Social 'cleansing'? What are the implications?

[Solopower1]

Camden Council wants to move 750 poor families north to places like Bradford and Leicester. They say that because of the new benefit caps (which limit total welfare payments to £500 a week for families, no matter how many children they have or how much they have to pay for rent), some families are not going to be able to afford to live in London. So they're shunting them all up north.

I don't think this is a new idea, btw, but I still find it shocking.

When the govt were discussing these benefit cap plans, they must have worked out the implications for the families that would no longer be able to afford to live in their houses. And they will have realised that this would happen more in the poorer, Labour-run (?) councils. It's inspired, it's so clever. In one fell swoop they free up all the lovely expensive properties being wasted on poor families, and the Labour councils get the blame for it. It's absolute genius, don't you think?

So what sort of place will London be, when the heart is ripped out of it, and all the children go? Perhaps a tad melodramatic, but the Pied Piper springs to mind - not that I am blaming the Mayor and Corporation of Camden, particularly (don't know enough about it, tbh).

money.aol.co.uk/2013/02/14/council-to-export-poor-familes-to-north/

that's where half my family are from anyway and the house prices are cheaper uup narth :)

Where did you have in mind more than? Is it scenic?

A bunch of rich people who move into working class areas and make them too expensive for poor people to live in. That's happened in large swathes of London. Fulham used to be dog-rough. Islington too. Ladbroke Grove, Shepherd's Bush, Mile End, Shoreditch, Balham, Battersea etc. etc. etc. The gentrifiers move into an area, push up rents and house prices, and then turn round to the working classes and sneer 'it's your own fault you can't afford to live here'. Nice.

Wonder how the gentrifiers will feel when there's no-one left to clean their houses and offices, mind their children, sweep their streets, serve in their supermarkets, because no-one can afford to live in London and you can hardly afford to commute on minimum wage? Are there enough illegal immigrants living ten to a room to take over all those jobs?

The reason people can't afford rents is because we've lost so much council housing and haven't built anything like enough affordable homes or social housing. This is not the fault of ordinary people who just want a roof over their head.

that's where half my family are from anyway and the house prices are cheaper uup narth :)

Where did you have in mind more than? Is it scenic?

That is true Edam. But is the working class indigenous people who are still in these areas. didn't they move out of London a while back?

I watched some of those programmes on the BBC about various streets in London and it was quite interesting.

The first proposal of the policy of right to buy was in the 1959 Labour party manifesto here Every tenant, however, will have a chance first to buy from the Council the house he lives in;

If they'd won that election the whole scheme would have kicked off far earlier than it did.

And from Paul Flynn (Lab MP): Paul Flynn (Newport West) (Lab): Does the right hon. Gentleman know that Newport council, and Leicester council on which our friend the late David Taylor served, were selling council houses in a fair, sustainable way for more than a decade before the dawn of Thatcherism? Does he acknowledge his debt to those pioneering Labour authorities?^ paulflynnmp.typepad.com/my_weblog/2013/02/nuclear-collapse.html

The point is people cannot expect others to subsidise huge rents

That should apply primarily to private landlords of multiple properties.

pointing out the previous labour government(s) were a shower of shit is not a counter argument against this abhorrent tory party.

what is really getting on my nerves is - where is Ed? oh well now he's turned up in Eastleigh for a bit, but seriously the Tory party are giving the labour party a big fat gun, they are literally shitting the bullets, loading that gun and asking them to shoot you, nay....they are begging

wheres your spin machine labour - what the fuck is going on - its beyond me.

how the tory party can get away with making people believe that they are better than part time dinner ladies is beyond me.

the shower of utter shite that was labour did not strongly regulate the banks, the other shower - tories - strongly agreed for NOT regulating the banks further

the banks fucked us over

and the spin machine is watching working people and people on benefits fight it out like a couple of pit bulls whilst they are on the sides pissing themselves with their inherited titles, and their policy making powers to make themselves and their friends richer

and the country is swallowing this shit hook line and sinker

i swear, whoever is spinning this tory shite, need to be poached and paid double by labour immediatley, they are brilliant

I must say the Labour Party will have to do better than Milliband. Who looks to me like he is straight out of an episode of Jeeves & Wooster. I wish they would get somebody else. Until they do they have no hope of being elected.

No! They must NEVER get rid of Nasaled. He is the Tories best weapon!

In a nutshell, Smudging!

One thing that no-one has mentioned, afai remember (had a quick trawl back) is something that I think is very important: mixed neighbourhoods - a millionaire in Number 7, a single parent on HB in No 9, a professional family in No 11, someone who's unemployed in No 13, etc ... .

When you lump all of one sort of people together, they only have each other for role models - and the same applies whether it's a 'sink' estate or a gated community. I think they must become isolated from huge numbers of other people and forget that in the same country, breathing the same air, some people are living completely different lives and have a totally different set of values.

Or if they did remember that, they'd start to fear (and then hate) anyone who is outside their own little world. It would be like a society made up of mutually exclusive gangs and clubs, atomised and fragmented. I know it's already like that in some places.

