Pushed into a corner by soaring prices, greedy landlords and a cap on benefits, one London council has embarked on a daring set of untested policies to provide more public housing

Christina is at breaking point. The thing is, so are the people she’s asking for help.



Christina and her three kids have nowhere to stay. Their private landlord chucked them out after she fell behind on the rent, poleaxed by the coalition’s cap on welfare benefits. When they pitched up at Enfield council’s homelessness centre last night, officers sent them to a hostel. Her appointment this morning will decide where the family sleeps tonight.



The meeting’s here, at John Wilkes House – although the invocation of that radical wit does nothing for a low-slung office block plonked next to a branch of Asda and a pound shop. This is where residents of the north London borough of Enfield pitch up when their housing benefits haven’t arrived. It’s also where they come if they’re made homeless.



All those headlines about runaway prices and impossible rents: John Wilkes House is where you see the human fallout. A meltdown happens daily here: one that’s forced the council to experiment with a string of new, unusual and highly risky interventions in its housing market. Many of its policies are untried. Some are radical enough to startle even the experts.

Just a few miles away from Westminster, Enfield’s local politicians are making a series of gambles that parliament’s big beasts wouldn’t dare try. They come with serious political and economic risk. But if even some of the things being tried by Enfield work out, they might help not only cases such as Christina’s, but also point to some radical solutions to Britain’s housing crisis.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Kenny Wanogho (left) takes down the details of those affected by the housing crisis in Enfield and who have turned to John Wilkes House for help. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/Guardian

But first, see what an outer London borough is up against.



This morning, Christina’s brought along her eldest, Si. “I’ve been crying from the moment I wake up, and trying to hide it from the kids,” she says. “I didn’t want the kids to be disappointed in me. I didn’t want them to be taken away from me.” She broke down during a recent school run, she says, “in front of about 100 other parents”.



Si turns 11 in four days. What would he like for his birthday? “WWE!” Seeing my confusion, he translates into old-speak. “Wrestling!” Small hands bounce on the ripped knees of his jogging bottoms.



First, the pair must wait. Waiting is built into the architecture of John Wilkes. It begins outside the office, with a long see-through shelter, where a queue forms long before opening time. The most desperate carry neon-pink suitcases, bulging Lidl carrier bags, plump binliners: the sum of their lives which, in the glare of morning, resembles nothing so much as the leavings outside a charity shop.



At 9am, the line pours past the security guards and into the reception – and the waiting begins all over again, in front of a big screen that, at one point, notes the average time to be seen is 84 minutes.

Inside, everyone hears everyone else’s business: the elaborate ringtones, the kids shouted at to pipe down, the official interrogations.



“You not got any friends who can help?”



“Why don’t you have no money?”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest John Wilkes House is also under pressure from austerity. On the day of this report, 10 staff were given notice of redundancy. Photograph: Graeme Robertson

They hear the answers, too. Wimbledon thwacks away on the reception telly, but no one watches.



At first, the balance of power seems starkly cliched: here gather the supplicants desperate for shelter; behind those glass partitions sit the local authority representatives deciding their fate.



But a day here reveals a council at the limit of its abilities and a workforce at the end of its tether. Those on the front desk each see about 50 people in need of housing every day – six or seven of whom have nowhere else to stay. “At the end of each afternoon, you just feel exhausted,” says Linda Ray. Especially when you have to tell dozens of faces that they don’t qualify for help.



On being refused by Linda a couple of weeks ago, a woman pulled out a jar, unscrewed the lid and lobbed it under the screen. It was full of bed bugs. I’m shown the desks they crawled over, the carpet that had to be fumigated.



And under the now-familiar arithmetic of austerity, more work and more stress is parcelled out among fewer staff. While the Guardian was at John Wilkes, 10 employees received redundancy letters.



Finally, there’s the big picture. “We’re being hit by a perfect storm: rising house prices, the squeeze in the rental market and the benefit cap,” says Sally McTernan, who runs Enfield’s housing service. Like the people turning up at John Wilkes, her team is being tossed about by forces beyond their control.



