Our special correspondent, Bill D’Amore, has been at the Chartered Institute of Housing Conference this week, and was moved to write this post.
The Mayor of Newham, Sir Robin Wales, spoke at Wednesday’s session of the Chartered Institute of Housing conference and set out his – and Newham’s – stall for social housing that builds resilience, aspiration and fairness for residents and communities. Sir Robin is one of Labour’s most outspoken politians calling for an end to what he has called ‘the race to the bottom’. The social housing and benefit system has created a ghetto that makes the poor poorer and creates a culture of dependency, excluding people from work. Never avoiding controversy, Robin is a stalwart champion of his part of East London, and for what his community needs: robust access to employment, strong place-making, and prioritising social rented housing to those in work to “stop Newham’s revolving door”.
Robin’s position has been well known for some time, but he has courted particular interest because he tries to set out the socialist case for change – and a role for social housing that is, to some, not a million miles from Conservative boroughs like Hammersmith and Fulham and Westminster. He argues that it isn’t – precisely because Newham has some of the most deprived communities in Britain that need stability and resilience, whereas other affluent Tory councils are actively excluding the poorest in areas where they work and live. Robin’s argument is both moral and economic. As he said: ”driving people out of rich areas seems to me to be just plain nuts”.
So far so plausible, to this party member, but as coalition policy starts to ramp up a vision for social housing as merely a short term safety net ( as articulated on Wednesday by Matt Oakley from Policy Exchange)it’s important that Robin – and others – sharpen up their argument for a Labour housing policy that doesn’t just leave an open goal to the Tories. As I listened, three political challenges seemed imminent:
1) Some of us, Robin included, seem to have adopted the Tory narrative of the dependency culture, and invidious insinuations, denied by IDS but run week-in, week-out in the Mail and Express, that those in social housing are scroungers and the ‘feckless poor’. I do not think Robin believes this, but we need a consistent challenge to this narrative – the Hill’s report did not draw this conclusion, and indeed other evidence suggests that the barriers to work are 80% circumstance / capability and 20% motivation, not the other way around. The third speaker on Wednesday, Diane Lee, tenant chair of Watford Community Housing Trust, gained the loudest applause of the session went she expressed just how much tenants resent this suggestion.
2) I am not sure Robin’s analysis does always lead to the need for social lettings solely to those in work. As he says, the social tenants in Newham are the most stable, whilst it’s the private rented sector that sees the lowest standards and highest churn. What Newham, and places like it, may need is a far more robust set of tools to intervene in the private rented sector (PRS). What he can most readily influence is the easy option of his own lettings policy. To be fair, Robin does talk about the PRS, but only in terms of small pilots, and this part of the housing sector repeatedly never gets the attention in Labour policy that it ought to.
3) Most critically, Robin is always stuck within the localist position. If Newham can change its lettings policy to only allocate to working families, how can these flexibilities be denied to Hammersmith and Fulham? This is where we need the clearest thinking. If ordinary working families are not to be driven into overcrowded slums or out of vast swathes of London and the South East, we need a policy that does not just help Newham, but all of the South East. The answer has to be one, or possibly both, of two possibilities: in some way, a prescribed minimum tenure mix – a limit at the edge of localism however much local communities may squeal; or, some form of positive incentives to encourage genuinely mixed communities (and not merely the desultory bribe of the new homes bonus).
Neither of these will be simple, or uncontroversial, but our best advocates – like Sir Robin, and Labour’s national housing policy need to get passionately behind the reasons why we value mixed communities, whether of race, faith or economic circumstance, and a serious set of policy tools to achieve this. For Newham’s sake, and the rest of us.
Bill D’Amore.
Category: Blog Post
Lone parents make up around 10% of households in this country. Demonised in the media as responsible for many of society’s ills including the breakdown in law and order, the facts do not fit the stereotype of teenage girls in a feral underclass getting pregnant and taking all the social housing. Divorce and separation are the real factors behind the growth in numbers.
People take different views on David Cameron’s call that ‘runaway dads’ should be ‘stigmatised’ in the same way as drink-drivers and face ‘the full force of shame’, but a new report from the Fawcett Society prepared by the Institute for Fiscal Studies shows that lone parents are being hit hardest by the government’s cuts. Lone parents may, as Cameron said, be doing ‘a heroic job against the odds’ but he is stacking the odds against them in a highly damaging way. Far from being the father of the nation, Cameron is the nearest political equivalent to the runaway dad.
