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The St James’ Estate in Bermondsey used to be the site of an old railway yard, and you can still see the echo of that history today. A long straight road cuts through the middle of it, which appears to follow the track of the old rail line.

Today, this road is part of a cycle superhighway which e-bikes carrying commuters in and out of central London and delivery riders zip frequently along. The hundreds of cyclists who pass up and down it everyday probably wouldn’t look twice at the houses as they pass.

The estate is built in the unshowy but unmistakable style of the 1990s and early 2000s: red and brown bricks, small, neat front gardens, white triangular overdoor canopies. Most of the homes are modest terraced houses, ideal for young families. A few larger homes spread over three storeys and there are a few small, low-rise flats.

Should any cyclists have pause to think about it at all as they whizz through they may notice that it looks a little more suburban, a little greener, a little less densely-built than you might expect this close to central London. They might observer that there were more kids around than you often see. They may even refleft that this wouldn’t be a bad sort of place to start a family - better than the 21st storey of one of the flats a mile or so in either direction. But most would hardly notice it at all.

But what they all will notice though, what they can’t miss in fact, is the banner that hangs from the old railway bridge. Painted on a blue sheet in black and red block capitals, it reads OUR HOMES ARE WORTH A FIGHT!

The residents of this small estate - some of whom have lived here for more than 30 years - recently had their lives turned upside down. In May, a couple of hours before a new law banning ‘no fault evictions’ came into force, their new landlord served dozens to households across the estate. Around 30 now face the prospect of possession hearings where they may lose their homes and be forced out of their community altogether. Dozens more are threatened with punishing rent hikes of up to 60%.

Where residents have already left, workers are moving round houses like bees in a nest, pulling out fittings and converting the homes to be let as ‘houses in multiple occupation’ (HMOs).

An organised residents campaign is now fighting back, making this the latest frontier in the fight of working class communities against mass evictions and displacement that has a long history in the UK.

“They want to increase my rent from £1,200 to £1,600,” says Marie* - a mother of two. “But that is more than what I earn in a month full stop. I would have to leave, I would have no choice. I’ve lived in that home 23 years, and I’m just being told I have to pack up and go. I don’t like to think about what will happen to me, I just focus on helping other people. If I think about it too hard, I get too upset.”

“There are six primary schools in this area,” says Abigail, who lives on the estate and is helping to led the campaign against the evictions and rent hikes. “This is a community with a lot of families, and they are trying to get rid of us all. Everyone will be scattered out of London and beyond, and the schools will eventually close down.”

This fight, and the history behind it, tells a sad, poignant story about what has gone wrong in housing in the UK - and why it is getting even worse.

The St James’ Estate in Bermondsey was once supposed to resemble the bright new dream of modernity in UK housing. The story begins - as many like it do - in the 1980s with the government of Margaret Thatcher. Her government had introduced the Right to Buy and a series of budget cuts, which had begun to carve up the council housing which had provided the basis for a better quality of working class life since World War II.

But cutting off the supply of council housing and selling it off created a problem. People who could not afford to buy still needed somewhere to live. Thatcher’s dream was that the private sector should step in and provide rented housing instead of the state. When her government drove through a radical series of changes in 1988 - which ended rent control and allowed landlords to evict tenants much more easily - they hoped it would be the start of a brave new era of high quality, privately funded rented housing. We were introducing competition and consumer choice to the market to replace the state - surely standards could only rise?

The Quality Street initiative was a poster child of this effort. It had nothing to do with the popular chocolate selection box, but was instead a company launched in 1988 by Paul Mugnaioni, a former director of housing from Glasgow. He was backed with £600m of finance by the bank Nationwide to set up a purely-private rental business - building new developments and buying up homes in working class areas to offer tenants good quality housing at affordable rents without a penny of help from the state.

