By Nicola Bacon
Nicola is a Director of Social Life consultancy, a spin-off from the Young Foundation. She is a former Director of Policy at Shelter.
Last week I met a young woman who was proud of her home and her child. She was on her own and had been through a difficult time when pregnant, living in a one-room studio with a couple who were drinking heavily. She had gone to the local council (in London) for help as homeless and had been given a bedsit temporarily, then offered a housing association tenancy on a new development. She knew she was lucky, she realised that few people were offered a brand new home that no-one else had ever lived in, and she’d used the stability and security her new home gave her to keep her job, be promoted, make plans to go to college, and become an active contributor to her community. She exemplified why we need a housing safety net.

Post by Ade Sofala of the 4in10 campaign.
4in10 is a coalition of charities and public agencies working with and campaigning on behalf of children living in poverty in London. It is based in Save the Children’s London Office.  It’s name is taken from the statistic that 4 in 10 children in London live in poverty.

David and Laura have been on their local council’s housing waiting list for a move to a larger two-bedroom flat since Jordan was born almost four years ago.  At first, it wasn’t too bad having his cot and baby things in their bedroom.  But now he needs a bed of his own there just isn’t room for much else apart from a small chest of drawers.  David and Laura do their best but really worry how they will fit everything in when Jordan starts school.
Across London, almost a quarter of a million families like David and Laura’s are cramped into overcrowded homes.  Overcrowding is well known to have a serious impact on the health, education and life chances of children.  When one child falls ill in an overcrowded home, their brothers and sisters usually do too.  And it can be incredibly difficult for teenagers to find the quiet space they need to concentrate on their homework and study for exams.  Overcrowding is especially unfair on teenage girls having to share rooms with their brothers.
Of course, the chronic shortage of genuinely affordable social housing lies at the root of this crisis.  The records show that governments of all political colours have failed to consistently provide the level of funding needed to replace all those council homes sold under the Right to Buy, let alone add to the stock.  As a result, the number of overcrowded households in the Capital has been growing inexorably – up by 80,000 in the past decade alone.
Shelter says that 391,000 children live in these overcrowded homes.  That’s a quarter of London’s children who are not as healthy as they might be or doing as well in school as they could be just because of their housing.  In a city as wealthy as ours, youngsters just shouldn’t have to endure such inadequate housing standards.  That’s why the 4in10 campaign is now calling on the Mayor of London to take more decisive action to tackle the problem.
In 2010, Boris Johnson published an Overcrowding Action Plan, which included a target to halve the number of families living in severe overcrowding by 2016.  At first sight, that sounds promising.  But it actually represents fewer than 5 per cent of all London’s overcrowded families.  The Mayor can and should do better.  In fact, 4in10 believes that, if the Mayor was to focus political attention on this problem, he should be able to halve the number of children living in overcrowded conditions by 2020.
Meeting this target certainly won’t be easy, especially when Government funding for housing has been slashed and benefits are being severely capped.  But surely, the alternative of more and more of London’s children have their young lives blighted by growing up in overcrowded homes, is even worse.  If we really want every young Londoner to be able to fulfil their potential in life, its time the needs of the Capital’s 391,000 overcrowded children became a genuine political priority in City Hall.
To halve overcrowding by 2020, the Mayor will obviously have to secure a big increase in public investment.  Ideally, funding needs to be restored to the levels the Coalition inherited.  No doubt, it won’t make the Mayor popular in Downing Street to publicly start calling for that level of funding.  But if he can publicly lobby the Treasury for a new airport, there is no excuse not to demand more funding for homes for London’s children too.  He should also be encouraging more of London’s councils to build some homes themselves.
That is the only way to ensure that young families like David, Laura and Jordan have a decent chance of getting the family home they need.
Please join us in calling on Mayor Boris Johnson to commit to halve the number of children growing up in overcrowded homes by 2020.  You can sign our petition here.