The report shows that lone parents, 92% of whom are women, are suffering the greatest cumulative loss as a result of the cuts in public services. Reductions in housing benefit are a major factor as single women are particularly reliant on HB either because they do not work or because they are in casual or part-time work and rely on HB as an in-work benefit.
Lone parents will come under increasing pressure to work – the expectation that they will work will shortly be reduced to those with children over 5 – just as rents are rising, housing benefit is being cut, working tax credit coverage of child care costs is being reduced. Lack of childcare is already a particular barrier to lone parents wishing to work. As the report states: “At the same time as the coalition government introduces wide-scale welfare reform with the intention of “making work pay”, they are reducing the level of support for childcare and training costs that help lone parents into work.”
The report highlights the contradictions in government policy and how cutting the deficit is a much higher priority than other objectives such as helping people into work or improving educational attainment. The contradiction in policy says Fawcett “fails to recognize the needs, interests and circumstances of the diverse women who fall into each group and risks reinforcing outdated stereotypes and penalizing those who do not conform to them.” Quite.
Monimbo
Peter Hetherington writes in the Guardian that more than faith is needed to build council houses, and asks why Scotland manages to build almost as many as England when its housing market is a tenth of the size of its southern neighbour?
The reasons are set out in today’s UK Housing Review Briefing, which updates many of the figures in the annual publication and draws attention to recent trends. One of these is that the 32 councils in Scotland built over a thousand houses last year, and may well build the same number or more this year, while English council house building will probably peak at only a little higher than this, before heading back to the miserable output levels of 2-3 years ago.
So why is this? It turns out that the answer is in the spending rules. Scottish councils have several big advantages over their English cousins.
First, they’ve had local control of council housing finances for years, for the simple reason that Scotland stopped subsidising council housing revenue accounts and so the ridiculous ‘HRA subsidy’ system which is in its last year of operation south of the border fell into disuse in Scotland many years ago.
Second, they have had no rents policy for council housing, which may have been an oversight but has had the happy side-effect of low rents which councils can now raise – if they choose to – to pay for new investment.
And third, a quirk in the spending formula by which the Treasury controls Holyrood means that any extra borrowing is counted as what’s called ‘Annual Managed Expenditure’ (AME) rather than the more tightly controlled Departmental Expenditure Limits (DEL). In England and Wales, the opposite applies.
Even more surprisingly, councils are predicted to soon have the same building potential as Scottish housing associations. This is, of course, because their borrowing is cheaper than new borrowing by associations. It’s counted as public borrowing, though, which doesn’t worry Holyrood but might one day trouble the Treasury if volumes are perceived to get too high.
Even after council housing finance reform in England in April next year, councils will still be restricted in what they can do and won’t be able to emulate Scotland. In theory, English councils can also borrow prudentially, but HM Treasury is placing a cap on their borrowing from April onwards so they won’t be able to use this freedom to the extent they could support from their income. Some will continue building, but most won’t be able to do so on any scale.
There’s a sting in this tale, of course: someone is paying for the new houses and while there is a grant system in Scotland part of the cost falls on rents. So existing tenants are partly paying for the new homes. However, so far there has been no suggestion that Scotland follows England in jacking rents up to 80 per cent of market levels – or anywhere near them. So the pain is probably tolerable and councils must judge that they have tenants on their side.
The odd thing is that it’s in England rather than Scotland that the government is making a big fuss about cutting red tape and freeing up councils to do more. Looking north of the border might be a bit unpalatable since May’s elections, but even so the English housing minister could take a leaf out of Scotland’s spending rulebook.
Labour Housing Group members in Newcastle have organised a discussion ‘Looking forward: housing policies for the future’ on Tuesday 21st June 2011 at 7.30pm at Civic Centre, Newcastle. If you are interested in attending please contact Sheila Spencer at [email protected]
Now that Labour has taken back control of the City Council, what should our detailed housing policies be? What are the key problems we need to solve, and what are the most urgent tasks for our new Cabinet? How can we best meet housing need and avert the housing crisis being brought about by the policies of the Tory-led Coalition Government? What do we need to do differently, either from the Lib Dem Council or from our own last period in office?
