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Wasted assets?

Monimbo
Eric Pickles’ latest burst of ‘localism’ is his plan to force councils (and other public bodies) to publish a public register of their assets.  Like the requirement to publish minute details of expenditure, this will encourage the press and others to try to catch councils out.  They’ll try to find things they don’t know they own or (in the views of the press) shouldn’t own.
For example, already mention has been made of county councils owning farmland, as if his were a horrendous crime.  Yet as Steve mentioned in his bucolic Northumberland post, tnanted farmland is profitable and a perfectly reasonable asset to hold.
Yet Andrew Boff, Conservative housing spokesperson in the GLA, says anyone looking at the land owned by public bodies will be shocked.  He must be of a sensitive disposition.
I looked at the public assets shown on the DCLG’s map for an area I know well.  Surprise, surprise: the council owns several parks and open spaces, a school or two, a library and – yes, shock horror – a house!
The DCLG register is just a trial, apparently. Before being opened to public scrutiny, the real asset registers will have to be consolidated from different records, checked for veracity, put in a central system (standardised across England?) and then kept up to date.
Just think about the implications for housing alone – a council’s (say) 20,000 houses
might well be digitally mapped, but will they be on the same database as (say) the schools?  Assets change constantly – for example, as houses are sold through the right to buy.  If empty assets have to be shown, will the system have to show every short-term void?  In the case of council housing, the cost of doing all this or harmonising databases will presumably fall on the housing revenue account – in other words, tenants will pay from their rents.
Now you could argue that this is all no more than good practice in the digital age, and the more transparent these things are the better.  Both are good arguments.  But I don’t think
they are foremost in Pickles’ mind.  I think he wants to imply that these assets – or a good proportion of them – are being poorly managed or kept empty at the taxpayer’s expense.  Then I think he wants another smokescreen for insufficient houses being built.
Finally, if he or his spies in the Daily Mail can find a few wasting assets, he’ll no doubt feel vindicated and might even manage to get a site or two sold on to private builders.  Don’t hold your breath though, he’ll be happy if he gets the odd example of incompetence to ‘justify’ the whole bureaucratic exercise.

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What is it about our society that can make such things possible?

There are some similarities between what has happened in Tottenham over the past few days and the riot of 1985.  Both were triggered by a death during a police operation and a family demanding answers about what happened, followed by a march on Tottenham Police station and people feeling ignored and disrespected.  Then, crowds gathered on Broadwater Farm estate which became the venue for the subsequent riot.  The riot had nothing to do with the estate, it was about policing, and the location could equally have been Tottenham High Road then as now.  But the pressure cooker exploded and the appalling, and I believe still unsolved, mob murder of PC Blakelock cemented the notoriety of the estate.
Talking our way through hundreds of riot police, three of us opened the Broadwater farm Neighbourhood Office at 7am the following morning, dealing with many terrified people.
Teams of council staff arrived spontaneously and began the clean up.  Shops and cars had been burned out but there was remarkably little damage to the residential parts of the estate – extraordinarily, the glaziers were hardly needed – although the impact on residents’ morale was palpable.
Local politicians and neighbourhood staff were outstanding in the aftermath, and especially Bernie Grant, who showed enormous courage in the face of a despicable media campaign of vilification.  He devoted many years of his life afterwards to making the Farm, and the wider Tottenham area, good places to live and strong communities.  He eventually got the relationship between the community and the police onto a new footing.
Everything that has been said about the criminality of the current riots, the appalling firesetting and looting, is fair comment.  There are a large number of people, many very
young, who have done very bad things and they should be arrested for them as soon as they are identified.  It hurts, but we have to understand that many of the rioters have done this to their own communities; it is not good enough to say it was all done by people from somewhere else.
It will take a long time for communities to recover, but there were signs all over the news today of councils responding magnificently and communities pulling together and supporting each other.  I have been struck by the many interviews with community activists and leaders who are stunningly articulate about what is happening in their areas, why things have been going wrong, and what needs to be done.  They give the lie to the
many derogatory things that are said about working class areas.  In many cases they are already the Big Society but without the resources and wherewithal to withstand the tsunami of post-recession policies that have caused hope and aspiration to evaporate.
A twin track approach is needed.  Obviously the police response has to be better and the community deserves to be better protected.  Cuts to police numbers should be withdrawn.  There will be many operational lessons to be learned, especially when so many communities come under attack at the same time.  What is so different from 1985 is the speed with which the rioting spread through so many different areas across London and further.  The blackberry phenomenon needs to be understood for the future, the police seemed clueless in the face of it.
But those that can only condemn and talk of clampdowns and state retribution are making a big mistake.  Even Mrs Thatcher sent out Michael Heseltine to find out what was happening in Liverpool after the Toxteth riots.  Boris Johnson hasn’t got a clue.  His one
dimensional response, repeated by David Cameron, about ‘sheer criminality’ is just not good enough, and Ken Livingstone is much more sure-footed and grounded in reality when big issues like this arise.
If it has no other dimension than criminality, if it has nothing to do with economic and social conditions, and policing, why has it happened now?  Is it completely unrelated to the closure of youth centres, the removal of EMA, rising youth unemployment, and rising numbers of young people being stopped and searched on the streets, which they see as harassment and disrespect?  If poor communities are constantly accused (even by some Labour politicians) of fecklessness, worthlessness (to the point of being told they shouldn’t have children if they can’t afford them) and scrounging, and a feeling of hopelessness is added by the unfair and unequal impact of the recession, is it a surprise that the outcome is a destructive form of alienation that eventually expresses itself in violence?
If bankers ruin the global economy then earn millions in new bonuses, if politicians and policemen are perceived to be on the make (even if most aren’t), if a media empire indulges in criminality as a matter of routine, if we only measure worth in material possessions, we should be traumatised but not astonished when youth also display heartless avarice and grab what they can.  Maybe Laurie Penny is right when she wrote in her blog last night that “people riot because it makes them feel powerful, if only for a night.”
For the future, we should take our lead from the dignified comments of the furniture store owner, distraught at the loss of his building, which had served the local community for 150 years, who was right to condemn but also had the perspicacity to ask why, what is it about our society that can make such things possible?

