Florence Eshalomi knows all too well about life at the sharp end of the country’s housing crisis.
As a child, she lived in temporary accommodation with her mother and two younger sisters, including a damp and mouldy converted Victorian house in Brixton, south London, and bed and breakfast accommodation in King’s Cross. The family secured a home on a council estate in Brixton after two years.
“Having experienced temporary accommodation, including bed and breakfast hotels, it’s just the joy of finally having a place to call home without having to move yet again,” she says. “When you think about the issues successive governments have dealt with, whether it’s school exclusions, the impact on mental health or people trying to get a job, what links those issues is having a safe place to sleep at night.”
The experience would leave a lasting mark on the future chair of the Commons housing, communities and local government committee – a position she has now held for a year. It has also driven her endeavours as a councillor, London assembly member and now a senior MP.
“Growing up in the heart of Brixton as the oldest of three girls, it made me aware from an early age that there are people who make decisions that have an impact on your life,” she says. “Whether it’s something small like contacting the council about why the heating wasn’t working or whether the communal rubbish had not been collected, decisions had been made by people that would impact all of us on the estate.
“My mother made sure we knew about the political process. She would always take my sisters and me with her to the polling station on election day, and drummed into us that when we got older we should register to vote and be active citizens. Coming from Nigeria, she saw the political system working in the UK and that we should be involved.
“My upbringing definitely shaped my view of decision-makers but never in my wildest dreams did I think that many years down the line I’d be an MP and in a position to make an impact.”
Social stability
Eshalomi highlights two “vitally important” areas where those decision-makers must change their approach to social housing. Stability is the first.
“It’s about recognising for a number of people across the UK that social housing provides a safe and secure place they can call home. It’s about the families that live in them, about people making a start in life. It can be about some residents who may be disabled and have difficulties accessing the private rented sector, or people who may not be able to afford to buy.
“Stable social housing provides security for so many people and it provided that security for me growing up.”
This feeds into the government’s overriding priority of encouraging economic growth. There simply has not been enough investment in social housing to back it, she adds.
“Growth won’t happen unless we have the homes for people to live in, because it will be the citizens around the country who will generate that growth for UK plc. We’ve lost a lot of stock through policies such as right to buy and we have seen council funding decimated, so there are many challenges across social housing that the government is genuinely trying to redress but all those things won’t happen overnight and it’s going to take years for us to improve on that.”
Social stigma
The second area where change must come surrounds the stigma that is still attached to social housing. This is another issue Eshalomi knows first-hand.
“As someone growing up on an estate, people would assume you wouldn’t amount to anything or you were part of a gang,” she says.
“Some of that stigma is still perpetrated through the press yet the people who live in social housing are doctors, teachers, care workers or people who are going out, earning a good day’s living and who just want to go back home and live their lives.”
Grenfell Tower represents the nadir of this stigma. Eshalomi points to “tragic failures”, such as residents’ concerns being ignored year after year before disaster struck.
“You can’t legislate to remove the stigma, but I hope that with the government accepting all the recommendations of the Grenfell inquiry we will see a sea change in how we deal with social housing, including some of the culture around it.”
Council funding
The committee has four current inquiries under way: home ownership affordability, housing conditions in England, Grenfell and building safety, and land value capture to deliver 1.5 million homes. A fifth inquiry, into the funding and sustainability of local government, resulted in a damning verdict on the state of England’s council finances and services.
Local authorities are caught between the twin pressures of not having adequate funding to allow them to do so effectively. MPs lamented the “broken link” between council tax levels and service quality, leading to a growing dissatisfaction among residents. This in turn risks undermining trust in local democracy.
“We are asking councils up and down the country to do so much more without adequate funding,” says Eshalomi. “We are seeing increased demand right across England.
“We are seeing a broken link between tax and the level of quality of service people are seeing, so many are scratching their heads asking why year on year council taxes are going up yet services are not improving.”
A further factor is that huge cuts to preventative services have exacerbated the financial crisis engulfing local government. Funding is particularly dire in London. Local authority spending on homelessness in the capital has jumped by 42% in the past year, according to analysis by London Councils.
Homelessness costs totalled £5.5m each day for boroughs in 2024-25, up from £4.2m daily the previous year. Nearly £5m of that was allocated for temporary accommodation costs. Nationally, Eshalomi says, council tax is now desperately past its sell-by date.
“It’s the most unfair regressive form of tax we have and yet successive governments have put it in the ‘too difficult’ box,” she argues.