This meeting will provide a chance to discuss our policy direction with Cllr Helen McStravick, the Deputy Cabinet Member for Housing, and with Steve Hilditch.
Key questions we might discuss at the meeting include:
How can we build more houses, not just for owner-occupiers but social housing for people who want to rent as well?
What should our stance be on flexible tenures being introduced by the Government?
How do we maintain the progress that has been made on tackling and preventing homelessness, particularly in the light of the current welfare “reforms”?
What role should we expect Your Homes Newcastle to play in the future, not just as a provider but as a developer and more?
How can we ensure there is money to fund refurbishment of houses and flats, and avoid the planned demolition of much-needed housing?
How can we marry up regeneration and housing policies rather better?
What needs to be done about the Private Rented Sector to ensure better quality of stock and management, better access to the sector for households in need, and better linkage with other sectors?
What should our policies towards student housing be?
What do we need to do to reduce numbers of empty properties?
How can we work more effectively with housing providers (housing associations and others)?
How should the Council be engaging with tenants?
What could we do to campaign against the worst of the Government’s housing policies, and to campaign for positive change?
These and other discussion points could help us to shape a response to the Labour Party’s Housing Review as well as help to inform the policies of the City Council.
The meeting will also serve as an inaugural meeting of a Tyneside group of the Labour Housing Group.
If you are interested in attending the meeting, please contact Sheila Spencer [email protected] or 0191 265 2425
I think Labour has got into a bad place on welfare reform. It’s not just since Ed Miliband became Leader, it developed during the Labour years in government. I think it is driven by the overwhelming dominance of the Daily Mail agenda of wild exaggeration about benefit cheats and scroungers and how this feeds into opinion polls. We have not found a way to counter the hugely successful tactics of the right in turning public anger about failing economic performance into hostility against the poor and not the rich. Why is the country not up in arms against the bankers and the mega-rich – the people who run the system, benefit most from the system, who have lined their pockets in the most extraordinary way over the past decade and failed everyone else whilst they were doing it?
On Monday former political advisor to Tony Blair John McTernan was on Daily Politics. Commenting on Ed Miliband’s speech, he said that the Leader was ‘missing symbolic policies that indicate which side he’s on’, adding: ‘If he’s serious about saying if you get a job you should be looked at more seriously for council housing rather than simply council housing being for welfare recipients, I think that’s a big signal, it’s a signal that if you get on, if you better yourself, the state will be behind you, I think that’s a much more powerful signal than anything he’s said on policy before.’
This repeats a myth about council housing, which isn’t and never has been (but will be if Shapps gets his way) allocated according to income or employment status but according to defined housing need, it fails to acknowledge why most people receive benefits (unemployment, illness, disability, retirement) or to explain why they are somehow undeserving of a home. It accepts the ‘welfare recipient’ stigmatisation in its entirety. Like the use of the term ‘lifetime tenancy’ when there is no such thing, the term ‘welfare recipient’ carries a package of prejudices and negative images, and has become a classic stereotype. Even Andrew Neil seemed pleased with this contribution.
Ed Miliband’s speech was more balanced than the spin suggested, as Tony described in his earlier post, but it’s the spin that bothers me. He accepted that there was a ‘terrible shortage’ of social housing and that ‘it will be a key test of the next Labour government that we address this issue’. But the sterotype still crept in a roundabout way. ‘People who give something back to their communities – for example people who volunteer or who work’ should be given higher priority in allocations. But it seems to me to accept the media presumption about who lives in social housing and that there is something deficient about them compared to those that ‘give something back’.
More than half of social tenants are retired or economically inactive for reasons other than unemployment. Of the remainder, the vast majority are actually in work or full time education. People entering social housing are often enabled to work for the first time because rents are affordable and the transition to in-work housing benefit is managed better. The level of volunteering on some social housing estates is extraordinary, something we should celebrate, they put Cameron’s prissy big society full of lady bountifuls to shame. The vast majority of tenants are already ‘responsible’ just like the vast majority of home owners and private tenants are.