This article by Steve Hilditch was published today by the think tank Class (the Centre for Labour and Social Studies) to help launch their project on A Social State 2015: what can Beveridge teach us about the giant evils of today?
Seventy years ago the Beveridge Report announced the pursuit of a new settlement, one that would dramatically change the structure of Britain for the better. With this in mind, what can Beveridge’s analysis of society teach us about the Giant Evils of today and how can we use this to chart an alternative course for a welfare state – or Social State – fit for 2015? The project will look at a range of welfare state concerns from education to welfare, employment to housing and health and universalism.

The large majority of people are adequately or well-housed. That’s why housing is the dog that never barks when Elections come around. But for more than a generation – since Thatcher ended council housebuilding – we have failed to build enough new homes of all types to keep up with rising demand. And chickens are coming home to roost.
The core failure to build is the root cause of our now familiar problems. House prices are far too high due to scarcity and easy credit. Rents have followed suit. Social housing is frighteningly scarce. Escalating housing benefit is the inevitable outcome of the growing dependence on expensive private renting rather than cheaper social renting. To its credit, Labour tackled the enormous investment backlog in existing social homes, but failed to build enough new affordable homes until Gordon Brown’s Keynesian fling following the banking collapse.
Three decades of failure were followed by a huge lurch backwards as Eric Pickles and Iain Duncan Smith pursued their prejudices. Housing investment was cut by over 60%. Virtually no new social rented homes are being built, only the Orwellian ‘affordable rent’ – homes at up to 80% of market rents. Demand from both ends – people excluded from home ownership and a rising tide of homeless and displaced people – has become focused on private renting, and rents have rocketed. Even William Beveridge couldn’t solve the problem of rent and we have not tackled it properly in the 70 years since.
In a highly competitive market the poor lose out. The return of one of Beveridge’s five evils – squalor – is in evidence all around us, from the re-emergence of ‘bed and breakfast’, to more homeless on the streets, to rising overcrowding and sharing, to the new phenomenon of ‘sheds with beds’. The housing and welfare benefit reforms, in their bewildering variety, leave millions of people facing unbridgeable gaps between income and housing costs. Benefit recipients – according to ex-Minister Sarah Teather – are deliberately demonised. Yet the rapid growth in new housing benefit claims is coming from people in work who can no longer meet their housing costs.

The new Government in 2015 will inherit a housing emergency. But the crisis can be tackled if there is the will. So what needs to be done?

First, we need a big increase in the building of social rented homes. Construction caused the second dip in the recession and might cause the third. Housing schemes sit on the shelf and could be activated rapidly. Housebuilding is labour intensive, creates strong multipliers through the supply industries, does not suck in imports, and reduced unemployment means that the Treasury gets most of the investment back. Building social rented homes (which eventually pay for themselves) means the housing benefit bill would start to fall as families living in expensive private rented homes or hugely expensive temporary accommodation move to much cheaper social rented homes. After the successful reform of council housing finance, many Councils have considerable capacity to finance and build new homes. A more radical reform of the public borrowing rules could unlock a wave of investment that has been stymied for many years by Treasury orthodoxy.
Secondly, we must restore a pro-active planning system that aims to meet community needs. Tory theory that higher developers’ profits would encourage more housebuilding is misconceived. It just leads to higher profit. Land values should be controlled through land value taxation and more public ownership. The creeping segregation we are seeing under the Tories should end: we should fulfil Aneurin Bevan’s vision of ‘the living tapestry’ of the mixed community.
Thirdly, the Banks must be made to work for new home owners. Even if first time buyers can afford repayments they cannot raise the huge deposits that are required. There are ways of easing this but it is unacceptable for the Banks to be so unresponsive when they have had such extraordinary support from the taxpayer.
Fourthly, we must regulate letting agents and private renting, starting with the most squalid homes. Standards must be raised and bad practice tackled. Longer tenancies should become the norm and rent caps should replace benefit caps.
Finally, we must restore the homelessness and benefits safety nets. Housing benefit caps are likely to stay but must reflect conditions in the real housing market and not leave people having to choose between food and rent. The Coalition has effectively ended the homelessness safety net. Forcing families to move hundreds of miles from London – the majority of London boroughs are now doing this, it is not just a ‘rich central London’ issue – is a disgrace because of the human cost involved and especially the impact on children.

