Solid ground

Somewhere in Lewisham this morning, a child is waking up in temporary accommodation. Their books are spread across a bed because there is no space for a desk. They share a bathroom with strangers. Their belongings remain half packed, because permanence is a luxury they do not have.

This is not an isolated hardship. It is a predictable outcome of systems that have failed to provide the most basic form of security: a stable home. In Lewisham alone, 2,495 households are in temporary accommodation, including nearly 4,000 children. These numbers are so large they can lose their moral clarity, yet every one of them reflects a family pushed into instability by choices taken – or avoided – at every level of government. This is exactly the sort of challenge the Fabian Society has spent more thana century urging Labour to confront at the level of structural inequality rather than superficial symptoms.

The Fabians have always argued that the state must be capable, purposeful and serious about delivery. Nowhere is that more urgently needed than in housing. Yet across London, the debate has been distorted by actors who speak the language of social justice while campaigning against the very developments that enable it. Your Party and the Green party increasingly move as a single bloc of obstruction. Their rhetoric is radical, but their impact is regressive.

The pattern is familiar: they arrive late; they insert themselves into local groups that have spent years in dialogue; they amplify anxieties about change; and they exit before responsibility for the consequences reaches them. Lewisham is just the latest example.

In November, Zarah Sultana made Your Party’s Question Time debut. She focused on poverty and injustice – issues which matter deeply. But too often, the radical left strategy separates moral outrage from the material conditions required to reduce inequality. You cannot claim to tackle poverty while organising against the construction of secure, affordable homes. Housing is not peripheral to social justice. Itis the foundation of it.

Fabians understand this instinctively. For decades, the argument has been the same: social progress requires the unglamorous work of building institutions, housing, infrastructure and services. You cannot redistribute opportunity if people do not have a stable place to live.

Labour in London is now aligned around that practical mission.

Nationally, the Labour government has committed to 1.5m homes. That necessitates planning reform, unblocking stalled sites and rebuilding state capacity to deliver social housing at scale. For the first time in years, national government is an active partner rather than an obstacle. In City Hall, Sadiq Khan has delivered more genuinely affordable homes than any mayor of London since devolution began – not to mention the London Living Rent, record numbers of new social homes, billions secured for council housebuilding, and a planning system that treats affordability as a requirement rather than an aspiration.

In Lewisham, this mission is well underway. Our Building for Lewisham programme is one of the most ambitious in the capital. Hundreds of council homes have already been completed. Thousands more are in progress. We are on track to deliver 2,000 homes by 2026. A council home is not only shelter; it is stability, schooling, access to services and the ability for a family to plan their future.

Permanent homes do more than end temporary accommodation. They allow communities to form as children play in shared courtyards, parents build support networks, and neighbours stay long enough to invest in each other. Housing is social infrastructure, and hostels are not homes.

The Lewisham Shopping Centre redevelopment is a practical example of this approach: 344 new social and affordable homes, a youth club, a music venue, a new park, a new shopping centre, and thousands of jobs and training opportunities. Nobody is being displaced, because the land provides no homes today. Under Labour, it will. This is the choice: performance politics or delivery politics. Symbolic resistance or structural change.

Fabians have always argued that the state must be willing to act, not gesture. That poverty cannot be reduced through slogans. That inequality cannot be undone without building. That social justice is not achieved by protecting empty car parks but by constructing secure homes for families.

Today, London has a Labour government, a Labour mayor and boroughs like Lewisham ready to build. This is the alignment Fabians have long argued for: national, regional and local government pulling in the same direction.

The task is clear. The evidence is overwhelming. The moral duty is obvious. There is no credible progressive politics without a commitment to build the homes people need, and no path to equality that does not begin with a stable place to live.

Image credit: Jodi crisp via flickr