Forum - Prepare for a perfect storm - Labour MP Karen Buck says housing benefit cuts will devastate families

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Published: 2 July, 2010
by KAREN BUCK

To understand the world we live in, we must understand a little of its history. 

The history of London is not just about kings and queens, the Great Fire and the Globe Theatre – it is a story of migration and the movement of people, drawn to London for a thous­and reasons, often economic.

London has always been a city of mixed communities. From the earliest days, terrible slums sprang up under the shadow of Westminster Abbey, and the streets around Seven Dials in Covent Garden were among its most notorious.  

We see the legacy of these communities in the Peabody estates in Old Pye Street and Victoria, the Page Street estate, and the dwellings constructed by Octavia Hill.Housing associations like Paddington Churches and Notting Hill Housing Trust sprang up in the 1960s in response to the slum landlords of North Kensington.

Today, the share of affordable housing run by councils and housing associations is dramatically lower than it was 30 years ago.

In Westminster, one in five homes is “social housing”, representing a loss of many thousands of flats and houses with affordable rents.

Many of these same properties are now rented out privately by the owners, at rents several times higher than those charged by the council.

Indeed, the council rents large numbers of them back to homeless families!

The high profile examples of a few families in very expensive, high quality homes, subsidised by housing benefit, highlighted a specific issue which needed to be tackled. 

However, as is so often the case, developing a set of national policies in response to a tiny number of extreme cases creates more problems than it solves.

The Conservative-Liberal Democrat government’s decision to slash the amount housing benefit will pay for private rented accommod­ation, not just in Westminster but across the country, will have a dramatic and potentially devastating impact on families and on our city.

Some 84 per cent of the 5,400 households in Westminster living in private rented accommodation – much of it ex-council, or humble flats in places like Harrow Road – will lose £80 or so a week. They will, of course, be forced to move.

Many of these families have at least one person in work. Others are pensioners.

Many have children at school.

Many were placed into private rented homes in order to reduce the number of applicants to Westminster under homelessness laws.

Of the 123,000 people who approached but were turned away from local authority housing departments, two-thirds were helped into the very private tenancies they will now be forced out of.

So let them all move to Lewisham and Newham and Tower Hamlets! Except that these are communities which already have a dispropor­tionate share of lower income and poor households.

These are the boroughs that would like to attract more prosperous residents, to create mixed communities.

In practice, they will be expected to accommodate tens of thousands more tenants on housing benefit.

Oh, and they too face a substantial cut in housing benefit levels, intended to save seven times more than the cap which hits Central London.

No comfort there.

So let them all move to Hull or Cleveland! Except that these are the areas with the highest unemployment.

And has not the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions encouraged tenants in the unemployment hotspots of England to move south to where the jobs are? Two mass migrations of the lower-income households will be passing each other in opposite directions looking for homes and jobs.

In practice, what we will see is a perfect storm of homelessness and desperation, with some families struggling to pay the rent with £80 less coming in each week, and others moving east to find somewhere cheaper to live in the highest unemployment areas of London.

Each household will have their own story, and for every example of fecklessness and irresponsibility (and there are some, inevitably) there will be 10 harrowing cases. I think of the father in an ex-council flat off the Harrow Road who is looking after his three children because their mother has a mental illness.

He will have to move to the other side of London, where contact will be minimal.

Or the Bangla­deshi mum, born and bred on the Lisson Green estate, who cares for her severely disabled parents and will no longer be able to do so.

We are encouraged to believe that all these private tenants are footloose welfare parasites, ripping off the taxpayer in order to live the life of Riley in Knightsbridge and St John’s Wood.

In fact, they include bus drivers and care workers living in tower blocks, the adult children of local residents and the parents of children in local schools.

And the final irony? Westminster Council tax-payers have benefited from a subsidy of £6million a year as the council charges more housing benefit for its own temporary accommodation (housing homeless house­holds) than is paid out in rent! Conservative councillors who have complained about the handful of extreme individual cases should reflect that they have helped themselves by 60 times more.  

• Karen Buck is Labour MP for Westminster North