According to Dallas Campbell on the BBC’s Supersized Earth, you could fit all the World’s urban areas into half of Australia.
That’s fairly extraordinary when you consider that recently the number of people living in urban areas exceeded those living in rural areas for the first time.  And that the World’s cities are growing by 200,000 new inhabitants a day. Cities account for some 70 per cent of global GDP.
Around one billion people live in urban slums, about one in seven of us. The figure is projected to rise to 1.4 billion by 2020. Many are built on marginal land next to rivers railways roads and rubbish dumps. Poor quality and overcrowded housing in slums has a significant impact on people’s lives: diseases spread more easily, disasters like flooding are amplified, and people are denied both privacy and safety. Basic services are often absent. The threat of eviction is often ever present.
Yet slums are not always what they seem: many are economically vibrant and some become transformed into permanent settlements.
For millions of people, gaining secure tenure of safe land is the first step towards building a permanent home and accessing other opportunities.
Since 1987, when it was set up by British housing activists, Homeless International has been the main UK charity that supports slum dwellers to improve their lives and find lasting solutions to urban poverty. Homeless International’s vision is ‘a world in which all people can exercise their right to land, basic services and shelter’. They help communities transform slums by supporting them to work together to secure land, build homes, access safe water and sanitation, and negotiate with governments – ensuring that they have a voice that gets heard.
They work by supporting the development of local organisations in Africa and Asia that have their roots in poor communities. These organisations often grow from small social movements into self-reliant organisations that are able provide shelter and basic services solutions that are economically, socially and environmentally sustainable.
Homeless International believes that sustainable solutions to homelessness can be created if people have access to land, finance, information, organisation and technology – and if they have an opportunity to play a lead role in designing solutions that work for them.
A small amount of resources is used to help a lot of people and HI deserves the support of the whole housing movement in the UK. You can find ways to get involved and to support their work on their website. Photos from Homeless International website.
Support social enterprise in Africa this Xmas!
And if you’re looking for a Xmas present that will support social enterprise in Africa, John Lewis are selling Alive and Kicking’s footballs.  If you buy a ball, A&K donate another ball to a school in Kenya – and you can track online where your donated ball has gone.
A&K are the only people making footballs in the whole continent of Africa, and there is great potential for a social enterprise to create jobs and sustain communities.
Many of the workers in the Kenyan factory live in Africa’s second largest slum, Kibera in Nairobi.