What do you do when your options are being cut daily by the market and central government? If you’re Enfield, you try and create a few more. To reduce its dependence on private rentals, the council has arranged a credit facility of £100m and begun bulk-buying homes. It’s introducing a scheme to license private landlords so controversial that it’s being challenged in court. And for the first time in 30 years it is building council houses. Furthermore, in defiance of Eric Pickles, it is using a loophole that means it won’t give tenants the right to buy.

Emergency, emergency, emergency

To see why these schemes matter, go up to the first floor of John Wilkes, where staff try to sort out Christina. The council has a duty to house her family, the question is: where? Her case-worker, Rob Andrew, marches over to the temporary accommodation team with a wad of paperwork and a pinch of self-deprecation. “You’re going to love me!”



Facebook Twitter Pinterest The council is buying properties wherever it can afford to. It has already acquired one of the flats in this apartment block on Colyton Way. Photograph: Graeme Robertson

Nothing doing, says Andy Wheeler: “I’ve got at least three others waiting for three-beds before she gets even a look-in.” A colleague goes to the last resort: ringing around hotels.



Wheeler pulls out a yellow ring-binder, each sheet a ledger of the day’s appointees placed in a flat or house. But at the foot of the forms are handwritten entries of people who came in off the street needing somewhere to stay that night.



“Emergency,” he taps the sheets as he flicks. “Emergency, emergency, emergency, emergency: a bad day. Emergency, emergency, emergency …” As the days go by, the handwriting gradually fills up more of the papers.



After 30 years of right-to-buy and no new council houses, Enfield’s stock of homes has halved. “We’ve gone from being a provider of council homes to a provider of emergency homes,” says John Wilkes manager, Mike Bobbett.



The new walk-ins are typically people like Christina, evicted by a landlord wanting more rent than David Cameron’s benefits cap allows.



Conservatives initially promised that the cap on housing benefit would force landlords to accept lower rents. Instead, rents in London are rising at double the national rate. The bottom of the housing market is in turmoil, with an exodus of poor households out of inner London to traditionally low-rent neighbourhoods such as the eastern half of Enfield.



Central boroughs, such as Westminster and Kensington, are also shifting families to cheaper parts of London’s periphery.



“Authorities are now gazumping each other,” says Ahmet Oykener, Enfield council cabinet member for housing. “Croydon [council, on the edge of south London] calls our officers about properties in our backyard to warn, ‘Butt out, it’s ours.’ Where are we meant to put our homeless?”



One London authority has placed 1,000 households in Enfield, he claims. “Forget homes: think about what that means for local schools and GP practices.”



Making things worse, big landlords and their agents are cutting down on long-term lets. They prefer the vastly more profitable and insecure overnight rentals.



Here’s an email that’s just reached Wheeler, and presumably every other council homelessness department in London. It invites bids for a two-bed in Mill Hill, on the edge of north London, for £85 a night. Per calendar month, that works out as £2,585 – for which you could take a flat on Harley Street. Still, he reckons it’ll go.



Enfield has about 480 households in what’s called nightly paid accommodation. The cost is ruinous – and getting worse. Last winter, the council worked out that over a year each overnight rental would cost an additional £5,000 on top of housing benefits; now it estimates the premium has risen to £5,500.



House hunters

Peter Robinson is the only man in this house wearing a suit.



About 20 minutes up the road from John Wilkes, the auction property is heaving with young couples dreaming of getting on the ladder, and weekend developers. But Robinson in his Daz-white shirt doesn’t plan to move in.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest One of the properties bought by the council. Its remit is to buy cheap homes, and so it is more interested in the price and number of bedrooms than decor. Photograph: Graeme Robertson

For most people, buying a home is the biggest financial decision they’ll make in their lives. Robinson will be making dozens of such calls in just the next few months.



He’s bulk-buying homes for Enfield. Rather than keep paying profiteering landlords, Ahmet and fellow councillors established a company to purchase new houses, arranged a credit facility of £100m, and imposed targets for the number of units to be snapped up every month.



