affordability model, in partnership with Lewisham Citizens, Lewisham Council and the Greater London Authority.
Citizens UK Summit: Building back together
In 2021, Citizens UK worked towards a national summit with Rt Hon Robert Jenrick. The Citizens UK Housing Summit was an opportunity to reflect on where we are as a country when it comes to housing and how we might work with local and national government in their efforts to build back better. We worked across Chapters and partnered with Create Streets to develop a series of events culminating in an assembly with senior Government officials and decision makers.
Leaders who worked on the National Summit include:
Elizabeth Coleman
Derren Cresswell
Arthur Tsang
Revd Caz Hague
Revd Alison Richards
Rehana Begum
John Clifton
Shermara Flecther
Rebecca Stockman
Clare Moses
Graham Bowpitt
Penny Bernstock
Jackie Ashmenall
Fighting the root causes of homelessness
Homelessness cannot be solved without changing hostile policies, but we know that everyday people have the ability to shape the world around them by working together. That's why we're calling for an end to unjust migration policies that cause homelessness, as well as campaigning for safer and more equal access to housing for homeless people.