I'm Fiona Colley and I'm a counsellor in Southwick and I'm the Cabinet Member for Regeneration. And we're stood here in the shadow of the start of building and behind us is the Hage Estate. But what's your overall vision for elephant castle? What will people be seeing if they come here in five years time or ten years time? Well for a start we hope it'll start to be somewhere that people want to come and visit and to live and to shop and to work. At the moment the area's got a bit of a reputation for being run down, a concrete jungle. And we really want to see that change. This is a central London location and it should be an area that people are proud to live in. In Southwick's housing waiting list is on a critical level with some people having to wait seven years for a home. In that context is it wise to demolish a very large counsellor estate with thousands of affordable homes and replace it with what some would see as more kind of up market type deliverments? Well the challenges with the Hage Aid were that whether we rebuilt the area or whether we continued to maintain its castle homes it was going to be extremely expensive either way. And the opportunity arose for us really to change the area as well as to live a new affordable homes that are for much higher quality than the current Hage Aid. The plans include not just the 625 plus new affordable homes on the Hage Aid site but also about another 700 or more affordable homes in neighbouring areas. So overall we will see an increase in affordable housing in the Alfa and Castle area albeit not on this particular site but of course that's part of our plans as well. We don't think it's a good thing that you have all affordable housing on one site and all expensive homes on another site. The new area behind us when it's rebuilt will be a mixture of private housing, shared ownership housing and social rented housing so that you'll have a properly mixed community. Some critics suggest that the new so-called affordable homes will be less affordable than the existing council stuff so the new homes will be affordable to those with the lower income. Well that's certainly a challenge for us and I think many of them will be affordable for people on very low incomes. In South Oak we are opposing the government's plans to change the definition of affordable housing. Certainly the Conservative government is very keen that housing associations should be able to charge up to 80% of market rent and we don't believe that's affordable for people. We want to make sure that the new homes are being built at a mix of tenures so certainly some homes that are being built at the kind of rents that are equivalent to current council and housing association rents which are around 35% of private market rents as well as some shared ownership homes because many people who are on middle incomes and low incomes who want to own homes can't afford private ownership in London so it's important to make sure we've got those sorts of homes as well and as well as the full outright ownership. We still don't expect elephant castles going to be a tremendously expensive place to live compared to say the riverside and the south bank or west you know west minster but so we do think there's a need for a mixture of tenures on this area. He said you hope elephant castles still won't be too expensive a place to live but if you look at a lot of the marketing literature by some of the developers it's very much geared towards international investors who want to buy to let so is there a risk that the international market could push up the prices because they seem to sort of openly they're openly happy that in their terms the London housing market suffers from a lack of supply and a high demand. The words they're not enough houses and too many people will live with them which is great if you can afford to buy to rent so there's a problem that the international market will make things unaffordable. I mean I think it's important to remember that when those homes are built up by international investors that doesn't necessarily mean that they aren't lived in by local people. I mean the private rented sector is very important too because as you've said we've got 20,000 people on our waiting list we won't be able to house all of them and many of those people will rely on the private rented sector in order to find somewhere to live so that is an important sector although I would like to see the government take steps to regulate that market to ensure we get reasonable rents and security of tenure in the private rented sector as well as the social rented sector. I think it's understandable really that big developers will look overseas as well as in the UK when they're trying to sell their properties off plan it is difficult for them to get finance at the moment so they'll look to sell them wherever they can but I'm sure we'll see plenty of local people, people on the learners and British people buying those homes as well. But if a local family was to rent a house off an international investor the chances are it would be more expensive probably than say a council flat rented from the council. Well I mean it would be but the family may or may not qualify for a council flat as you said we've got 20,000 people on our waiting list even though we are one of the UK's biggest social landlords so demand for housing certainly outstrips supply and not everyone is going to be able to be housed by the council regardless of whether we knock down the haggare or build the new homes or not. We will see far more homes on this site than we have at the moment and clearly private sector rents are set by the market and what people are willing to pay versus what people supply there is and I don't think it makes very much difference whether people's private sector landlord lives in the far east or lives in London. The buy to let market is I'm sure here to stay and I would as I say like to see a bit more regulation in the private rented sector to make that more stable and secure for people but that is an important option for many people in London. You've talked about the introduction of mixed tenure as opposed to a large council rented development isn't the flip side of that the de placement of a large working class community and some people seem to see this as gentrification and do you think that's a fair assessment? No I don't think that is a fair assessment actually I think it's quite a naive assessment in fact. What we see increasingly on council estates because of the shortage of supply and because of the rules around who gets the tough of the list is it's very rarely now working class people and working people who get places on council estates so in fact what you I'm sad to say you often get a council estates that are full of people who aren't working and are on benefits although many of them are trying to get into work. So I think having a mixed tenure area is much better certainly for kids growing up for them to grow up in an area where there's a mixture of people, people who are working as well as people who are out of work and I do think that's a much better environment for everybody. The developer claims that this is going to be a sustainable development but is it really sustainable to knock down thousands of structurally sound homes only 35 years after the completion and fail lots and lots of mature trees can that really be described as sustainable development? Well we aren't failing lots and lots of mature trees actually in the latest version of the Master Plan we're saving an awful lot from mature trees and that's a really important thing that we were welcoming it was feedback from the public consultation that people wanted us to do that. We're creating a very large new park which is the largest new central London park for 70 years and I think the main lesson we have to learn from the homes that were built 35 years ago is that the homes we built in the future need to have a much longer lifespan. These homes simply didn't turn out to be built to last. They are structurally sound according to the Council's own survey so would there not be a case for maybe refurbishing them because a lot of people have suggested that for approximately half the hey gates life it didn't really have any adequate money on upkeep spent on it. I think that was certainly a problem in the 1980s but it was a problem that you will always face when you have to keep rents low to keep them affordable that you aren't going to have a lot of money for maintenance. So they turned out to be high cost to maintain. The heating systems were failing and needed replacing. If you talk to people now who live on the elsewhere state you'll find that the vast majority of them can't wait for those homes to be knocked down to have the new homes to move into because the heating keeps breaking down. I get emails every week telling me the heating is down again, the power's gone off, these are not good quality homes and they are not homes that we can afford to maintain. Having new high quality, sustainable, environmentally friendly homes is definitely the right way to go.