The programme began in March with one officer, an endearingly serious South African called Detlev Munster. Never having done anything similar, Munster did what boffins do: he drew up an intricate flow chart for how to hoover up homes.



But since flow charts don’t do viewings, he rapidly built up the team. Robinson was drafted in – a consultant surveyor, who travels up from the City to view property in some of the most rundown bits of Enfield. Then came Tim Bentley, who watches the local market for new listings, plugging them into a model to assess suitability. And Neo Georghiou has just joined to do the evening and weekend viewings.



Other London councils pick up the odd property, out of the same dire need as Enfield. But I haven’t heard of anything like this: a purpose-built team of municipal house-hunters.

These buyers aren’t fussed about character or location, but affordability. If the model deems a house too costly, it doesn’t get seen. Cheap properties needing expensive repairs are dropped. Before making an offer, Munster has to seek the assent of colleagues. “Everybody’s become Phil Spencer and Sarah Beeny,” he sighs.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Andy Wheeler with his yellow folder, trying to book emergency accommodation for those who need it most. Photograph: Graeme Robertson

As property-buying goes, this process lacks all the usual dreams and heat. This auction home, for instance, has a 1970s-style avocado bathroom suite, which any owner-occupier would tear out with their bare hands, but Robinson reckons it can stay. His main worry is that the council will get outbid.



With good reason. Look at this spreadsheet kept by the team of its progress:



Properties viewed: 64



Offers placed: 44

The high ratio of offers to viewings proves the worth of Bentley’s sifting. But see what happens next:



Offers accepted: 23



Of these, offers proceeding: 18

Completed: 2

That drop shows how, in a fast-rising market, the value-conscious council is being elbowed aside by bigger spenders. Were Sisyphus around today, he wouldn’t be pushing boulders up hills, but trying to buy fairly priced housing amid a massive bubble.



Without making Munster’s task harder by revealing to estate agents his buying targets, let me just say that the total secured since March is less than the goal for one month.



The two properties he has bought are former council flats. To alleviate its housing crisis, the local authority is buying back, with public money, homes it was forced to sell at a steep discount under Thatcher’s right-to-buy scheme.



And yes, Oykener and the council are keenly aware of the irony.

The temporary village

Back at John Wilkes, officers have unexpectedly good news: they’ve found Christina a house.



As Andrew explains to her, it’s outside London, which means longer school runs. And it’s temporary, so the family can be moved on at any time. But to look at Christina, who’s had nightmares of sleeping on the streets and her kids getting taken away by social services, is to see pure relief.



This isn’t a home, it’s an interim arrangement – but it’s one that, given the lack of other options, might endure for years. Andrew reels off a list of places where Christina could afford to rent on her reduced benefits. None are within the M25; one, Southend-on-Sea, is an hour’s drive.



Christina: “That’s miles away!”



Andrew: “We didn’t make the rules!”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Bury Street West site is several acres of derelict land that the council is going to build 180 homes on. Photograph: Graeme Robertson

The 300,000-resident borough has sprouted what is in effect a large village of 2,200 households, say 9,000 people, living in temporary accommodation. That’s the seventh highest of all local authorities, and it keeps climbing.



Housing families who no longer receive the benefits or other income to house themselves costs Enfield £3.3m a year. Growing demand and rising rents means that sum is projected to more than double this financial year, to £7.8m.



Imagine being a council seeing a housing crisis rip through your financial planning and chuck around some of your most-vulnerable residents. That is what’s forced Enfield to experiment.



London borough of Barratt

Off one of Enfield’s main streets, behind brick walls and locked gates, lies a patch of land about the size of three football pitches. It’s here that the civic centre plans its biggest housing gambit yet.



The parks department once used Bury Street West as a store for lawnmowers and to wash out wheelie bins. Soon it will form part of the council’s first programme of housebuilding for 30 years.



Munster is a key part of this project, too. Gesturing at the abandoned land in front of us, he talks about how it’ll soon be a mini-village, with up to 180 flats and houses. It will back on to a brook and adjoin a nature trail and put council homes in the same blocks as private ones.



