Thriving Communities need Affordable Living

The True Cost of Affordable Housing In Richmond-Upon-Thames Paddy Griffith, South Richmond, Green Party Councillor Candidate

"Affordable Housing" is one of the banner issues being discussed in the Borough for the May 7th Local Elections. But it doesn’t sound very, ermm, ‘Richmond’ does it?Do we really want more ‘affordable housing’? Surely we love seeing house prices go up around here?

Well, the problem starts with the name: "affordable housing". For most in TW10 and TW9 it conjures a mental image of council estates and social housing, which at the very least feels like a ‘them’ problem. So let me reframe it:  what we're actually talking about is whether your children's teachers can afford to live here, whether the nurse or carer who looks after you or your family can get to work or a hospital without a two-hour commute - and, just as significantly, whether your council tax bill keeps rising to pay for a crisis your own council created by refusing to build.

First: what does "affordable" actually mean?

Legally, affordable housing covers everything from social rent (set at around 50–60% of market rate) to intermediate homes for key workers at roughly 80% of market rent. It is emphatically not just social housing. It includes the starter flat a teacher or nurse could actually rent. It includes the family home a local business owner or young professional can afford to stay in.

Richmond's average rent is now £2,254 a month — up 5.2% in a single year, the fastest rise in London. A newly qualified teacher earns around £31,000, or a take-home of £2,200 per month, meaning that rent alone would consume almost their entire monthly salary. Richmond-upon-Thames is explicitly named as one of the least affordable places in Britain for key workers — nurses, teachers, police officers, firefighters. When those workers can't live here, they commute from further away, burn out faster, and leave sooner. The services we all rely on quietly degrade.

Who actually needs affordable housing in Richmond?

Three groups — none of them abstract.

First, people the council is legally required to rehouse. Families evicted from private rentals — like the 20 or so residents currently being displaced from the Poppy Factory estate on Petersham Road in order to increase rents ahead of new renter protection legislation — with nowhere to go. As of August 2024, there were 3,735 households on Richmond's waiting list, with only 268 properties made available for allocation in the previous year. The gap between supply and need is structural and growing.

Second, the workers who keep this borough running. A nurse's salary cannot cover the median rent in any London borough. The same is true for teachers, council workers, care staff. When they can no longer live where they work, recruitment collapses and the cost of agency cover rises — another hidden bill for tax payers.

Third, your own children. The average first-time buyer in Richmond now pays £619,000 for a home. Unless they have family wealth behind them, they leave. The borough ages. Its diversity shrinks. School numbers fall and have to close. The community that made Richmond what it is, slowly hollows out.

Now for the number that should end the debate.

Richmond Council recently spent £21.5 million acquiring 50 properties — not to house people permanently, but to use as emergency temporary accommodation. The council's own estimate is that this saves £1 million a year by reducing reliance on costly nightly paid hotels and B&Bs.

So that is £21.5 million. Not building a single long-term home. Not solving the problem. Just buying breathing room from the consequences of not having solved it sooner.

And the crisis is accelerating. The council recorded a £2 million overspend on homelessness in Q1 of 2025/26 alone. Across London, boroughs overspent their homelessness budgets by at least £330 million in 2024/25 — a 60% overspend — with councils collectively spending £4 million every single day on temporary accommodation. That money doesn't build homes. It funds privately run hotels and B&Bs, often outside the borough, uprooting families and children from their schools and communities.

Meanwhile, the STAG Brewery in Mortlake - the biggest development Richmond has seen in a generation - was approved with just 7% affordable housing. The Greens challenged that at the Public Inquiry and pushed it to 12%. Still nowhere near the 50% target in the London Plan. The council had the leverage. It chose not to use it.

This is what the housing crisis looks like in a wealthy borough. Not visible poverty, but a slow hollowing out — of teachers, nurses, young families, and diversity — and a council tax bill quietly rising to clean up a mess that better decisions could have prevented.

What Greens would do instead.

The Green Party's approach starts from a simple principle: build the homes, avoid the bill. Our manifesto commits to four concrete actions. First, using developer money to build new social rent homes — making planning permission conditional on genuine affordable provision, not the 7% fig-leaf the council accepted at STAG. Second, streamlining planning to unlock and retrofit the borough's vacant properties, putting empty buildings back into use rather than leaving them idle while families wait. And our approach to housing doesn’t just stop at affordable housing. Third, we will create a borough-wide energy service for every home, helping residents and landlords finance insulation, heat pumps and solar panels — cutting bills while future-proofing the housing stock. Fourth, requiring zero-carbon construction standards for all new domestic renovations and extensions, so that every pound spent on housing improvement also reduces the borough's long-term environmental costs.

The housing crisis in Richmond isn't inevitable. It's the product of choices — choices made by national governments, at planning committees, in budget rooms, and at public inquiries. Different choices produce different outcomes. That's what this election is about.We need a stronger opposition from the Greens in Richmond, to oppose the Lib Dem complacency. We cannot afford to let this problem go on. 

Sources: ONS House Price Index (Dec 2025); Richmond Council Housing Allocation data (Aug 2024); Savills Key Worker Housing Report (2024); Richmond Council press release on property acquisition programme (Oct 2025); Richmond Council Q1 budget monitoring report (Sept 2025); London Councils homelessness analysis (Apr 2025).