Teresa Nkemelu has lived on the Bellhaven estate for nineteen years, long enough to have watched three separate regeneration plans arrive, be photographed, and quietly expire. The fourth one is different. This one has a budget, a bill, and a date. Her block comes down in March.
The housing bill that passed its final reading last week is the largest building programme this country has attempted since the nineteen sixties. Two hundred thousand homes in six years, a third of them at social rents, paid for by a mixture of borrowing and a levy on undeveloped land. It is, by almost any measure, a serious answer to a serious problem. It is also, for about eleven thousand households, an eviction notice with a long lead time.
The arithmetic that made it possible
The programme works because of a single clause on page forty-one. Sites already in public ownership can be redeveloped without the usual local consent process, on the argument that the land is public, the need is urgent, and the delay is the whole reason nothing has been built for a decade. Ministers are not shy about this. The housing secretary called the clause “the only interesting sentence in the bill” at a select committee hearing in June, and he was not being modest.
Without it, the arithmetic does not close. Land acquisition is the largest single cost in any social housing scheme in this country, typically between thirty and forty per cent of the total. Building on land the state already owns removes that cost entirely, which is how the Treasury got from a headline figure of ninety thousand homes to two hundred thousand without finding more money.
Building on land the state already owns removes the largest cost in the scheme. That is the whole trick, and it is a good one.
The trouble is that publicly owned land in cities is not empty. It is estates. It is the postwar blocks that were built quickly, maintained badly, and are now the last genuinely cheap housing in the inner districts. Bellhaven has four hundred and twenty flats, an average rent of two hundred and ninety a month, and a waiting list.
What “replacement” means on paper
The bill guarantees every displaced household a home at the same rent in the same district. It is a real guarantee, written into the statute rather than the guidance, and it is stronger than anything offered in the last three regeneration rounds. Housing charities that spent two years fighting for it consider it the single best thing in the legislation.
The guarantee attaches to the household as it exists on the day the demolition order is served. Nkemelu's household is three people: herself, her son, and her mother, who moved in after a fall in 2023. The replacement flat she has been offered has two bedrooms, which is what the allocation formula produces for three people when one of them is over seventy and one is a child. Her current flat has three.
This is not a loophole. It is the formula working exactly as designed, applied to a household that grew after the last allocation and before the next one. There are, by the department's own estimate, between nine hundred and fourteen hundred households in the programme in the same position. The department describes the number as “within tolerance”.
The gap between the demolition and the keys
The second problem is time. Demolition on the Bellhaven site begins in March. The first replacement block is scheduled for completion in the autumn of 2028. The gap is thirty months, and the bill does not say where anybody lives during it.
In practice it will be temporary accommodation, which in this city means private lets procured by the council at rates that are roughly four times the social rent being replaced. The department's impact assessment budgets for this. What it does not budget for is what temporary accommodation does to a school place, a hospital appointment, or a job that is reachable by one bus.
You cannot describe a thirty-month move to the far side of the city as a temporary inconvenience. For a child that is a school. For my mother it is a doctor she has seen for twelve years.
The case for doing it anyway
None of this is an argument against the bill, and the people making it loudest are careful to say so. Bellhaven's four hundred and twenty flats will be replaced by eleven hundred, of which four hundred and sixty are social rent. That is a net gain of forty social homes on the site and six hundred and eighty homes overall, in a district where the median private rent has risen by fifty-one per cent in five years.
Thirty years of not building is the reason Bellhaven's flats are the last cheap housing in the district in the first place. The households being moved are paying the cost of a decision made before most of them were born, and the alternative on offer is not a better plan. It is another decade of the same.
The households being moved are paying the cost of a decision made before most of them were born.
What would fix it
Three changes have been proposed and all three were voted down at report stage. Assess the household at the point the replacement is offered rather than the point the order is served. Cap the gap at eighteen months by phasing demolition block by block instead of clearing the site. Give the guarantee to the address rather than the household, so that a family that grows does not lose a room for growing.
The first costs nothing. The second costs about four per cent of the programme in slower delivery. The third is genuinely expensive and genuinely difficult. Ministers have signalled that the first may return as an amendment in the second chamber, which would be worth something to perhaps a thousand households, and nothing at all to Teresa Nkemelu, whose order was served in June.
She has stopped going to the consultation meetings. “They are not consultations,” she said. “They are explanations. I understood the explanation the first time.”
1 of 3 free stories read this month