Ed makes the point that he wants to reward contribution and not punish people. But there is shortage and the people who get punished are those that won’t get a home as a result of a change in priorities – your grannie who needs sheltered housing, your cousin with a severe medical condition who can’t stay in a private bedsit in a shared house, your son or daughter who has had a breakdown and needs supported housing, your sister with 3 kids evicted from her home because she can’t keep up with the mortgage. None of them working and none of them able to volunteer. These are not tearjerkers, this is the real life business of allocating social housing.
John McTernan rightly said that Labour can’t win unless it is seen to represent a wider coalition of people. I am less sure about his view that we were seen as the party of lone parents and immigrants (lone parents and immigrants won’t agree). I think Labour came to be despised by a lot of natural supporters because of Iraq and because of Labour’s association with the rich – not the poor. We no longer looked like the party of ordinary Britain. The parties on yachts in the Med, the moth-like fascination with the wealthy, our soft line on the bankers and the undeserving rich. Not forgetting the mad in-fighting which diverted the government from the ordinary issues facing people.
We fall into the hands of the forces of darkness every time we play the undeserving poor game, every time we add to the negativity around ‘welfare recipients’ without explaining who they are. Every time we fail to challenge the belief that ‘the housing benefit bill was out of control’ rather than point out that rents have gone up and caseload has increased due to the resurgence of the private rented sector. If, as John McTernan seemed to me to be saying, you can only get the middle class on board by dumping on the poor, then the game is up for the left and every variety within it. But if he meant it when he said that we need to have policies attractive to people in the middle as well as at the bottom, then there is enough common ground to unite us all. Because Labour should be on the side of both.
Labour Housing Group and Socialist Health Association held a conference ‘Prescription for a healthy Britain’ on Monday 13 June. Conference papers are available on the LHG website here. In a guest post, LHG Vice chair Marianne Hood picks up the conference theme.
Despite the fact that the links between health and housing have been recognised for well over 100 years, and despite over a century of public health and housing interventions, we still have people with the worst health living in the worst housing.
The original impetus in the 19th century for improving housing conditions (for example slum clearance to tackle squalid living conditions, severe overcrowding and dilapidation) was clearly focussed on improving health outcomes. Sadly, in the 20th century the focus shifted to issues of ownership, access, management and cost – losing the link between improving housing to improve both mental and physical health.
Now in the 21st century many of the policies being driven forward by the Tory-led coalition risk returning us to that early 19th century situation with severe overcrowding and the poorest and most vulnerable people being driven into the poorest homes in an unregulated private sector. Make no mistake, there is a wealth of evidence to show that the private sector, especially the private rented sector, contains the highest proportion of ‘non-decent’ homes with a significant percentage of older people living in the very poorest private sector homes.
If investment in housing is not substantially increased, much of the expenditure on health and care programmes will be totally ineffective. In a report commissioned specially for the LHG/SHA Conference earlier this week, environmental health expert Stephen Battersby* reminded us that poor housing conditions cost the NHS at least £600 million per year, that the one-off costs of works to improve private rented housing gave an annual financial saving to the health sector, and that every £1 spent on providing housing support for vulnerable people can save nearly £2 in reduced costs of health services, tenancy failure, crime and residential care.
The Labour Housing Group believes that housing should be recognised as a community capital asset that needs to be properly maintained, most of our current housing will still be here in a hundred years time, because if it is neglected the cost of demolition and replacement will ultimately fall on the state.
Surely we owe it to current generations, and to our children and our children’s children, to have good housing and health policies fit for the 21st century? Policies that recognise that investment in housing is an essential prerequisite for tackling inequality overall but especially health inequalities.
*University of Surrey and University of Warwick, current President of the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health.
Labour’s housing policy will help lead the country out of the ‘turgid economic trough’ being created by the Tories, Ken Livingstone told a packed London Labour Housing Group conference on Saturday. ‘Investment to create 100,000 new homes would create three-quarters of a million jobs’ the mayoral candidate told the conference, called to debate housing policies for London to be included in next year’s manifesto.
Describing the fight for the mayoralty as a ‘mid-term election’ Ken argued that Labour needed to redefine housing policy as a key part of economic policy as well as being important in itself in meeting the housing needs of low and middle income Londoners. One of the jobs of the new mayor will be to draw up a major programme of housebuilding ready for the return of a Labour government.