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Who should get priority for social housing, people in work or people in need of work?

Ed Miliband and Caroline Flint have suggested that being employed should be a factor in social housing allocations.  It has been suggested that this is an effective ‘message’ to the ‘squeezed middle’, which I commented on in a previous blog.  But, whatever the message it conveys, does it stand up as a housing policy?  
Guest blogger Sheila Spencer takes up the debate. 
There’s been some debate within the Labour Party, at senior levels, and on the pages of Inside Housing, about giving priority to people on the basis of their employment status, and it seems to me that some people are missing the point a bit.  Ed Miliband, for example, has pledged to make it easier for voluntary workers and the employed to gain council housing, to fit with the idea that the welfare state should reward those who contribute. But what about those who can’t yet contribute in this way?
I know that some councils have already adopted this policy: Manchester, for example, gives extra priority on the basis of someone in the household being in work or contributing
to their community. Manchester’s allocations policy says that the idea of this is to encourage people to access work. But the person in work has to be employed for 16 hours or more, and must have been in work for at least 9 months in the last year – so it is not
encouraging people to move into work, just giving priority to those who already have work.
It seems to me that this puts those who are out of work and without anywhere to live at a considerable disadvantage. If you are homeless, you are fairly unlikely to be able to get a job until you have an address; and if you are living in temporary accommodation, in most cases the housing and support costs stop people from being able to take on a job whilst they are living there. So this policy puts an additional barrier in the way. It’s really
a Catch 22 – you don’t have priority to get rehoused because you’re not working, but you can’t apply for work because you won’t be able to afford to have anywhere to live in the meantime.
There is one glimmer of light for people in temporary accommodation: many people are now getting involved in some way as a volunteer, as part of “meaningful activity” and tangible support to move on with their lives. But Manchester’s scheme seems to restrict the community contribution to the area you want to be housed in – expecting, I would guess, that this is as part of a neighbourhood or community group there. Again, this could exclude people who are not yet part of a community.
I prefer the schemes which give people an incentive for looking for work by awarding priority for rehousing, or priority for particular places, to those who have pledged to get into work, or training or education once they have somewhere to live, and which supports them to do so. So those who have only just got themselves into a position where they can look for work are able to do that with a steady home to live in. Isn’t that a responsible way
to look at offering social housing? And how can we justify rewarding people who take responsibility for their lives whilst excluding those at the bottom of the heap, and in effect, taking on policies which keep them there?

