In Ealing & Acton we have homes valued at over £2m yet within walking distance there are homes that suffer from paper thin sound insulation, damp and mould, gut wrenching lifts and many families living in overcrowded conditions with children growing up with little indoor space to play or privacy.

As someone who works for a housing provider, I understand the desperate need for decent affordable housing to allow local families to stay close and support each other.

There is a need for more housing though there must be a balance to achieve sustainable communities: between the right mix of affordable housing (including key worker and shared ownership) and private; delivering more family homes and appropriate housing for our increasingly older population; and perhaps most importantly building the infrastructure to serve those new residents, especially in education and health provision.

With the loss of social housing through the right to buy, the Labour government has sought to develop mixed and sustainable communities, and empower councils with the financial ability to build new council homes to bridge that gap. We are also ensuring new housing developments meet lifetime homes criteria; include waste reduction and the promotion of recycling facilities, as well as being more energy efficient.

I fully support the rights of leaseholders to ensure their landlord achieves competitive prices for repairs and maintenance work and deliver good customer services. I also support giving the council enforcement powers to deal with issues residents feel is leading to a detrimental impact upon their lives and the local environment around them, both in planning and anti-social behaviour terms.

Ealing suffers from the twin problems of inadequate, poorly managed social housing and excessive overdevelopment of speculative private developments, especially in central Ealing and West Ealing.

The council manages its housing through Ealing Homes, a failing organisation set up by the previous Labour administration in order to jump through hoops set up by the Labour government. Ealing Homes and Ealing Council spend their time trying to blame each other for continued housing failure. The current Tory council is only now starting to address these issues having neglected them for the first three years of their term.  Meanwhile many people wait for years - or even decades - to be allocated social housing.

Council leaseholders are especially poorly served as they have the additional burden of cripplingly high bills to pay for works to their homes due to Ealing Homes' poorly negotiated contracts.

The Conservative council has allowed a proliferation of excessive residential overdevelopment, especially along the Uxbridge Road without the transport improvements, health facilities and schools needed to support it. 

In a final twist, the Council has allowed developers to get away with only a small proportion of affordable housing in these schemes, so all this development does little to address Ealing's housing needs.