Shipping our problems out of London

The shock news is that Newham council has written to a private provider exploring the possibility of finding low cost housing in “areas of low demand” as part of their “resilience agenda”. Using the Localism Act they hope to discharge  or outsource their duties as a local authority to private providers outside of London.

This is not simply a tale of privatisation because the proposal includes rehousing 500 families from Newham to Stoke in the East Midlands. The Brighter Futures Housing Association was asked whether it would consider using 500 of its homes (that are presumably used for the social housing needs of the good people of Stoke) to take those on the London council’s waiting list.

This is bad for both Stoke, which would have lost a large amount of its social housing provision, and for those unlucky residents who might have jobs, their kids have schools and to be shipped away from family and friends for no other reason than the council thinks that’s fine.

It doesn’t end there.

Smart Housing Group, a private housing provider, has proposed to buy homes in Nottingham, Derby and nearby towns and use them to house London families. According to the BBC Kensington and Chelsea, Hammersmith and Fulham and Westminster councils are all “considering the proposals because of a shortage of housing in their areas”.

Newham

Newham faces some of the same pressures that other London boroughs do. High rents and high house prices, making it more difficult for the councils to fund social housing. Newham is also the “Olympic borough” meaning olympic land use and a recent influx of young professionals that could afford somewhere more central. In one of the poorest boroughs in the capital this puts massive pressure on local residents.

On top of this the cap on housing benefit has a unique impact on London where rents are too damn high. As Random Blowe said ” It may well be true, as the council claims, that the government’s new weekly limit on housing benefit (between £250 for a one-bedroom flat and £400 for a four-bedroom property) is already starting to push people out of expensive parts of London into Newham. ”

Of the top five councils effected three are in London. According to the Chartered Institute of Housing Research Westminster has 20,700 that are effected, Kensington and Chelsea has 14,100 properties effected and Camden has around 10,000 properties effected.

Will it happen?

To her credit Brighter Futures chief executive officer Gill Brown says she will not agree to the request: “I think there is a real issue of social cleansing going on. We are very anxious about this letter which we believe signals the start of a movement which could see thousands of needy people dumped in Stoke with no proper plan for their support or their welfare.”

However, with high rents, continuing out sourcing and the housing benefit cap (rather than rent cap) the pressure to find these kinds of solutions will continue despite the fact that it is terrible for both those shipped out and for the areas where they are shipped too – not too mention the ethics of effectively forcing people to leave where they live (or not get housed) when they could have real roots in the area.

Long term solutions

Building new affordable housing, bringing unused housing back into use and reversing the trend of the deterioration of council housing is absolutely essential.

More than that we now have pre-crash house prices while the banks are no longer willing to lend at the same rates. Unless we can bring down the prices of housing, where young families can no longer afford to buy and many never are, we are going to stuck in this vicious cycle. The difficulty is that bringing down those prices to more realistic levels will hurt some people, quite a lot.

Finding ways of reducing the bubble without bursting it and then finding a more sustainable model of banking and housing has to be a political priority, but is very difficult to explore without threatening to impoverish thousands of families. Whatever the long term solutions in the short term there has to be a better way than shipping our “problems” out to the Midlands.