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From princes to pitmen: 'Close The Door On Past Dreariness’.

From a picture by Norman Cornish, from article by Martin Wainwrigt on Guardian website October 2006A holiday in Northumberland normally involves castles.
This year’s selection included Bamburgh (the most dramatic), Lindisfarne (the most beautiful), Dunstanborough (the most ruined), Chillingham (the most eccentric), and Alnwick (the most Hogwarted).
Alnwick castle is the home of the Duke of Northumberland (and his forebears for 700 years).  Alongside the fabulous State Rooms – I thought one woman was going to faint when we were told in the dining room that the Queen had recently lunched here with the Duke and Duchess – visitors have the opportunity to watch a video explaining the Duke’s views on Inheritance Tax.  He doesn’t think much of it.  But I think his progeny will survive on the post-tax pickings of “a growing international commercial property portfolio which is centred on the North East, including over 100,000 acres of land and more than 100 let farms, a large residential portfolio, a number of historical assets including Syon House in London and the Albury Estate in Surrey as well as fine art and treasures, mineral rights, sporting and leisure interests” as the Northumberland Estate website explains it.
An alternative view of Northumbrian life can be found at the fantastic Woodhorn Museum just outside Ashington.  In addition to its exhibitions on coal mining and working class history, the museum is home to the permanent picture collection of the Ashington Group, known as the Pitmen Painters, who captured every aspect of life above and below ground, depicting living as well as working conditions.
The exhibition of union banners is fascinating, although we were struck by the banner of the  Ellington Branch of the Northumberland Area of the National Union of Mineworkers.  On one side is a picture of crowded slum pit housing with the slogan ‘Close The Door On Past Dreariness’.  And on the other is a picture of a modern housing development, houses with gardens on a tree-lined street, with the slogan ‘Open It to Future Brightness’.  That just about sums it all up.
Alnwick Castle followed by Woodhorn Colliery Museum offers such stark contrasts it really makes you wonder why the class war never caught on.
Image from a picture by Norman Cornish, included in an article by Martin Wainwright, Guardian website, October 2006.

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Beautiful places also need affordable homes

Lindisfarne community prioritises affordable homes

As you arrive into the village from the causeway out to Lindisfarne, there is a ‘welcome’ notice board.  It records the history of the island in timeline form.  All the key dates are there, the arrival of St Aidan in 635AD, the death of St Cuthbert in 698, the arrival of the Vikings in 793, and all the rest.
And, given equal status, are the key dates for ‘affordable housing phase 1 completed’ and ‘affordable housing phase 2 completed’.

Simon Schama might not agree, and David Starkey certainly won’t, but that’s what I call a balanced view of history.
Like other areas in rural Northumberland, Lindisfarne has suffered from rocketing house prices, driven by the second homes boom, and rapid rent rises, driven by shortage and competition from the holiday lettings trade.  Local people could not afford to buy or to rent on the island, the school closed, and the traditional community was dying.  Showing great foresight and determination, the islanders formed the Holy Island of Lindisfarne Community Land Trust (CLT), which raised charitable and community donations to fund the building of a small but vitally important number of homes for social rent.
Later, other small developments were financed by the Housing Corporation/Homes and Communities Agency.  The landlord of the Crown and Anchor pub put it simply – “Getting one of these new homes means we’ll be able to stay put, carry on running  the pub and be a part of the local community.”  The homes will be available for low rent occupation in perpetuity, irrespective of future land value rises.
This inspirational story contrasts with this week’s report from the Countryside Alliance concerning the death of rural communities around the country caused by the shortfall in affordable homes.  According to the group, almost 80,000 affordable homes are needed each year in rural areas but just 17,000 were delivered in 2010/11.
The report, ‘The critical shortfall in affordable rural housing in Britain‘, argues that rural housing remains less affordable than in urban areas due to average wages being
£4,655 lower than the national average.
As the Lindisfarne example shows, to survive rural communities need to prioritise low cost housing for rent.  As in the cities, the market simply cannot do the job that communities need without positive intervention.