The initiative was singled out for praise by then housing secretary Nicholas Ridley as Parliament debated the government’s Housing Bill. He said it was exactly the kind of change the government hoped to generate with its reforms. “[Quality Street] is the kind of action that we need,” he said. “Our plans to revive the private rented sector… will create the right climate for further imaginative initiatives of this sort.”

By 1994, Quality Street had built up a portfolio of 2,500 homes around the UK. Mugnaioni told the Independent newspaper how it only employed 130 people, focused on good services and kept only two layers of management between the board and the frontline. Calls to the office from residents had to be answered within three rings. Housing management was personal, important and everyone’s job. Despite being chair, he still did shifts on the reception desk and as a concierge, emptying the bins and keeping the estates tidy.

Among the portfolio of homes it had built up were the 182 on the new St James’ Estate - a redevelopment of the old railway yard near the Old Kent Road in Bermondsey.

Eventually, ownership of the homes passed from Quality Street to Nationwide, which took over 100% of the equity in the company by 1998. It is not clear exactly why this happened, but it is likely that the difficulty of making a commercial return and keeping rents affordable was proving a challenge.

Nationwide incorporated Quality Street’s assets into its own balance sheet and changed the name of the management company to ‘at.home nationwide’.

Little changed, though, for the residents of St James in Bermondsey - the rents were still governed by their original agreements and ethos about affordable housing. They rose, but slowly. Much more slowly than those in the surrounding area, which was rapidly gentrifying as the Jubilee Line extension brought the tube to this part of south London for the first time in 1999. Now, Bermondsey - once a byword for working class London - was five minutes from both Westminster and Canary Wharf and a suddenly desirable place to live.

By this time, Thatcher’s dream of a mature, responsible private rented sector backed by big, patient capital was already falling apart. Instead what she’d created in 1988 had become a free-for-all. The launch of the ‘Buy-to-let’ mortgage in 1996 meant that everyone with a few thousand pounds spare was buying up street property, building their own small property portfolio and renting it out. Suddenly England had millions of part-time landlords, and the money they poured in sent house prices soaring. Rapid evictions and ever spiralling rents became the norm as the market ruthlessly sought out whichever tenant could pay the most. St James’ estate was becoming an island of affordability in an increasingly unaffordable city.

Things changed again for the residents of this estate in 2011. By now, Nationwide was not interested in owning property. It had become one of the country’s largest mortgage lenders and made most of its money by financing house purchases not by owning homes itself. While it had ridden out the global financial crisis unscathed, it didn’t make much sense to hold 182 homes on its books when it could sell them.

The homes on the St James’ estate were purchased from Nationwide by Notting Hill Housing Trust - itself a historic London social landlord, originally set up as a charity to provide decent affordable housing to people stuck in slum conditions in west London.

By 2011, Notting Hill - like many social landlords - was changing. It had become much larger and much more commercial. Now, it owned around 30,000 homes across London - the vast majority of them social housing. But with government grant rates being cut, it needed more profit-led activity to help subsidise the construction of new affordable homes. So it had set up a private rental business which it was looking to grow. The 182 homes in south London were snapped up, rebranded ‘St James’ Place’ and put into this commercial arm of the charity which Notting Hill had named Folio.

Despite being a housing charity, Notting Hill did not view these homes as social housing. They had been purchased by its commercial arm to generate a commercial return. As a result, it started rent reviews for the residents and proposed some sharp hikes to bring them in line with the local market. A handful of homes saw 40% increases, while others saw more modest rises. There was a big protest from residents, but Notting Hill stood firm. “The updated rental rates are aligned with each property’s true market value, though still remain below the like-for-like average in the SE1 area,” said its chief operating officer at the time.

By the 2020s, things had changed again. Notting Hill’s business (now Notting Hill Genesis (NHG) following a merger) was in a difficult position. Huge investment was required to repair fire safety defects which had emerged in inspections following the Grenfell Tower fire. It was majorly behind on routine repairs. Costs across the board were rising as the economy got tougher. In 2024, it had to delay publication of its accounts and suspend trading on some of its publicly listed bonds. When published, they revealed a £90m deficit and £770m of required spending over the next 10 years on existing homes. The business needed cash. The homes owned as part of its private-rented sector subsidiary would be the first to go in order to raise it.