An interesting day for housing.  Nick Clegg made a speech promising more housebuilding…. again.  Housebuilding figures for London showed that all the dire warnings about Boris Johnson’s programmes were wrong – they are even worse than predicted by the ‘scaremongers’ during the mayoral election.
But a report published today on housing and the economy sets the real agenda for the future.  Let’s Get Building is written by John Perry for a group of housing organisations*.
The report marries the well-known information about the need for more affordable homes with the increasingly desperate need to generate economic growth.  It shows that housing construction is a particularly rapid means of stimulating the economy and that, unlike the often-talked about but rarely delivered major infrastructure projects, many schemes are ‘shovel ready’.  Each £1 spent generates £2.84 of economic activity and, if the £1 is public money, most of the money is returned to the sector in increased taxes and reduced benefit spending as people become employed to do the work.  More than 90% of the money would stay in the country, with minimal implications for imports, and there is considerable current capacity in the industry so it would not generate inflationary pressures.
In addition to the general economic argument, the report makes the case for the additional investment to be focussed on social rented housing because there is insufficient effective demand for new private housing and because the public spending advantage – in terms of knock-on savings in the system – is strongest.
There is common acceptance that there is huge unmet demand for homes and that buying homes has become unaffordable (the requirement for high deposits now being as important as being able to make repayments). Many more people are now looking to rent privately instead – people who might previously have bought but also people on low incomes who are now no longer able to access social rented housing due to reduced supply and changes to the homelessness legislation.
Demand is therefore rising for private rented homes across the board in all price ranges, putting upward pressure on rents.  Yet new caps on benefits and new payment arrangements are making landlords less willing to take people on housing benefit (and remember, the great increase in households on housing benefit is mainly people in work).  Where households on lower incomes are or become private tenants this is invariably at rents that are much higher than social rents – so the policy increases rather than decreases the pressure on the housing benefit budget.
The report identifies that there is extra capacity to build amongst councils and councils with ALMOs (arms length management organisations).  In addition to using any spare capacity of housing associations, council resources need to be tapped.
The end of council housebuilding led to the long period of inadequate supply that we have been experiencing for 30 years.  Housing associations never filled the gap left when Thatcher ended councils’ role in new provision.  Only in the last few years have councils looked to take up the role again, and the reform of council housing finance to bring in the self-financing regime has created new opportunities for them to do so.  Councils have already shown that the can gear up quickly – for example some 26 councils are participating in the ‘affordable homes’ programme – and most of the actual work – design and build – will be commissioned from the private sector, boosting the order books of struggling companies.
The report shows in plenty of detail how a new programme of homes for social rent could be financed and how councils are now ideally placed to facilitate investment on a significant scale.  But it also explains how this investment programme would have a big effect on revenue budgets and help government to stem the rise in housing benefit spending.  These savings would be particularly large if the new homes built were targeted towards taking households out of expensive temporary accommodation.
Finally, the report acknowledges that any increase in net spending (ie investment minus savings and extra tax income) would add to the currently used definition of public borrowing, PSNB (Public Sector Net Borrowing, still commonly referred to as ‘the PSBR’).  Here the authors argue that additional investment is justified under the existing rules, but that a review of the fiscal rules to bring them in line with international conventions would help remove discrimination against worthwhile and prudent investment by the UK public sector.  The authors have even gone to the trouble of commissioning Capital Economics to survey the City to discover no adverse reaction to the proposals.
I would go so far as to say that this is the most important report on housing and how to get investment moving for years.  It sets a serious agenda for the future.
It should be acceptable to all mainstream political parties.  It should be easy for Labour to adopt and offers a way out of Labour’s many dilemmas over housing.  And, instead of breaking yet more promises, I strongly recommend that Nick Clegg and Boris Johnson should sit down and read it cover to cover.
* Association of Retained Council Housing; Chartered Institute of Housing; Councils with ALMOs Group; Local Government Association; National Federation of ALMOs.