It's such a mistake imo to take any group of people from anywhere and try to graft them onto a society that already exists somewhere else. Has this sort of thing ever worked in the past? (Genuine question).

And btw I think that it's because we all feel threatened at the moment that some people are showing such a lack of empathy with the people directly affected by this plan.

Alemcie

Well parts of Lancashire and Yorkshire are scenic. But I don't think that is a priority for the people being moved up here.
Where I live there is high unemployment and it is quite a deprived town. We are also the first to trial the new UC in April, should be good for a laugh.

Solopower.
As a sahm receiving Tax credits I feel pity towards the many who have blasted sahps, and worse those that openly hate unemployed people. They are so bitter and twisted. The world is not a nice place anymore.
There are plenty of people who have what I can't have and don't work. I wish them well, so does my dh and he works all the hours he can.

Morethan, I agree: envy is horrible - and it's worse when it's whipped up for political reasons.

But I think if you live near to people who have more and less than you, you get a more reasonable perspective on things - they become human beings rather than a group.

And those people who say things like 'Why can they have what I can't have?' about people who don't have jobs or their own homes or anything really - they should just listen to themselves!

Well said, custy. Baffles me why so many people are keen to fight amongst themselves for the scraps, never stopping to ask who got away with the actual meal...

I hardly think £2000 a month rent is scraps.

Edam hit the nail on the head - why should people be forced out of areas they have built a life in over the years just because gentrification has pushed rental prices up. Absolutely no fault of their own.

Shocked that so many are envious of those in this position, I guarantee having walked a week or two in their position there might be a little more empathy. I would hope so anyway.

I don't think anyone is envious of them but sometimes certain people have been allowed to live in houses which are huge. Do you remember that story about the woman who had a massive house in Ealing at taxpayers expense.

I think people were frustrated because they couldn't understand why all her children needed their own bedroom yet other council tennants were told their DC had to share etc and lived in a 2 bedroom maisonette

It didn't seem to be a level playing field.

Also I think if someone isn't working and totally reliant on HB why should they have a lovely detached house.

Absolutely Alemci. I'm not envious and have no wish to live in Camden. But if the opportunity is there for one person to be subsidised to live near their support then the opportunity should be there to every other person in the country. But it isn't.

Think of somebody's rent being £500 a week. Which is £2,000 a month. So 20 people earning around £14,000 a year paying £100 tax to support this one person. And twenty people who cannot afford to rent or buy a house of their own. Sorry it's not on. And that's with the cap. How can people not see how crazy this is.

So what do you suppose we should "do" with all those people then Vivienne?

Here's an idea - introduce a rent cap, period - do not allow someone to charge £2000 a month rent, to anyone - that way everyone is happy because those people who are paying that much out of their earnings each month to pay someone elses mortgage and line their pockets are quite frannkly, being ripped off!

Camden is hardly Mayfair, FFS! It has always been a rough inner-London area. You see plenty of dodgy stuff going on. Rents are high because it's London. That's not the fault of ordinary people, the sort of people who lived there before our mad dysfunctional housing market sent house prices and rents mad. You do realise that the growth in house prices has zipped far ahead of growth in wages? And that this pushes rents up, given many buy-to-let landlords are using mortgages, and those who don't want to get the 'market rent'?

Shelter pointed out that if the price of food had gone up at the same rate as housing, a chicken would now cost £50. That's how mad our housing market is.

Housing benefit subsidies has fuelled this increase. Why do people not realise this. So let's take the food comparison. So a chicken is £50. I don't buy chicken because it's too expensive. But another person on benefit gets it free.

I do see that Vivienne, but this is still not the fault of people who, for whatever reason, are on benefits. Because we could the extend the "why should they get what i have to work for, for free?" argument to well, everything they have and just let them starve. You are exactly right that HB has enabled landlords to do this, they know they can rent these properties out at a premium when maybe they are not premium in standard. So poor repairs etc that someone on HB and grateful for a roof over their head (ive been there) just accept, compared to someone who is paying and would simply vote with their feet if the property was substandard.

So what is the answer? Decent social housing that excludes private landlords? Could that work?

The problem with rent control is that there are a lot of buy to let landlords who need rent above what rent control is set at in order to afford their mortgage, due to incredibly high house prices. If that happened then there is likely to be a lot of landlords going bust in pretty short order or immediately selling off their property. So there will be a glut of property suddenly on the market and a housing price crash. Rent control is one thing is it's brought in when prices are low, to stop them getting high, but very few buy to let properties are really owned outright, so it's not a case of a cut in income, it's a case of not being able to afford the mortgage after one month.

I'm sure a lot of people think that a housing crash which took out a lot of buy to let landlords would be a great thing, and I don't entirely disagree. But if prices crash in London, it's not just buy to letters which will be caught out. It's thousands and thousands of working people who have scraped and scrimped to afford their own home who will be plunged into serious negative equity and end up bankrupt and possibly homeless. That is the fear that stops governments introducing rent control, no one wants to be the government who crashed house prices and sent the middle class bankrupt in it's entirety.