In 2025, it appointed the agencies Deloitte and Savills to manage the sale of the 3,400 homes now owned under the Folio brand. “The money generated from the sale of our market rent portfolio will allow us to reduce our debt, invest in our existing social homes, and strengthen the delivery of our core services,” the company’s chief executive would later say.

In July 2025, trade magazine Inside Housing Living reported that the first set of homes to be put up for a sale by Savills was a collection of 182 properties which NHG owned the freehold to in Bermondsey, south London - the St James’ estate.

This deal was completed in October 2025, for a sum in the region of £58m. It went to a company called BMR Group. This was a small firm, not very well known in the UK property market.

In fact, BMR’s only real headline to this point had come in April 2025, when a linked company - BMR Hermini Ltd - had been fined and ordered to pay £43,000 after a property it let had been extended without permission to fit more tenants in. BMR Hermini was described as a “rogue landlord” in the media and the local council leader had told the press: “All of the actions from this landlord clearly show that they cared more about rental income than following the rules.”

When it purchased St James’ Estate, BMR Group was a very small company to do a deal of this size. Its accounts for the year ending 2025 showed it had just two employees, and capital and reserves of just £233,000. Folio St James, the company which NHG had set up to own the estate, was renamed BMR St James and BMR’s directors took over. The future of the estate was now in their hands.

But once more, it was subject to external financial pressure. It appears the deal to buy the estate was funded via a series of very large loans from United National Bank - the UK branch of the national bank of Pakistan. There are five such charges listed with Companies House on the same day the property deal was completed. It was a big, leveraged property acquisition - with the homes on the estate providing the security to raise the debt. But any debt must be repaid.

Since BMR Group has taken over, things have changed rapidly for residents on the estate. BMR has appointed Freshview, a separate firm, to manage the estate. Residents have noticed skips appearing outside any homes that became vacant. The homes are gutted as builders rip out fittings, fit locks on individual doors and change the family homes into multiple individual flats. The properties are then relet as ‘houses in multiple occupation’ (HMOs) - where each room is occupied by a different household. This massively increases the rental income from a home and is an accelerating trend. Research I carried out for the magazine UnHerd showed a startling 50% rise in HMOs in urban areas in the UK since the pandemic.

Andy Bates, a local Labour councillor, heard about what was happening and raised concerns with Freshview. He says that on a call with a manager at Freshview, he and local MP Neil Coyle were told “that ‘his client’ had borrowed a lot of money to buy the estate, and that this had to be paid back by displacing existing tenants and converting their homes into HMOs or through refurbishment and then selling on”.

HMOs are a particularly lucrative business model at the moment. Huge demand for bedspaces from local authorities with homeless households to place, as well as the Home Office which uses HMOs to house people awaiting an asylum decision, means there is an almost infinite pot of guaranteed state income waiting to be hoovered up.

“They want to turn these homes into state-backed cash machines, and they just have to get rid of the people here to make that happen,” Bates tells me.

Around the estate, tenants began to be informed that enormous rent rises were on the horizon. One woman I spoke to had been told her rent would jump from £1,185 a month to £1,900 - a sum she simply cannot afford. And in May, a day before no-fault evictions were banned by the Renters Rights Act, around 50 households received eviction notices which would have forced them out by July.

Neither Freshview nor BMR responded to a request for comment from Pete’s Substack. But Freshview has told the BBC that while individual properties were periodically reviewed, there was “no proposal to convert the estate as a whole into HMOs”. It has said that after BMR Group bought the estate, it found a “significant number” of homes were being rented at “substantially below” market rates, and that the proposals for new rents it has put forward reflect local market rental values.