It’s easy to lose count of the number of the times the Government has ‘declared war on red tape’.  David Cameron had another go yesterday in his speech to the CBI which seemed to have been written by a special computer programme which stitches Churchillian clichés together into sentences – ‘in the global race, you are quick or you are dead’ – that sort of thing.  LOL.
Cameron poured scorn all around:
‘Consultations, impact assessments, audits, reviews, stakeholder management, securing professional buy-in, complying with EU procurement rules, assessing sector feedback … this is not how we became one of the most powerful, prosperous nations on Earth. It’s not how you get things done. As someone once said, if Christopher Columbus had an advisory committee he would probably still be stuck in the dock. So I am determined to change this.’
Mr Cameron needs to attend one of Michael Gove’s history lessons.  Not only did Columbus have many advisors, it took him 5 years to convince his stakeholders – the Spanish and Portuguese Courts – to fund the project.  It sounds as contorted as a European procurement exercise.  He had to deal with those who still believed he would sail off the edge of the earth – there’s a real health and safety issue.  He did many studies which today might be called impact assessments and was subject to several audits of his plans to justify the proposed cost.  An equality impact assessment might have concluded it would be best to stay at home.
But I digress.  Cameron had many targets – cutting down on judicial review caught the media attention this morning – but one Labour innovation particularly annoys him: ‘So I can tell you today, we are calling time on equality impact assessments.’ He said ‘these things’ should be left to ‘smart people in Whitehall’ to consider when making policy instead of ‘churning out reams of bureaucratic nonsense.’
Anyone who has watched the Whitehall policy-making and legislative process knows how prone to error and miscalculation it is.  The clever people in Whitehall are not always very knowledgeable about the real world and, if I’m frank, tend to have middle class prejudices about poor people.  The really really clever people – like the civil servants who worked on the stunningly complex reform of council housing finance – spend a lot of time talking to outside experts and stakeholders, constantly informing and revising the policy they are developing, trying to get it right first time and trying to identify in advance the potential unintended consequences.
Impact assessments have become an integral part of the policy-making process.  They are often written by people with different forms of expertise and offer a structured way of looking at policy from a range of different angles.  It’s not just that they challenge discrimination, although they do, it’s that they challenge ‘straight line thinking’.  Some of the most insightful things written about new legislation have been in the impact assessments.  They have genuinely made a difference to the quality of the work done in Whitehall.  Nor do they need to slow things down as Cameron suggests.  They are built into the timetable and should be done alongside the other policy development work.  Indeed, by predicting possibly discriminatory outcomes and adverse reactions they can speed up the process.
In the world that Cameron wants to go back to no-one used to consider how proposals would specifically affect women or minority groups or disabled people or LGBT communities, and so no-one was charged with developing mitigating or countervailing measures if the impact was adverse.  Cameron is hubris personified: he and his chums in the elite know what is best and people with different views should stop being irritating.  Sir Humphrey would approve.
As Yvette Cooper commented: ‘This is even more proof of David Cameron’s personal blind spot on women and his lack of concern about the unfair impact of his policies. The idea we can leave equality to the ‘judgement’ of this prime minister and his cabinet with so few women is just a joke.’

The problem with the Government’s consultation on the definition of child poverty lies in the very first sentence: ‘The Coalition Government is committed to ending child poverty.’  Indeed this sentence is repeated so often it is a case that they ‘doth protest too much, methinks’.
In principle what the Government wants to do has some logic to it.  Child poverty should be defined more widely than just by measures of relative income.  Indeed, with a flash of honesty, it admits that the recent fall in child poverty rates is not due to any improvement in the incomes of the poorest but to a fall in the median income to which they are compared.  So introducing a multidimensional definition, to include for example housing conditions, educational opportunity, parental health, and household debt, should provide a clearer picture of the reality of child poverty today.
The chapter on housing is a decent summary of the argument that bad housing has a huge impact on children’s health and wellbeing and their future opportunities.  The quoted number of children living in overcrowded, badly repaired, damp and poorly-heated homes is testimony to the scale of the problem.  But it also makes a simplistic association between ‘troubled areas’ and ‘living on estates’, which are of course different things.  I also have suspicions about including family stability and parental worklessness in the measure and whether this is an attempt to open the door to Ian Duncan Smith’s favourite hobby horses.
Despite their assertion, the evidence that the Government has no real commitment to ending child poverty is just too strong.  Their measures on tax credits, welfare benefits, housing rents, homelessness and the cuts to children and youth services make things so much worse for so many families with children.
The latest evidence comes from Sarah Teather MP, an apologist for the Coalition whilst in Government as Minister for Children and Families and now – since being sacked – desperately trying to rebuild her reputation and save her seat.  Her interview in Saturday’s Guardian reveals a lot about the Coalition.
According to author Toby Helm, Teather ‘makes no bones about the fact that, for her, the cuts and caps already agreed by the coalition are unacceptable and wrong.’  Referring in particular to the overall benefit cap, she says that ‘having a system which is so punitive in its regime that it effectively takes people entirely outside society, so they have no chance of participating, crosses a moral line for me.’
Helm continues: ‘She accuses parts of government and the press of a deliberate campaign to ‘demonise’ those on benefits and of failing to understand that those in need of state help are just as human as they are. With vivid outrage she describes the language and caricatures that have been peddled. ‘I think deliberately to stoke up envy and division between people in order to gain popularity at the expense of children’s lives is immoral. It has no good intent.’ ’
‘The core of Teather’s argument is that the entire policy will not only be cruel and socially disruptive but also self-defeating because families and – most tragically – many thousands of children will be driven out of their homes and schools and forced to live in areas where rents are lower but where there will be less chance of adults finding jobs.’
At last someone with inside knowledge of the Coalition is telling the real story.
And the reality is that child poverty will get worse whatever measures are used.