The Tories have abandoned the idea of mixed communities in London, he said, but Labour will always build a mix of homes for a mix of people on a wide range of incomes, just as it had done in the past. Ken also reminded the conference that effective campaigns on housing had forced major u-turns from both the Heath and Thatcher governments and could do so again with the coalition.
Karen Buck MP, shadow minister for welfare reform, told the conference that the Tory government’s policies in the Localism and Welfare Reform Bills would have a huge impact on London and could force tens of thousands of people to move – all searching for cheaper areas. The policies would also be counter-productive – leading to higher rents in all tenures and far greater homelessness – making it impossible for them to make their savings.
Karen said that the policies directly contradicted the Tories’ claim that they wanted to incentivise people to get back to work. They had almost completely forgotten that housing benefit is also an in-work benefit – over 40% of people receiving local housing allowance were in work in some boroughs – the losses would make it impossible for many of them to remain in work.
Setting the context for the conference, Nicky Gavron AM, Labour’s housing and planning lead on the London Assembly, said that more and more people were seeing housing as a key battleground for the mayoral election. The difference between the two mayors could not be more stark. Ken’s legacy was strong, Nicky argued. There was a strong planning framework, the best housing record since the 1970s, the highest level of capital investment ever and a massive land bank ready for development. Johnson had squandered this inheritance and virtually all his housing claims could be dated back to Ken’s administration. He was undermining the planning system, scrapping Ken’s targets especially the 50% affordable target and the emphasis on social rented homes. The government’s own inspector had criticised Johnson’s polices, saying his targets were too low, he should keep the 50% London-wide affordable housing target, and should support social rented housing provision. Johnson caved in to his Tory friends in the boroughs, allowing them to cut affordable housing. Only the Labour boroughs are keeping London’s affordable housebuilding going.
The conference, with representatives from all areas of London, inner and outer, debated a series of detailed policy proposals for the manifesto, including policies to increase housing supply, to meet the needs of the poorest and most socially excluded households, to help the ‘squeezed middle’, and to guarantee the future of social housing in the capital. The policies will be developed further before the manifesto is published.
Labour Party members interested in joining the Labour Housing Group should follow this link. London members interested in the work of London LHG should contact [email protected]
Categories
Time to say goodbye
Love it or loathe it, the Audit Commission Housing Inspectorate will be missed after it closes operations this month.
I have a long list of irritations with how it went about its work. Number one is probably the poor quality of some of the inspectors, who sometimes failed to follow their own guidelines about transparency, feedback and having ‘no surprises’ in their conclusions, or imported their own views about how something should be done and turning it into a supposedly objective judgement. Having experienced inspection outcomes that were both significantly higher and significantly lower than the service being inspected justified, I’m left with the nagging feeling that some were preordained and that political fixing could make a difference. Some services seemed to get stars simply because of their previous reputation and sometimes there seemed quite a gap between the evidence and the conclusion.
All of this would be denied by the AC of course and the upside of its achievements comfortably exceeds my annoyances. Most importantly, there is evidence that after decades of flatlining, housing management standards really did pick up and improve during the period that the housing inspectorate was active. The first series of inspections of housing association services burst the balloon that their chief executives had been blowing up about the quality of their own services. Shining a light into a few dark corners brought significant improvement to the sector, in both councils and housing associations. The weight given to the experience of tenants increased as the regime was refined and improved. The set of KLOEs (key lines of enquiry) that the AC produced was a brave attempt to provide a template for a good service, even if they were then rather slavishly followed. Whilst the industry of pre-inspection consultancy prospered, the ideas of regular service review, external challenge and constant improvement became endemic, driving service improvement and a focus on tenant satisfaction.
There were a couple of areas where I am happy to own up to just being wrong in my early views on the inspection regime. One was that the traffic light system was superficial and trivialised important judgements – in fact it was a great success and an effective communication tool. Second that introducing the link between inspection outcomes and funding in the ALMO programme wouldn’t work. In fact it was a great motivator and became an important driver of service improvement and tenant engagement, helping to restore the credibility of council housing.