Skips and builders materials outside larger homes on the estate (pictures: Pete Apps)

The community has since come together and organised protests against the plans to get them out of their homes. In July, just before it would have run out of time, Freshview issued legal proceedings against 30 tenants - who will now face eviction hearings in court as soon as the backlog allows. The rest of the estate faces a battle against the rent hikes that will likely force many to leave. A number of housing justice organisations are helping the community to organise a fight back.

“We aren’t just going to give up,” says Abigail. “We will fight this.” “We’re not leaving,” adds Aasha, a mother-of-two who has been served a Section 21 notice. “This is our community.”

When I visited back in July, it was so hot that the heat was almost visibly rising from the asphalt. A few parents passed by taking kids home from the last days of primary school. An ice cream van passed lazily through. A few kids came out to buy an ice cream. Unexceptional as it may look, this estate is a throwback for London - a family oriented community where people know each other and children can play out.

But its future is now uncertain. And its longer story paints a broader picture about the journey housing has been on in the UK over 40 years. The journey from Quality Street to Nationwide, to Notting Hill to BMR charts a course of the shifts in power and priority in UK housing which resonated well beyond Bermondsey.

It is ironic and poignant that an estate which was once the poster-child for Thatcher’s Housing Act now faces this fate. She may have wanted to encourage patient, institutional private investment but it has ended up being ruthless HMO landlords, and everything they stand for, who have emerged as the real beneficiaries. Nicholas Ridley once said his government’s changes would create the “right climate” for initiatives like Quality Street. Instead, they set in motion that forces that would destroy it.

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If you pay £40 or more for an annual subscription, I will send you a signed copy of one of my books - Show Me The Bodies: How we let Grenfell Happen (which you can buy from an independent bookshop here) or Homesick: How housing broke London and how to fix it (which you can buy here). For £50, you get them both.*

Even if you can’t support financially, liking this article or forwarding the email to friends and colleagues really helps. All of my work is completely human-made - there is no use of AI in writing or editing. Thank you for reading!

Reform has set out its latest housing policy - in what some outlets have branded an effort to professionalise the party and “get serious”.

I last wrote about Reform’s housing policy in June, with a run down of Nigel Farage’s pledge to deport any foreign citizens who live in social housing unless they moved to privately rented homes.

This latest announcement adds a further two policies to their ethno-centric social housing policy platform:

• To build 50,000 “affordable homes” per year with no extra taxes or borrowing from the British state

• To limit access to this new social housing to British-born workers only.

Let’s start with the second of those policies. Reform says that being in work will be “a requirement to access new social housing built under this scheme”. It says that 59% of social housing tenants do not work, and that social housing should not be a “reward for claiming welfare”.

Immediately, we hit some problems, though, because “do not work” is not the same as “unemployed”. According to the most recent statistics, it is the case that 59% of social housing tenants do not work. But this is because 26.1% of them are retired, 1% are students and 25.4% are unable to work due to a long-term illness or disability. Just 6.8% were classified as simply unemployed.

Now, some Reform voters may insist that some of the people out of work due to long-term illness and sickness should be pushed back into the workforce. But even if this is possible for some tenants (and prospective tenants), a society as large and complex as ours will always have people who are unable to work. It will also have pensioners. These people need to live somewhere, and if they are barred from social housing this will mean the private sector. This in turn will push up housing benefit costs - which is unlikely to be the outcome Reform wants.

Then there is the ‘British-born’ element. Reforms deportation argument discriminates against foreign-nationals - ie, people who do not hold British citizenship. This policy goes a step further, as much online discourse now does, by asking where people were born before deciding whether or not they are worthy of public services. But this would open up a whole range of practical problems. Where you are born isn’t really a relevant question in the provision of services currently: citizens can access plenty of things foreign nationals can’t, but no one asks to see your birth certificate.

How would this work practically? Does a child born to a British family lose their entitlement if they are born on holiday? Does a child born in Britain, who moved overseas as a child and returns as an adult have more rights than someone who was born overseas, moved here young and has lived in the country their entire adult life? If not, how does a system as large and complex as a national social housing allocation programme distinguish between all these cases? Shifting from citizenship to birthright may placate a few accounts with a big following on X, but it wouldn’t be a sensible way to run a public service.