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A decent result for council housing

It has been a long time coming, but the end of the national HRA (housing revenue account) subsidy system for council housing is now in sight.  A new government paper Self financing: Planning the transition clarifies some of the detail, updates the figures that will be used, and crucially sets the timetable for implementation – 28 March 2012 will be the day on which many billions of pounds will move around between CLG, the Public Works Loans Board and individual local authorities to implement the scheme.
Although the technicality of the new paper will give anyone except a public finance accountant and a few experts a headache, the core proposals are still much the same as
proposed by the Labour Government. Radical change has been made possible due to the fact that the council housing system as a whole has moved into significant surplus, surpluses that are projected to grow in future.
The current system involves central government notionally collecting all rents and
redistributing the income between councils with housing stock according to
increasingly complex formulae.  The system has become unsustainable, with some councils losing 50% of their rent income to the national pool, and volatile, with annual determinations making longer term planning very difficult.  The central problem was the bad distribution of historic debt – councils that have built most in the past had large debts they couldn’t sustain from local rent income.  The new system redistributes the debt permanently between councils, according to their ability to support it within 30 year business plans, removing the need for annual redistribution.
‘Self-financing’, as it is called in the jargon, is a genuinely localist move, supported by all
of the political parties and by the vast majority of councils with stock. It is a major success for the housing lobby, and especially CIH, who have argued for this change for many years to give council housing a sustainable future and to bring key decisions over finance and services closer to tenants.
Of course there are still risks and there are elements of the package that could be improved.  There may be dangers in the detail of the redistribution formula that I wouldn’t be able to spot with binoculars, but some others will.  One change made by the current government has been to retain the rule that 75% of capital receipts from the right to buy will go to central government rather than stay locally as Labour had decided.  They also imposed a cap on borrowing, limiting the scope for councils to use their surpluses to build new homes, and spiking the ambitions of some councils to become major builders again.
The funding arrangements to complete the decent homes programme also do not seem to be adequate for the job.
It must be said that there are dangers as well as opportunities arising from local control of the housing revenue account. The ring fence is retained but, given that the general fund at most councils is under severe strain, some Directors of Finance and politicians will look avariciously at the HRA and seek to move funds across.
Tenants will need to be vigilant and alert to the many tricks of the trade, and scrutinise carefully all arrangements such as recharging of overheads and central council costs and service level agreements.   If council housing is to be a self-financing business in future, the core principle must be that rent income is used for the benefit of tenants and not
council taxpayers generally.
The long-predicted total demise of council housing has been averted. Campaigning tenants and a few councils who were determined to hold on to their stock can take much of the credit for that.  Councils with stock should now be able to adopt a sustainable business plan for the future, making decisions locally, with their tenants, to improve their management and performance.  Some councils are building again, admittedly in small numbers, and more have the potential to do so.
Given the politics of council housing over the last 30 years, this is a good result.

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A welcome shift but Shapps still needs his snoopers

Red Brick’s first ever post was on security of tenure.  And we have argued consistently since that reducing security of tenure would be bad for individuals, bad for communities and bad for social housing.
The government has now relented and moderated some of its worst proposals.  Grant Shapps, in a letter to consultees, has ‘caved in’ and accepted a significant amendment to his draft ‘direction’ on tenure.  Blogger Jules Birch has reported on the slalom that has been Grant Shapps’ opinion on this in recent times, wavering about under pressure from both sides.  In his letter, Shapps puts the change down to ‘concerns expressed during debate on the tenure reform provisions of the Localism Bill at Lords committee’.  Step forward those Lords, if this goes on I might have to amend my unicameral views.  And well done to the Labour opposition and to those elements of the housing lobby who have fought for the interests of tenants rather than landlords on this one.  No accolades seem to be deserved by the Liberals, who have been particularly supine on security despite their long-term party policies.
It is important however to put Shapps’ retreat into perspective.  A skirmish has been won but not a battle let alone a war.  Instead of a minimum term of 2 years for general needs housing, the policy will in future be that a normal tenancy term will be 5 years, but landlords will still be able to offer a 2 year tenancy ‘in exceptional circumstances’ as long as they set out what that means in their tenancy policy.  Some landlords will no doubt try to adopt an elastic definition of ‘exceptional’.
It should be said clearly that the policy is still wrong, just less wrong than it was.  At the end of 5 years, tenants will still be at the mercy of a landlord assessment of whether they should keep their home, without being able to make their case to a court.  That is where the immorality lies.  It gives arbitrary bureaucratic power to people who are often unaccountable, some of whom are very judgemental about tenants and which ones they like (deserving) and don’t like (undeserving).  And if virtually all tenancies are renewed, as some argue, what a waste of time and effort it will be.  Linked to Shapps wanting to means test all tenants to find out which ones have a high salary so he can charge them more rent, an army of people will be needed to go round checking everyone’s
income and resources and assessing everyone’s suitability to continue as a tenant.  Shapps will still need his Snoopers.
This victory should encourage more campaigning over the summer.  In particular, the government looks wobbly on the total benefit cap aspect of the welfare reform bill.
Their Lordships have more good work to do.