Maybe I’ll be wrong again but my view even before the Election was that the inspection element of the new TSA regulatory regime risked not being comprehensive and rigorous enough to keep standards improving and that some organisations would slip back into bad old ways. Since the Election, the changes made by this government convince me that it will be far worse than that. Even if the TSA (whilst it exists) and the HCA, as the new regulator, ensure the financial viability and probity of the sector, they will be toothless tigers in relation to service quality. I would welcome the emphasis on local tenant scrutiny if I didn’t know that it will be hopelessly under-resourced and open to manipulation by landlords of all types wanting to talk a good service instead of delivering one.
One of many challenges facing landlords will be to put sufficient effort and resources into making tenant scrutiny work and to maintain the tradition of external rigorous challenge based on the methods developed by the Housing Inspectorate. I hope they will but I fear they won’t – and the industry will take a step backwards.
The idea of evicting social housing tenants on higher incomes emerged in Westminster, based on some very dodgy statistics about how many tenants earned over £50,000 and £100,000. It appears that after years of saying soial housing had too many poor people, now the Tories say it has too many rich people as well. I suspect they just don’t like social housing. Now that Grant Shapps has taken up the attack, it has become a national story. The original story was broken by the Leader of the Labour Group on Westminster, Paul Dimoldenberg. In a guest blog, he accuses Shapps of tabloid-style reasoning. No surprise there then.
So Grant Shapps MP thinks it is a ‘no brainer’ to evict Council and Housing Association tenant families who between them earn £100,000 a year. He reckons that there are 6,000 such families across the UK who he says are rich enough to be able to buy their own home and should be evicted so that they can make way for a family who is in more serious need of a home.
Well, I certainly have a number of serious concerns about this proposal which has emerged out of the blue without any consultation or thought to the consequences.
In typical tabloid-style reasoning Mr Shapps raises the spectre of RMT trade union leader Bob Crow who earns £130,000 a year but still lives in a council house in north London. Interestingly, Mr Shapps can name no other high-earning individual or family to make his case and his argument rests entirely on the personal circumstances and choices made by Government ‘hate-figure-in-chief’ Mr Crow.
But the facts of these so-called ‘high-earning’ Council tents are a million miles from the isolated Bob Crow example.
A more typical ‘high-earning’ family is the one living in Grant Shapps’ constituency in a 2-bed Council or Housing Association flat where the parents both have middle income jobs earning £25,000 each and their daughter and her fiancee, again both earning £25,000, are saving for a deposit on their first home. Does Mr Shapps really think that this family is ‘rich’?
Does Mr Shapps really expect Council and Housing Association tenant families like this to reveal their incomes if it means that, by doing so, they will be evicted if they are thought by the Government to be earning too much? And how many people will decide not to work overtime or go for promotion if it means that they will creep over the £100,000 threshold and face eviction?
If Council and Housing Association tenants have to reveal the income of all family members living in their home, will it include the state pension of an elderly grandparent living with them? And will the meagre earnings of the teenage daughter with a Saturday job also be required to be included, too? Real life is very different from Mr Shapps’ easy headline grabbing and ill-thought out policies. So far he has failed to answer any of these points.
Or will local Councils and Housing Associations be told to make assumptions about their tenants’ income and then to evict those families who they estimate to be ‘wealthy’?
Mr Shapps says a family with a combined income of £100,000 should be able to buy a home of their own, but this will be different across the UK. In London, the South East and South West, a young couple with a combined income of £50,000 and living in a Council flat with mum and dad will not be able to get on the home-ownership ladder if that family is told to move out and buy their own flat. They will end up in private rented accommodation paying a lot more in rent.
And how did this £100,000 figure come about? Was it the result of research or is it a convenient figure that will guarantee tabloid headlines?
Posted on 6 June 2011. Later Paul added:
Housing Minister Grant Shapps’ plans to evict Council and Housing Association households with a combined income of £100,000 unravelled today on the BBC Radio 2 ‘Jeremy Vine Show’ when he contradicted statements he made over the weekend and now claimed that his new policy would mean that families with four or more people on average incomes would not be evicted if their combined household income is more than £100,000.
In a bizarre example of ‘policy making on the hoof’, Mr Shapps told BBC Radio 2 listeners that
- The £100,000 income threshold only applies to individuals and couples with a combined income of £100k
- Other family members’ income (e.g. children, granparents) will not be counted
However, Mr Shapps’ claim that this new policy would mean that people with high incomes would move out and allow people in housing need to take their place, was immediately in tatters when he revealed that if the high earners paid the market rent then they could continue to live in their Council or Housing Association property as now.