So how about the construction of social housing without government funding? Reform’s policy document thinks it has found an ingenious wheeze, which goes into surprising detail about social housing finance. Unpicking this takes a little bit of explanation.

Housing associations, private charitable bodies which own much of the UK’s social housing, borrow money from the private markets to fund the construction of new housing. They have been doing so since the 1980s, to supplement government support.

In order to raise a new loan, they use existing social housing as security for the lender. The amount they can borrow depends on the amount of social housing they have to act as security.

But social homes are not valued in the same way as open market property, because often the use of the home is limited to the purpose of social housing. So a methodology has developed (technically called Existing Use Value - Social Housing or EUV-SH) which gives them a book value as a social home. Crudely, this is the rental income which can be expected over 30 years, minus maintenance costs.

However, there is an alternative valuation method (Market Value Subject to Tenancy, MVST) which instead values the asset according to what another housing provider would pay to buy it. This assumes the home would remain social housing, but be purchased by someone else. As more housing has been bought and sold between housing providers, there have been enough transactions to allow valuers to make this sort of calculation. MVST typically gives a higher value than EUV-SH. This means that if you used this methodology to value all the homes, social landlords could borrow more with the same number of homes as security.

Still with me? Don’t worry too much if not - that last sentence is the only really important bit.

Reform reckons it could change regulations to require all social homes to be valued under MVST, which would allow social housing providers to borrow more cash privately, which means they could build 50,000 homes a year without any government support. A brilliant wheeze. Except…

Well, except that valuation methodology is really more a question for valuers and private lenders than it is for governments. These are private businesses investing their own or their clients money. They have no reason to accept the government’s insistence that they must value these assets higher, even if the government says it wants them to. Lenders would want to be convinced that the MVST valuation was real - that this home could really be sold for that sum. They wouldn’t simply be told to do it.

Second, just the ability to borrow more money privately does not get you to 50,000 social homes a year. Housing providers combine private borrowing with government grant to build social rented homes. The sums don’t stack up to do it with private borrowing alone - especially not in the post-pandemic, post-Ukraine world, where building costs are higher than ever and borrowing costs much more than it did a decade ago. Take the grant out of the picture and it’s no longer viable. The fact that more private debt is available wouldn’t magically change that. Reform also cites some pension investment through a sovereign wealth fund and scratching up some money through reinvigorating the Right to Buy. Neither would be enough. To invoke a very old cliche in social housing finance - you can’t build sub-market housing without some form of subsidy.

Some of this is a bit technical, but I’d expect a competent finance reporter to grasp it after spending six weeks or so working at Inside Housing. It shouldn’t be too much to ask of a party that wants to form the next government, especially not since its Treasury spokesperson was once the longest serving housing secretary of the last decade - and definitely didn’t succeed in building 50,000 social homes a year by messing about with valuation techniques. In fact, he didn’t succeed at all.

This policy is really just bluster to talk again about how unfair it is that social housing goes to foreigners, when in fact it overwhelmingly already goes to British people and always has. It is base grievance politics, built on a flimsy foundation.

A further note - when I wrote about the deportations policy, I said that forcing housing providers to evict foreign nationals would likely cause their debt to be recognised on the national balance sheet - adding £105.4bn to the Treasury’s books in a stroke. I said that it was “perhaps mindful of this” that Farage had promised to deport but not evict the foreign nationals it dislikes so much.

Turns out I gave them too much credit. The current policy document promises to ‘evict’ foreign nationals several times. Since I last wrote about the policy, the Conservative Party has also adopted it - proving that they too value racial division above economic credibility.

Accountability, Grenfell and Arconic

This week, the thinktank Common Wealth has published a report on the lack of accountability for Arconic - the American-headquartered multinational which produced and sold the cladding ultimately used on Grenfell Tower.

