Err. Really?

Talk is Cheap.

We must give a hat-tip towards Newham65 for this item.

They have discovered that the mayor’s commitment towards building new council homes is a bit fragile.

They note Mayor Fiaz’s election promise (at p33) to require 50% of new homes to be built for social rent. That is at council rent, not at affordable rent or the level of some other euphemism. 

They note that this promise was adopted by the cabinet in December 2022. This can be seen in the outcomes and measures appendix (extract below).

Alas, when it came to putting these promises into action, a dose of reality seems to have snuck in.

The commitment to 50% became a commitment to a ‘portfolio approach’ and the commitment to an actual number or percentage, seems to have disappeared altogether. (Cabinet Papers June 2023).

And as the mayor’s former supporters note,  

So well done Newham65, although we did notice something similar several years ago. This is taken from an Open Newham article. Here again we see the mayor’s dexterity with terminology overcoming her commitment to house building. Her manifesto commitment to building 1000 new council homes in her first term was replaced by a commitment to start the process, which could mean anything down to drawing up a 5-Year Plan.

You couldn’t make it up. Her failure to do what she said was then trumpeted as a success. In the 2022 manifesto, Labour stated:

That is to say, four years after entering office, in which Mayor Fiaz promised 1000 new council homes by 2022, the best she could say was that she had “started”.

In 2022 (and 2018)  she promised that 50% of all new homes would be for rent at social rent levels. In 2023 she abandoned that pledge.

It is little wonder that Mayor Fiaz is losing the support of her colleagues and her erstwhile supporters in the party.