Mr Shapps failed to spell out how Councils and Housing Associations would gather the information on ‘high earning’ tenant incomes or how much the Town Hall bureaucracy would cost to set up, run and police. Mr Shapps also failed to answer how he would stop high earning individuals declaring that their income was £95,000 or stop the two person household declaring that they earned £45,000 each in order to dodge having to pay market rents.
By introducing a new policy of letting high earners stay if they pay market rents, he will provide very few new homes for people in housing need. And much of the extra cash generated by increased market rents will go topay for an army of Town Hall snoopers whose job it will be to set up a new bureaucracy to find out tenants’ income and enforce the new red-tape regime introduced by Mr Shapps.
Last month, Westminster’s Housing Cabinet member Philippa Roe claimed that the Council wanted to increase rents for high earners by “a little bit more”, but now Grant Shapps has revealed the truth and tenants will face a 400% increase in rents as they go from their current level of around £110 a week to market rents of £450 a week or more.
The answer to local housing shortages is to build more homes for social rent, not to divide the community and set middle earners, the low paid and high earners against each other. Giving Councils like Westminster Council the power to set their own rent levels will mean that Council rents will go up for everyone, not just those on over £100,000.
Categories
That vile word
I was once in a meeting of a housing association which was discussing buying land and developing homes in Stevenage. “I’ve been there” chirruped the Chief Executive, “it really is chavland”. I have been in plenty of other meetings where senior housing folk have talked about their clients in disparaging terms. I can recall one Housing Director in the north responding to a presentation on the Decent Homes programme by saying “There’s nothing wrong with our houses, it’s the people that need fixing”. Fortunately most people who work in the profession are more enlightened and have a more balanced view and a better choice of words.
As a fan (mildly obsessive) of EastEnders I get outraged by every story line that involves any character visiting a council estate. They are always the same. High blocks, lifts not working, rubbish strewn everywhere, hoodies gathered menacingly outside, drug dealers hovering, noisy music blaring, people shouting, and in the middle of it some poor EE character suffering terrible deprivations, and desperate to get back to the square where decent folk live (now there’s the joke). I used to start talks by asking people if they knew where the Jasmin Allen estate was. Invariably they knew it was a bad bad place where police only went in big groups because it was run by gangs and the residents appeared to throw rocks at them on every visit. Everyone thinks they’ve heard of it and the penny eventually drops that it was in The Bill, and was fictional. I believe the filming was done on an estate in south London famous for being visited by Tony Blair on his first day as Prime Minister.
I was got going on this topic by Polly Toynbee’s piece on ‘the vile word’ chav. How right she is that the use of the word chav is just one part of a sustained effort to ‘foster the loathing of a feral underclass’ thereby diverting public resentment about economic and social failure from the rich to the poor.
Polly quotes Baroness Hussein-Ece – a LibDem Equality and Human Rights Commissioner no less – who tweeted: “Help. Trapped in a queue in chav land. Woman behind me explaining latest EastEnders plot to mate while eating largest bun I’ve ever seen.” And then of course this week we have Iain Duncan Smith, hand wringing in public and in private getting his department to place stories in the media – and picked up endlessly by the BBC – about the ‘top ten’ most ridiculous stories told by some benefit scroungers.
For this government (LibDems should look suitably ashamed, I expect it from the Tories) and their supporters this is all part of the softening up exercise for the cuts. Everyone’s on the fiddle, no-one wants to work, they’re breeding like rabbits, they get subsidised housing and don’t even pay the rent, so we should take their benefits away from them. Even decent politicians run in fear from the stereotype and feel it is necessary to back some variant of ‘welfare reform’.
The outcome is that it is so much easier to make cuts that really hurt people. We have blogged about some of these before. The latest news this week, from the heads of Britain’s main charities dealing with mental health, concerns the ‘devastating effects’ welfare reform (ie cuts) is having on the mental health of hundreds of thousands of people.
The long title of Owen Jones’ book ‘Chavs’ being published this week is ‘the demonization of the working class’. That’s what is really going on and council tenants get the worst of the stigma. Some politicians and housing professionals need to read it and begin choosing their policies and words more carefully.