This site is one of several on which the civic centre plans to build about 280 new municipal homes, starting this September.



It doesn’t sound like much. It isn’t much, considering the scale of Enfield’s housing crisis: only the tiniest puncture in a large balloon. But put this in perspective: Sheffield has more than 61,000 households waiting for a home; yet according to government figures, the city built no council homes last year.



So thoroughly has the post-Thatcher public sector lost the skills, confidence and financial scope to build, that – when a town hall either adds to or overhauls its housing stock – it usually sells the land to a developer, agrees some easily bent stipulations on social homes and retreats to a blameless distance.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ahmet Oykener, Labour’s housing and estate regeneration councillor for Enfield, is planning a major building project to provide municipal homes that they cannot be forced to sell under the right-to-buy scheme. Photograph: Graeme Robertson

Not so Enfield: it is funding the developments itself, holding on to the land, and retaining control of all building. And it’s doing this by, effectively, taking out a socking great mortgage and constructing private homes to rent, which will pay for its new council homes. As with the properties it’s buying, the stock will be owned by the council through a new company – which is not legally obliged to offer the right to buy.



Local government associations, academics; no one I’ve spoken to has come across the municipal entrepreneurialism being exercised by Enfield. I ran through its initiatives with Duncan Bowie, former planner for Ken Livingstone and a corporeal encyclopedia of housing policy. So, this local authority, I said: it’s not selling anything to a developer, it’s not doing any private-sector joint ventures…



As we ticked off the list of tried, tested and largely failed policies, Bowie’s frown of scepticism cleared, until he said in a tone of puzzled admiration: “Well … that’s good.”

While most of the modern public sector prefers the language of technical competence to values, council politicians and officers are clearly aware of the politics of what they’re attempting. One housing paper recently sent round the council cabinet dutifully trots through the alternatives before recommending: “A key aim of the council is to tackle inequality. The redevelopment … will help to reduce inequality by improving the living standards of some of Enfield’s least well-off residents.”



This Labour-run council didn’t start off radical. Across the borough are littered other council-house overhauls, led by some big developer with woefully low levels of affordable housing. But circumstances are forcing it to break old habits and try new things.



With hardly any guidance from Westminster (less than a year before the general election, Ed Miliband’s housing ideas are yet to fill a sheet of A4), and with a housing crisis on their doorstep, councils such as Enfield are having to experiment and learn from each other. Newham in east London was the first borough in the country to license private landlords; Enfield plans to follow suit.

All this requires a profound change in how council staff see themselves. The guy who goes to auctions to bid on houses is Munster, even with all those letters after his name. The municipal firm that will own these properties was partly set up by head of finance, Paul Reddaway.

After 27 years at Enfield, he says: “You think you’re going to coast.” Relax, Taxpayers’ Alliance, his council-issue tongue is in his municipal cheek. “But if you’d asked me how to start and run an entirely new company a year ago, I wouldn’t have had a clue.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Emilienne Wabuza, a resident of Enfield, has required emergency housing in the past. Photograph: Guy Grandjean

Next door to Enfield is Barnet, a council that under the guise of cuts has outsourced so many of its services it may as well be called the London Borough of Capita. Enfield has responded to the economic crisis by doing the opposite. It’s trying to compete in the market, ­to secure things the market isn’t delivering for its residents: better jobs, houses, industries. That means building private homes, getting into market gardening, even setting up an energy company.

At John Wilkes, Sally McTernan once described the new emergencies turning up at her door. “They’re a couple who were pootling along, and then their world fell in.” The same could be said of Enfield’s housing policy: it just about got by – until the cuts began, even while the property market went red hot. Now the roof’s falling in, pushing council chiefs to try measures they wouldn’t have dreamed of a few years ago. The big question is how differently Enfield – and perhaps everywhere else – needs to act for things to get back to what was once considered normal.

• Video: a week inside Enfield’s emergency housing office



• The Enfield Experiment: London’s fortunes distilled into a single borough