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When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?

George Osborne would do well to read more of John Maynard Keynes, and in particular his General Theory of Employment Interest and Money published in 1935.  Unlike Osborne and Cameron, Keynes (a capitalist economist and a Liberal) learned lessons from the Great Depression and was determined never to see it repeated.
One of JMK’s well-known sayings – ‘When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?’ – was uttered after he was criticised for changing his position on monetary policy during the Great Depression.  It applies well now to Osborne’s repetition of the Great Depression mistake (and indeed Japan’s more recently) of cutting demand in a recession.
But it might equally be applied to private rented sector rents and the policy of slashing the Local Housing Allowance for private tenants.  Minister after minister, from Cameron down, trotted out the line that cutting benefits would reduce rents, that the HB sector was holding rents up high, and that the free market would respond to HB cuts, effectively lowering demand, by lowering price.  Iain Duncan Smith frequently said that the fact that his department was responsible for 40 per cent of the private rental market was ‘staggering’ and that the aim of the reforms was ‘to drive down market rents’.
Logical thinkers came to different conclusions.  With current levels of excessive demand, tenants forced to move by cuts in their HB payments would be easily replaced by new tenants able to pay market rents.  There would be no price reduction in more costly areas.  However, the displaced tenants would be looking for homes in lower rent areas, boosting demand and competition for the cheaper homes that come on the market.  Rents in those areas would be likely to rise.  The problem would be compounded by a proportion of landlords taking family homes off the market to make them available instead to the growing number of single people who would only receive the shared accommodation HB rate in future.  Letting to 4 or 5 singles was likely to be more lucrative than letting to a single family.
The anecdotal evidence is that sharing and overcrowding are increasing as people, and especially larger families, try to find cheaper – which often means smaller – accommodation.  Harder evidence, from agents and landlords, shows that rents continue to rise above inflation.
Nor are there any signs of rents turning down in the future.  The head of research at Savills recently concluded  “High rent rises are not confined to the prime market and, as more aspiring buyers are frozen out of home ownership, demand for private rented stock in the country as a whole can only grow. Our prognosis for the private rented sector as a whole remains extremely bullish.”
Even if the government believed its little bit of idiot economics when it started the policy, surely the evidence is accumulating that they are just wrong, rents will not fall and people will be put through endless misery because of it.
The facts have changed.  But does Iain Duncan Smith have the bottle to change his mind as JMK suggests he should?

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Making the Most of Community Led Planning