Full disclosure - I have actually been working on this report for Common Wealth over the last year, alongside the financial investigators FIND and the report author Leela Jadhav.

Arconic, for those who don’t know, where found to have buried testing from as early as 2004 which showed the true, devastating fire performance of their polyethylene-cored cladding when it was bent into a particular configuration.

Rather than remove it from circulation, the firm obtained a certificate which appeared to suggest it could be used on high rise buildings in the UK - which its sales team actively targeted. Internal emails shared among its senior European staff, showed them discussing the potential for a fire in a building clad with its product killing “60/70” people in 2007. Emails between these staff before Grenfell acknowledged that the firm was “not clean” and said failed fire tests must be kept “VERY CONFIDENTIAL”. “For the moment, even if we know that PE material in cassette has a bad behaviour exposed to fire, we can still work with national regulations who are not as restrictive,” wrote one of their technical managers - in reference to the UK - in 2011.

Post-inquiry revelations have also revealed that even more senior staff in the US were made aware of the fire safety issues with the polyethylene-cored cladding - and even that it had been sold for use on Grenfell Tower.

The UK inquiry found that Arconic’s cladding was the “primary cause” of the fire spread at the tower. It later added that the firm “deliberately and dishonestly concealed from the market the true position” in relation to the safety of the panels, and “promoted and sold a product knowing that it presented a significant danger to those who might use any buildings on which it was used”.

But the consequences for Arconic since the fire have been slim. As the Common Wealth report outlines, it has paid out a relatively small amount to bereaved and survivors following a settlement agreement with various parties in the UK. It paid more (twice as much) to some of its own shareholders - who argued in a US court that their investments had been damaged by its behaviour. All but £2m of this has been covered by its insurance providers. The company turns over $8.96bn a year.

Further - it has not been made to declare the other locations it sold Grenfell-style cladding, whether in the UK or elsewhere, and has left the British taxpayer to pick up the tab for remediating these buildings. Individual managers remain in position, and have collected six-figure salaries since the fire with no apparent consequences.

The Metropolitan Police is investigating all avenues relating to Grenfell, but charges will not be brought until next year at the earliest. As it stands, Arconic has faced no meaningful accountability - not financial, not individual and not criminal.

The Common Wealth report outlines this - and makes a series of recommendations for reform, including a review of criminal penalties for corporate misbehaviour in the UK, and the introduction of a punitive damages regime, similar to the US. Jadhav, the reports author, says the lack of corporate accountability is a worrying gap in the UK legal system.

“As someone who’s worked in law and policy for a while across state and corporate accountability, it’s increasingly evident that the UK is lagging behind international counterparts such as Germany, Thailand and France in developing corporate due diligence legislation,” she says.

Despite the fact that corporations now hold enormous power over individuals, legal systems - and in particular criminal systems - are focused on individual wrongdoing and sometimes checking state power. “I think there’s a general problem that legal systems up until now in history have been calibrated around states and individuals, and this idea of a company and what it is to be a company has sort of slipped under the radar,” adds Jadhav.

She said that she initially expected the report to recommend a toughening of corporate manslaughter rules - which are rarely used - but after researching the area, she felt that the whole area of corporate accountability merited a closer look. Some lawyers felt - for example - that the gap is the absence of good investigation and enforcement against corporate actors who cause death.

“Some of the experts we spoke to felt that there’s not very effective implementation, and that the work needs to be done in that area,” she says. “So I think broadening out our recommendation on that to a kind of review of criminal sanctions in general that apply to corporate malpractice was a way of getting at this idea that there’s a comprehensive system at play, and we need to identify where the gaps are, where the weak points are, rather than focusing just on one piece of legislation,” she says.

Andy Burnham has built some of his political reputation on standing up for the victims of disasters. Ensuring that the system provides a measure of justice next time the cause of that disaster is a corporation is something he should be interested in at least exploring.

