More homes for workers will narrow Two Islingtons divide

Published: 23 July, 2010

• I WAS looking at Islington Council’s website the other day and came across the papers for the Islington Fairness Commission’s first public meeting, scheduled for July 19 at the Town Hall.

I couldn’t help noticing that the solutions for many of the problems highlighted under “The Two Islingtons” can be garnered from a basic analysis of the data presented.

For example, we see that “The borough has one of the highest proportions of social tenants in the country”, with 44 per cent of Islington residential property being social/council housing set against a London average of 26 per cent and, indeed, a national average of just 18 per cent.

Given this reality, it is difficult to understand why the council should be advocating the building of yet more of the same.

We also see that “Of the 40,000 children and young people in the borough 45 per cent live in poverty. This equates to 18,000 children and is the second highest rate in the country.

“Of these, 73 per cent live in lone-parent households”.

Under the present system of “needs”-based social housing allocation (brought in during the 1970s) it has been noted that one of the few sure-fire means for young women to ensure allocation of a social tenancy is to get pregnant and have a child.

This, of course, ensures promotion to the “priority” list for housing.

Could, therefore, the council be creating “deprivation” and manufacturing child poverty by having so much social housing so that this becomes the logical and inevitable consequence of the policy?

We also see that “there are 140,000 people in Islington of working age.

Two-thirds are in employment.

The number in work has fallen in the last year and is now lower than the London average despite there being 1.3 jobs located in the borough for each resident of working age”.

Therefore, the employment situation in Islington is not similar to that of the ex-industrial heartlands of the North.

There are, in fact, more jobs in Islington than there are residents of working age.

Could there be a connection between the exceedingly high level of social housing (allocated as it is on the basis of so-called “need” and with those in work not being deemed to have enough “need” for an allocation) and the higher-than-average levels of unemployment, despite the fact that there are more jobs in the borough than there are people?

Lastly, we also read, somewhat worringly, that “Islington has one of the highest rates of reported crime in the country”. Given all of the above, one has to wonder if this too is connected to the disproportionately large amount of social housing in the borough and the nature of the current allocation system.

Whether the Great and the Good who are sitting on the Commission will be able to see the connections is, of course, anyone’s guess.

However, to the rest of us, the solution to “The Two Islingtons” appears to lie in reducing the amount of social housing as a proportion of the borough, so that Islington edges closer to the London average, along with making changes to the social housing allocation system in order to favour those in work; thereby reducing the concentration of “deprivation” in the borough.

Such a change has already been made in Hammersmith and Fulham, where one-third of all social tenancies are now reserved for those in work.

Just do the math, as our American cousins like to say…

JAMES BAINBRIDGE
Ockendon Road, N1

• I HAVE read about the council’s new Fairness Commission, so I turned up to have a look.

I thought the only things missing were fairness, common sense and equality.

The commission was completely unrepresentative of the people it should be representing.

There were no real disabled people, no impoverished people and no pensioners.

One councillor praised the documentation presented at the meeting, only to have another member of the commission point out that the information was years old.

Embarrassing or what?

MG MCELLIGOTT 
Amwell Street, EC1