• By guest blogger Monimbo

The Growth and Infrastructure Bill going through parliament at the moment is a threat to affordable housing supply.  Is it also an example of what Naomi Klein calls ‘disaster capitalism’?
Writing in the Guardian about responses to the destruction in New York caused by Hurricane Sandy, Naomi Klein describes how big firms are moving in offering private sector solutions and shows how the hurricane’s aftermath is in danger of becoming ‘just one more opportunity for further deregulation’.
In Britain we haven’t (recently) had a Hurricane Sandy but we do have our own ‘crisis born of corporate greed’ which has led (among many other things) to a collapse in the housing market. Everyone knows that builders aren’t building enough houses because potential buyers can’t get mortgages and in many cases also because builders themselves can’t get finance from the banks. To give some credit where it’s due, the government has recognised this with its FirstBuy and NewBuy schemes, although there is criticism that they are too focused on first-time buyers of new property. Local authorities are also doing their bit with several launching mortgage schemes, such as Sandwell.
But we are also getting a dose of disaster capitalism as developers lobby hard to get rid of regulations that supposedly stand in the way of the investment they would otherwise undertake.  The evidence that the planning system continues to be an obstacle to development, even after detailed guidance was replaced in March by the 50-page National Planning Policy Framework, is mixed at best.  There is even less (no?) evidence that building regulations hold up development, but that hasn’t stopped the government setting up an independent review to look into how many of them can be dispensed with in the supposed interests of ‘economic growth’.
As is happening with homelessness and allocations policies, the government is also tripping over its own initiatives in its hurry to act.  It’s been anxious to weaken (and is said to have considered abolishing) the planning requirements to provide affordable housing, known as section 106 agreements.  At first it was content to let councils renegotiate them, which 40% have apparently already done.  Then in August it decided to consult on renegotiating any agreement that dated from before April 2010. It also announced that expert brokers would be used to get projects moving that were stalled because of section 106 deals.  Its stimulus package of 6^th September promised:
‘…removing restrictions on house builders to help unlock 75 000 homes currently stalled due to sites being commercially unviable. Developers who can prove that council’s costly affordable housing requirements make the project unviable will see them removed.’
Although consultation on the August document didn’t close until 8^th October, within ten days it published the Growth and Infrastructure Bill which will allow any section 106 agreement (irrespective of date) to be challenged immediately.  It is hard to see how the Bill can possibly have taken into account responses to the consultation, several of which were submitted close to the deadline.
This week the Bill has been examined by Commons committee.  David Orr from the NHF has already seen his argument that the Bill could stop the development of 35,000 affordable homes dismissed by Eric Pickles.  Gavin Smart from CIH argued that Pickles’ evidence that 75,000 housing starts were held up includes a range of reasons for delays, such as lack of bank finance or lack of buyers who can get mortgages. It doesn’t give evidence of specific problems about section 106.  In the impact assessment for the Bill, the government says it is targeting sites where housing markets are weak.  But it is far from clear how changing section 106 deals will make a scheme viable if the overall market is still moribund.
Compared to the use of the banking crisis as a smokescreen for massive spending cuts and attacks on welfare and public services, deregulation may seem a minor problem.  But as Gavin Smart also pointed out, section 106 led to 29,000 affordable homes being built as recently as 2010.  This was a huge contribution, even if this scale of output is unlikely to be repeated soon. As direct government subsidy is drastically curtailed, the last thing we need is an irresponsible end to the main source of indirect subsidy: obligations on builders either to provide affordable homes within new developments or, if not, to pay for them to be built elsewhere.
None of this will stop the government, of course.  Disaster capitalism isn’t interested in evidence-based policies, but in deregulation, and much more besides.