Current financial pressures on local government are also driven largely by mandatory, high-cost, demand-led services, such as social care and SEND, where councils have little control over demand. Councils are trapped in a straitjacket by central government and lack the flexibility or control to devise creative, long-term, preventative solutions which could offer better value-for-money, Eshalomi points out.
The government is seeking to hand more powers to local government, but Eshalomi argues that fiscal devolution is “a glaring omission”.
“There is a stranglehold on the levers of tax raising and income generation. The Treasury does not want to let that go but if we really want councils to be more independent and have a closer relationship with their residents then that needs to include fiscal devolution.”
New housing and communities secretary – and her fellow former Lambeth councillor – Steve Reed already has a crowded in-tray, she acknowledges. But Eshalomi would put this at the top of it.
“We’re seeing more and more councils coming forward to ask for exceptional financial support. But there is nothing exceptional about it if more and more councils are asking year on year for, effectively, a bailout.
“We cannot have a system where so many councils have not sent their accounts to the government to be signed off.
“We cannot have a system where the whole of the government’s accounts, according to the National Audit Office, has not been signed off because councils have not submitted their accounts. This is something we really need to get to grips with.”
In the long term, this means the Treasury devolving tax-setting powers to local authorities, allowing them to set their own taxes, such as tourist levies. “If, as a country, we are going to deliver growth and improve local services, Westminster needs to ease its grip and let councils have more power to control their own affairs and be accountable to their own electorates.”
While additional funding for local authorities is welcome, “this is essentially a sticking plaster” as they are under escalating pressure from temporary accommodation, adult social care and children’s social care costs. They are not going away, she says. Housing costs are another “glaring omission” in the government’s Fair Funding Review.
“The working assumption of the Fair Funding Review is for every authority to increase their council tax to the maximum level. It will be interesting if councils do not do that. Some councils are modelling funding gaps of between £80m to £100m, particularly inner London boroughs.”
Eshalomi points to the introduction of a tourism levy as one route to generating income locally alongside a comprehensive review of business rates. “We need to have grown-up conversations around fiscal devolution and all of this needs to be in the mix.”
Consistent approach
Many of the changes Eshalomi advocates for will require consistency of purpose and direction in government, and perhaps explains why housing is in such a peculiar mess. The 12 years before the 2024 general election saw the appointment and subsequent departure of no fewer than 16 different housing ministers.
“We can’t keep saying we’re in a housing crisis when the key person for housing changes so often. In some cases, we’ve had three housing ministers in one year. Everybody thinks I’m joking, but Matthew Pennycook should not be allowed to resign or be sacked until we have addressed the key issues around building homes and solving the housing crisis.”
Eshalomi sees this as linking to a panoply of evils such as children missing school, employment problems for their parents and worsening health for both.
“You can’t have a secure job if you’re moving from one bed and breakfast hotel to another. We want to push the government to recognise that emergency and work with other departments including health and education.
“It’s so important that we don’t see housing as just something that happens in the ministry of housing, communities and local government. We have a health secretary focusing on reducing waiting times but when somebody is discharged from hospital, if we are sending a patient who has suffered from a bad respiratory disease to a damp and mouldy property, what do you think is going to happen?
“If we are asking our children to achieve more, if they haven’t had a good night’s sleep, how do you expect that child to function at school? If we’re looking to fill the skills gap and get people off benefits and into work, if they haven’t had a good night’s sleep, how is that going to help?
“It’s about looking at housing as being central to the government’s key missions.”
Florence Eshalomi’s career in brief
A lifelong resident of Brixton, south London, and the oldest of three girls from a single-parent family, Florence Eshalomi was a carer for her mother who was forced to retire early from her career as a school teacher due to poor health.
Eshalomi was the first member of her family to go to university, graduating with a degree in political and international studies with law from Middlesex University. She also studied at Utrecht University in the Netherlands under the EU-funded Erasmus Student Exchange.
Her working life started as a 16-year-old at a Sainsbury’s in Clapham, before performing a range of campaigning and public affairs roles. These included a policy officer at the London Borough of Islington, a regional organiser for the Labour Party during the 2005 general election, an account manager at PR agency Four Communications and public affairs manager for the Runnymede Trust, a leading race equality think-tank.
Eshalomi was a councillor at the London Borough of Lambeth alongside Steve Reed, who became housing and communities secretary in September after Angela Rayner resigned. She was a member of the London Assembly for Lambeth and Southwark from 2016 to 2021 and was elected as Labour MP for Vauxhall and Camberwell Green in 2019.
Eshalomi became chair of the Commons housing, communities and local government committee in September 2024.