New social housing grant funding

Staying with Burnham for a moment, this week saw the announcement of the first social housing funding allocations of the £39bn which will be used to build new social and affordable homes over the next decade.

Burnham had suggested when he was vying for the leadership that all of this money should be used for social housing - but this did not happen. Instead it went out in exactly the proportions that his predecessor suggested - around 60% to social rent and the rest to other tenancies.

I am not too surprised by this. The allocation process was well underway by the time Burnham took over and ripping it up and starting again would have been a poor move given how badly the construction sector needs to get moving with some publicly-funded housing (and how badly the homes are needed).

But if he is to make good on his promise of the biggest increase in social housing since the post-war period, this isn’t enough alone. The next spending review needs to increase the size of the pot to get there. This may be a difficult thing to achieve in the current fiscal climate, but Burnham promised change not continuity in this area. It is reasonable to expect that to be what he delivers.

Falls from height

The last week has seen a devastatingly sad inquest into a death in Newham in east London - where five-year-old Aalim Ahmed fell to his death from the 15th floor of a tower block in May 2024.

The inquiry heard that between moving in to the property in February 2023 and the date of Aalim’s death, his mother had raised issues about the state of the windows with Newham Council multiple times. She was afraid for the safety of her son, due to apparent defects with the restrictor on the windows - which had begun to allow the windows to open fully every time, instead of only a few centimetres to begin with.

“I don’t know what more I could’ve done... I showed you guys over and over again. We could’ve prevented it, it could’ve been prevented. If the council did their job, my son would’ve been here,” she said, according to a report in Inside Housing.

She continued: “I feel like Newham Council failed me as a mum, as a tenant. I tried everything with Newham Council, I tried to say I wasn’t safe multiple times, and you guys chose to ignore me... I told you guys that [Aalim] had autism.”

In his conclusions, the coroner declined to issue a prevention of further death report. He found that while there had been an unacceptable delay in responding to the family’s concerns, Newham council operatives had attended in January 2024 and fitted a safe restrictor. He found that the restrictor was later damaged due to “misuse”.

A doctor’s report had said Aalim had “a poor awareness of danger” and that the “family lives on the 15th floor and the doors need to be locked, otherwise he will open the window and throw things or try and jump out of the window”. The coroner found no evidence this had been shared with Newham Council. In its absence, the coroner found there “was no compelling reason why the landlord [Newham Council] should have considered that placing this little boy on the 15th floor was inappropriate”.

On the coroner’s findings - though I can’t claim to have studied the evidence - this may be a case where the social landlord receives little blame. Nonetheless, it does point to the very serious risk that comes with windows and high rise buildings, especially when a child is present.

I wrote in depth about the issue of children falling from windows - which is a devastatingly common cause of death last year. A report had revealed 13 children have died since 2019 due to falls from windows, and a further three falling from balconies. All of them were aged under 11 and all of the deaths were described as “entirely preventable”.

This is an issue the social housing sector really needs to take more seriously - both as a matter of proactive maintenance and emergency repairs. If a window report comes in and a child is present in the flat, it should get a higher priority. Fiona Garrett, who lost her son Josh after a fall from a balcony in Islington earlier this year, has launched a “No More Falls” campaign, which calls on housing providers to act to prevent further deaths. You can read more about it here.

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If you pay £40 or more for an annual subscription, I will send you a signed copy of one of my books - Show Me The Bodies: How we let Grenfell Happen (which you can buy from an independent bookshop here) or Homesick: How housing broke London and how to fix it (which you can buy here). For £50, you get them both.*

Even if you can’t support financially, liking this article or forwarding the email to friends and colleagues really helps. All of my work is completely human-made - there is no use of AI in writing or editing. Thank you for reading!

Here I am checking the football scores while I’m supposed to be chairing an event

Over the last couple of days I’ve been in Manchester at the Housing 2026 conference, chairing sessions about a range of topics closely related to my regular content in this Substack. So here is a little bonus piece of thoughts inspired by some of those discussions, plus some remarks from me on where London finds itself in relation to housing and where it goes next.

