Woodberry Down tenants face moving twice after Greens vote down Labour motion

Secure tenants on Hackney’s Woodberry Down estate may still have to move twice. The Green-run council defeated a Labour motion against so-called double decanting at full council on Wednesday 23 September.

Sarah Young, who represents Woodberry Down ward for Labour, proposed the motion. It asked for a plan with full costings to be brought back inside three months, showing how secure tenants could go directly into their permanent new homes without an interim stop. No funding source was set out in the motion.

What double decanting means for Woodberry Down tenants

In July, Mayor Zoë Garbett and her cabinet approved the next phase of the regeneration. Under it, social tenants in one of the original blocks due for demolition will first be rehoused temporarily somewhere else, then moved again once their replacement homes are ready. Cllr Alastair Binnie-Lubbock, the Green councillor responsible for regeneration and planning, described that phase as “exemplary” at the time.

Opening the debate, Cllr Young said the estate had already gained more than 650 social rent homes, and that so far every secure tenant had gone directly from an old flat into a permanent new one. According to her, Berkeley Homes had warned that the project would lose £13.2 million unless demolition of phase 5 could begin before the replacement homes were ready. She argued the developer stood to make far more than that in profit.

By her count, around 130 of the households in the phase 5 blocks alone are families the council has in temporary accommodation. If council tenants were moved into empty flats across Seven Sisters Road, she said, those flats would no longer be available for families in temporary accommodation from elsewhere in Hackney. Victoria ward councillor Joanna Sumner seconded the motion. It was her maiden speech in the chamber.

Greens say the motion puts council finances at risk

Cllr Binnie-Lubbock called the motion unfeasible and said it could put the council’s finances and delivery of the wider project at significant risk. He said Labour, which ran the council until May, should have raised the problem sooner. He put the delays down to building safety changes introduced after the Grenfell disaster.

Members of the Woodberry Down Community Organisation followed the debate, the final item of the night, from the public gallery. The group first took the issue to the council in 2010, when its chair at the time told Labour’s cabinet that tenants who had been promised one move would end up making two.

Before May’s elections the Greens were critics of the regeneration, which Berkeley delivers in partnership with the council and a housing association. In March, before she became mayor, Garbett wrote a London Assembly report accusing the developer of “running rings round the community”.