IT WAS not so much the knights of the round table as the suited and booted politicians of the round table as London Mayor Sadiq Khan sat politicians, experts and campaigners down on 29th October to discuss an Action Plan for ending rough sleeping on the capital’s streets.

Sadiq announced that his new initiative will be called “Homes off the Streets”. This brings to an end a couple of centuries of keeping our homes very much on the streets and taking the homeless off them – but this is Sadiq’s first time with a Labour Government and it’s clearly pressing his “innovation” buttons.

Sadiq has found £4.8m down the back of a County Hall sofa to fund the scheme, and he has worked out that will provide 3,500 homes for rough sleepers by 2030, when the problem of rough sleeping will end. However, both Sadiq and Tom Copley (Deputy Mayor of London for Housing and Residential Development) are taking a leaf out of Starmer’s “first take your medicine” book and have warned that the problem of rough sleeping will get worse before it gets better, because the last Government left things in such a state.

We know Sadiq is serious about homelessness. The budget for ending rough sleeping has quadrupled since 2016, and although we haven’t ended homelessness apparently we have seen 17,600 rough sleepers leave the streets – with 75% of them leaving for good. And Sadiq tell us London “was one of the early adopters of a housing-led approach to tackling rough sleeping” – which sounds like the best way to do it, really.

Rushanara Ali MP was among those sat around the (rather square-looking) round table – that’s the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Homelessness and Rough Sleeping, but no longer the PUSS for Building Safety. Let’s hope she didn’t suggest that Sadiq build all the rough sleepers new homes in Tower Hamlets, because we are very, very full and very short of space.

What we do have, though, is lots of empty flats: flats bought as investments by speculators but seldom or even never let out. They sit empty, as their owners are content to see the book value of their wealth grow without the bother of having to deliver a service. The last Government threatened to give Councils the power to take over empty properties built for financial speculation rather than occupation, but no useable powers ever came into being.

Now maybe that’s an idea Rushanara could take back to her mate Keir. If Keir would let Tower Hamlets Council take over those speculative flats built in Tower Hamlets (mainly in and around Canary Wharf) and actually rent them out, we might well be able to house London’s 3,500 rough sleepers well before 2030 – and quite a few of the families on the Tower Hamlets housing waiting list too.

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