Overheating by design

Unsurprisingly, given what it felt like outside, the question of overheating came up in a panel on the construction and management of tall buildings.

Richard Cook, chief development officer at Clarion Housing Group, pointed out that buildings around the world - including countries much hotter than this one - cope with the heat better, without total reliance on air conditioning.

This is a point worth emphasising. Statutory guidance on overheating (Approved Document O) was only introduced in 2022. Before then, we didn’t have any official standards on overheating and, as Craig Sheach of PRP architects pointed out on the same panel, many other regulatory requirements worked directly against it (window sizes, insulation etc).

The result is that we have a generation of high rise buildings which have not been built with hot summers in mind. Huge windows which only open a fraction cook the flats, and enclosed internal corridors can become dangerously hot. The fear is - as one academic report put it - that we have spent the first quarter of the 21st Century building a generation of tall buildings which will be uninhabitable by mid-century during the summer.

Dealing with this isn’t rocket science, and isn’t impossible. Designs which focus on shading and ventilation can make a massive difference to the comfort of buildings when temperatures peak.

Despite the increasing discomfort of those stuck in maladapted high rises in our increasingly fierce heatwaves, there are those who would unwind the new regulations and force total reliance on air conditioning on flat dwellers.

This, however, would bake in a new, future fuel poverty question about who can afford cooling. Cook predicted that this would be a major debate in UK housing in 30 years time. I’d suggest it may come round much quicker.

Does selling flats in tall buildings actually work?

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If you pay £40 or more for an annual subscription, I will send you a signed copy of one of my books - Show Me The Bodies: How we let Grenfell Happen (which you can buy from an independent bookshop here) or Homesick: How housing broke London and how to fix it (which you can buy here). For £50, you get them both.*

Even if you can’t support financially, liking this article or forwarding the email to friends and colleagues really helps. All of my work is completely human-made - there is no use of AI in writing or editing. Thank you for reading!

What is the latest building control reform all about?

The question of why building control in England went wrong evades easy answers.

Building control is the process by which compliance with regulations is ensured. An inspector is engaged by the builder to check that they are complying with the rules and sign the project off at the end.

Until the mid-1980s, it was the job of an officious public sector inspector based at a town hall or a municipal body like the Greater London Council.

Then, from the mid-1980s onwards, private sector inspectors were allowed to compete with councils for the work meaning we have since had a hybrid system where both public and privately appointed inspectors can carry out the work.

Some people blame the private sector for the failure - saying the introduction of competition sucked resource out of town halls and introduced inappropriate clients relationships with the building industry. Others say the public sector became staid, failed to invest in new staff and was overwhelmed by the non-negotiable statutory responsibilities they continued to hold even as their resource wore down.

Others still say that blaming building control is something of a red herring - the reason we got a generation of poorly built and dangerous buildings was a combination of poor government guidance, dishonesty among product manufacturers and commercial incentives which pushed the construction industry away from careful, professional process to a save-money-at-all-costs dash.

Nonetheless, a lot of focus since the fire at Grenfell Tower and the subsequent revelaton that thousands of other buildings have serious fire safety problems, has been on building control. This week saw a big step forward in answering how it may be reformed.

A panel chaired by Dame Judith Hackitt reported on how to reform the system, and the government’s initial response is to say that it agrees with the findings and will consult on steps forward.

The changes, if implemented, would be substantial. The panel criticises the current system as one which “cannot provide reassurance that this public safety role is being met consistently” raising “risks to health and safety and the potential for substantial future remediation costs”. This is a serious criticism of a major function of the state. The panel do not limit their criticism to the private or public sector, but criticise both for different reasons.

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Anyone who is viewing the housing crisis in the UK with clear eyes should be able to see that the most pressing challenge for policy makers is the spiralling numbers of families stuck in temporary housing.

It is …

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