By guest blogger Monimbo.
Inside Housing carries a story about a new guide to Making the Most of Community Led Planning, promoted by the DCLG and created by two pressure groups working in rural areas and in market towns. Without disparaging the work of ACRE and Action for Market Towns, with their rural focus it is perhaps not surprising that the groups involved in this exercise seem to be solely from County Council areas. There is no representation from inner city areas or, indeed, outer ones.  The guide carries the endorsement of the minister for decentralisation, Greg Clark, with no mention of its rural bias, and yet it was part financed from the DCLG’s empowerment fund.
The minister hails the guide as helping ‘local people’ exercise the right to prepare a ‘neighbourhood plan’ under the Localism Bill.  It strikes me that the guide is an unintentional reminder of how vacuous such plans may turn out to be.  There is only the
vaguest discussion of resources, delicate issues like building more local housing are touched on only briefly, and there appear to be very few examples of what neighbourhood plans can actually achieve – surprising given that more than 4,000 community led plans are apparently already in existence.
One gets the impression that neighbourhood plans are intended to be about minor issues that can be readily tackled by parish councils. I looked eagerly, but in vain, for an example of a community that championed the need for more rural housing, overcame local opposition and built some affordable homes using a local housing association. Perhaps they exist – but they are not mentioned here.
You will also look in vain in the guide for any mention of ethnic minorities. There are several references to community plans being ‘inclusive’, but no examples of what this means. As we know, in many rural areas there are marginalised communities who might well miss out on this sort of ‘community led’ planning if it fails to involve them.  For example, many of the issues about the housing of migrant workers have cropped up in rural authorities like Breckland in Norfolk and Kerrier in Cornwall, where migrants provide the labour for the ‘pick, pack and pluck’ trades. Is their housing an issue which might be examined in community led plans, or is it better brushed under the carpet?
Community led planning is a good idea, and I would be surprised if many of the projects championed by ACRE and AMT aren’t good examples of rural communities getting things done. But there are dangers if this becomes the exclusive vision for neighbourhood planning, and more widely for the government’s ambition (repeated by Greg Clark) of replacing ‘big state’ with the ‘big society’.  There are some advantages to the state: it is open to lobbying, it is governed by equality laws, it has elected councillors and – even in troubled times – it has real resources and statutory powers to use them. If neighbourhood plans are to work properly, they must be about delivering real change in real communities where all groups are involved. And this must include challenging inner city areas, neglected outer estates, and hard-to-reach groups in both.
Neighbourhood plans that merely sustain a comforting image of rural and small-town life will not fit the bill.

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‘Ship the poor out’: at least it’s honest

It’s always a mistake to buy a Murdoch newspaper.  But yesterday I couldn’t get an Observer so I bought the Sunday Times.  My defence is that it was an impulse buy.  Given that I normally read newspapers online I am now really pleased his papers are behind a
paywall that I will never breach.
My ire was stirred by an article by columnist Minette Marrin called ‘Crisis solved: ship the poor out of their costly homes and sell them’.  Seriously. It must be a cosy number writing a column like that, you take a report from a right wing think tank (in this case Policy Exchange’s ‘Making Housing Affordable’ ), add a couple of anecdotes and a bit of prejudice, and off you go.  It’s a bit like writing a blog but you get paid for it.
Anyway, her central thesis rests on 2 facts.  First that some social tenants live in valuable houses that could be sold and other housing provided ‘elsewhere’ with the money.  And secondly that old canard that social housing somehow causes poverty and unemployment. So, the thesis emerges: “to put it crudely, if people in social housing are not working and not thriving in one place, they might as well do the same thing somewhere much less expensive.”  At least it’s honest. 
Now, we’ve spent a lot of time on this blog trying to tackle the myths in housing, and in particular in social housing, so I don’t intend to repeat all the points.  Suffice to say that the fact that there is an association between 2 factors (in this case social housing and worklessness) tells us nothing about the causal relationship (ie social housing tends to house people who do not work, because they are in housing need,  rather than causing them to be workless).  And most of the tenants who do not work are not unemployed but economically inactive – the biggest group are retired (how shocking is that) and many others do not work because of disability, ill health or vulnerability and are unable to compete in the housing market.  In other words, social housing is doing its job.
What adds unpleasantness to inaccuracy is the line that ‘mixed communities do not work’ therefore it is a better use of money to ‘ship people out’ (the London example is used but all cities have social housing in their more valuable areas, and the arguments apply equally to unaffordable small towns and villages).  So the ground is prepared for social segregation, the concentration of poorer people in some areas and richer people in others, and the forced removal of people from communities where they might have spent their whole lives.
The concept of ‘elsewhere’ is central to the NIMBY’s cry – we need housing but somewhere else, not here.  But ‘elsewhere’ is already a poorer part of town with a higher proportion of social housing.  No doubt next week Marrin will condemning social housing ghettoes for breeding criminality and calling for more home ownership as the solution not more social housing.
The poor should not live here next to the rich, they can live elsewhere, this attitude was the
driving force behind Shirley Porter’s gerrymandering in the 1980s.  She may be disgraced, but she might also be quietly satisfied that her approach is now mainstream on the Tory right and increasingly central to government housing policy.