It doesn’t sound very exciting but the Homelessness (Suitability of Accommodation) (England) Order 2012 came into force yesterday.
Behind the apparently harmless jargon of this statutory instrument is a story of indifference to human need and hypocrisy of the highest order.
In short, the Order sets out the matters that a local authority should take into account when using their new power under the Localism Act to discharge their main homelessness duty by finding accommodation in the private rented sector for a priority homeless household.
The order refers to the standards of physical accommodation and management which should be achieved, for example ensuring electrical and gas safety and that landlords are fit and proper persons.
The Order also sets out what seem to be reasonable conditions about the location of the private rented accommodation to which homeless households should be referred.  Councils ‘must take into account’ distance, potential disruption to employment, health, education or caring arrangements, and the accommodation’s proximity to local services and transport.  But in reality it’s a bit like saying we should all ‘take into account’ our health when tucking into a large pile of jam doughnuts because the Order is a million miles away from what councils – and the Government itself – are planning for homeless households.
Just as Grant Shapps wrote to 20 councils telling them they shouldn’t use bed and breakfast accommodation for more than 6 weeks whilst fully aware that many simply could not avoid doing so under current Government housing policies, Mark Prisk has signed this Order in the full knowledge that homeless households will be transported huge distances with the guaranteed disruption that his Order supposedly seeks to avoid.
Prisk even has the nerve to say the new system would provide ‘certainty for households’ and would offer ‘new protections’.  Compare that with the case studies offered recently by the Guardian and the Child poverty Action Group, which showed that the outcomes for families are often horrendous.
At the same time as the Minister spouts about it not being fair or acceptable to place households many miles away from home, councils and his officials are planning to do just that.
Many newspapers and magazines have now carried stories about councils, especially London boroughs, moving households many miles away from home.  Many more are procuring accommodation right now.  Towns and cities have been mentioned in all parts of the Midlands and the South.  The vast majority will not meet the location criteria set out in the Order, and everyone knows that.
To be stating one policy whilst practicing another is simply hypocritical.  Patrick Butler in the Guardian has reported on what official Government advisers are telling the sector.  He quotes a Government representative, Andy Gale – confirmed to me by another person present who was appalled by his message and tone – briefing that councils would have to undertake a procurement exercise for private rented accommodation and that, for many London authorities, this would involve looking outside the area.  He briefed that the changes have to be ‘sold’ to council members including how to deal with questions like ‘is it about cuts’ and ‘surely the homeless are in the greatest housing need’.  He talks about people playing the system.  And, as Butler quotes, he exposes the underlying rationale behind the new brutal regime: ‘The overall conclusion of introducing this framework is inevitably that new statutory homelessness applications will become minimal.’
Gale, and presumable the department on whose behalf he was speaking, accepts that councils may seek to discharge their duties in distant towns, and that they may face legal action.  Rather than show how councils can meet their obligations, his paper advises councils how best to frame their policies to avoid legal challenge.
On the ground, there is common acceptance that the mixture of welfare caps and changes in the homelessness duty will lead to many households having to move out of London.  For example, 7 West London boroughs have joined forces to adopt a Homelessness Strategic Action Plan which explicitly aims ‘to manage the movement of households out of London in anticipation of the overall benefits cap and other benefit changes’.
The Government’s adoption of the title ‘Affordable Rent’ for its programme of unaffordable housing has rightly been called Orwellian by many.  One meaning of Orwellian is ‘denial of truth’.  A homelessness policy where the Government does exactly the opposite of what it says it is doing is fully deserving of that description.
For more information and discussion about the new regulations, I recommend reading Jules Birch’s blog posts – on Inside Housing and on his own blog .
 
And late addition – Nearly Legal has published Andy Gale’s briefing paper, so you can read more of his progressive thoughts if you want to.