Tories attack Labour council for hiring homelessness prevention staff

Tories have attacked a Labour-run council for hiring more homelessness prevention officers – claiming they are a waste of money.

The new Labour administration in Wandsworth is bringing in 23 new housing staff to try and clear a backlog of homelessness cases.

3,545 children are currently living in temporary accommodation in the borough, and homelessness has risen there every year since 2010.

But William Sweet, leader of the Conservatives in Wandsworth, said the Labour council had been “on a spending spree” by hiring the 23 new staff in the housing department.

“They’re spending money without explaining how it will actually improve the lives of residents,” Mr Sweet said in a video put out by the opposition.

“We’re not against working with Labour to be constructive, to help them to do the right thing for residents. But we can’t just sit by while they spend money without thinking about value for money.”

Labour councillors said they were “genuinely surprised” at the Tory line of attack given the level of need in the inner-London borough.

The party took control of Wandsworth council earlier this year, ending decades of Tory rule at the “flagship” local authority – which has long been a testing ground for Thatcherite policies.

One the Labour administration’s first acts was to increase staffing in the housing department, where officers were dealing with 80 to 100 homelessness cases each.

Close to 3,000 families came to Wandsworth presenting as homeless from Wandsworth in 2021/22, and a report by the council’s director of housing this year urged the administration to make “significant investment in staffing for the homelessness service, across various teams, to assist recovery of the budget position and to see temporary accommodation usage reduce over the medium term”.

Aydin Dikerdem, Wandsworth Labour’s cabinet member for housing, told The Independent that investing in the new staff would likely reduce costs in the long-term because high levels of homelessness meant temporary accommodation costs had skyrocketed in the last decade.

He noted that Wandsworth now spent £20 million on temporary accommodation for homeless families in 2019/20 – “quadruple the £4.7 million we spent a decade ago”, because it had not been able to properly house local families.

“I’m genuinely surprised the Tories would attack an investment in homelessness prevention staff given the dire situation that they have overseen and that we inherited in May,” Mr Dikerdem said.

“It’s not just morally the right thing to do, but also financially aims to save us in the long run as every prevention is a family avoiding expensive temporary accommodation alongside the huge social and mental health cost to those residents too.

“For me the question is will this make a dent given the huge rise in rents and the cost of living crisis that will undoubtedly see the risk of homelessness increase this winter. My answer is we have to try, which makes our investment more needed than ever.”

The Conservatives also criticised the Labour administration for spending money on setting up a citizens’ assembly, and for increasing staffing in the council leaders’ office.

Wandsworth has long had the lowest average council tax in the council, but the approach has put significant pressure on services like housing.

As a Thatcherite testing ground the council was described as “the cradle of privatisation” in the 1980s, transferring vast swathes of its responsibilities to the private sector under leaders such as Christopher Chope, Paul Peresford and Edward Lister – now all Conservative parliamentarians.

But Labour finally captured the council in May this year, ousting the Tories for the first time since 1978 and winning a majority of their own.