Social cleansing

Published: 19 November, 2010

• COUNCILLOR Philippa Roe, the cabinet member for housing at Westminster City Council, has inundated local newspapers with her scheme to move families out of the borough. 

The first claim that needs to be exposed is the one that 2,500 affordable homes are being built in the next seven years. Affordable to whom? Families with incomes below £25,000 will not be able to afford these new homes. More importantly all of these new homes will be offered to people who don’t live in the city. 

Yet Cllr Roe is pleading with housing minister Grant Shapps to extend the residency period for those needing to be housed to three years. One law for the wealthy and another for those with housing need and on low incomes. 

When Cllr Roe takes on the property developers in Knightsbridge and Belgravia (which she represents) and fights for social rented housing in that area I will listen to her pleas for “mixed communities”. 

The whole point of the local planning regulations is to create mixed communities. 

The developers ask not to build social rented housing in areas like Knightsbridge and Belgravia, and the council lets them.

Cllr Roe then has the audacity to criticise those residents in temporary accommodation for living in  “sought-after properties”. The council has never met the target set by the government for moving people out of temporary accommodation. They don’t meet the target because not enough social rented properties are built in the city. 

This catalogue of misleading spin only points to the clear conclusion that the council is embarking on the social cleansing of the city, aided and abetted by the government. In an authoritarian state this would be par for the course. 

In our society it is not just an attack on the poor but an attack on our civil liberties. 

We cannot stand by and let them get away with it.

CLLR GUTHRIE McKIE
Housing (Labour)
Westminster City Council