Green Party candidate for Mayor of London Jenny Jones today visited Peckham High Street to pledge action over empty homes and affordable housing.
Along with Green candidate for Lambeth and Southwark, Jonathan Bartley, Jones met residents of the area to discuss shocking levels of empty housing in the area and in London as a whole.
Figures from the charity Empty Homes suggest there were 79,971 empty homes in London in 2010, 3,367 of which were in Southwark.
33 recently refurbished homes on the nearby Dog Kennel Hill Estate were left empty for nearly 3 years, losing at least £594,000 in rent and depriving 33 families on the waiting list of a home.
Southwark Council owned 650 properties in 2010 and recently refused to release a list of all empty properties following a Freedom of Information request from the Green Party.
Jones said: "London is facing a housing crisis that decision-makers have been only too willing to ignore.
"We want to change the housing market from a playground for speculative investment to a source of secure, affordable homes.
"If we are to ensure that residents of the capital can house their families and themselves, slow the continuous rent increases, reduce homelessness and end the insecurity that many tenants suffer, then City Hall must act decisively."
The Greens 2012 London Elections Manifesto, launched last week, pledged to set up a clearinghouse to offer all publicly owned derelict land to Community Land Trusts and to make all suitable publicly- owned empty homes available to self-help co-operatives to bring them back into short-life or permanent use.
The party also promised to offer empty homes owned by the Greater London Authority group to self-help co-operatives who can work with homeless people to bring them back into use and house themselves.
Homeless in England increased 36% between October and December 2012 according to recent figures, and charity Shelter has highlighted a ‘desperate shortage of affordable homes for Londoners’.
Bartley said: "The Green Party is the only party that has realistic, credible and practical policies to address the housing crisis in Southwark.
"It is a scandal that there are so many empty homes in the borough, whilst there are also so many needing affordable housing."
You can find more details on the Green’s Housing policies at www.jennyforlondon.org/fresh-ideas/housing/