Impact of Housing Benefit cuts....Exporting the Poor
A piece from Dave Hill's weekly Guardian blog email'Metropolitan Lines' The same topic is covered at http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/davehillblog/2010/jun/24/george-osborne-housing-beneift-cap-london-poor-housholds"George Osborne's "progressive" emergency budget has been loyally dignified as "tough but fair" by Boris Johnson's economic development adviser but damned by Ken Livingstone as bad for London's poorest and its economy alike and by Oona King, now officially Livingstone's rival to challenge Boris for the mayoralty in 2012, as "short sighted and regressive." And as the details are digested a particular looming impact of Osborne's measures is coming into view - the quite literal marginalisation of Londoners who cannot meet their own housing costs.London Councils, the body that represents the capital's boroughs, has told me that nearly a quarter of a million of London's roughly three-and-a-quarter million households are in receipt of housing benefit in order to pay their rent to private landlords. Its rough early estimate is that 70 percent of these - about 170,000 - will lose income as a result of Osborne capping the amount of housing benefit the government is prepared to provide to the boroughs, which are responsible for administering and dispensing it.How will the people affected avoid eviction? What will become of them if they can't? How will boroughs fulfill their responsibility to find them alternative private rented accommodation, which they're only inhabiting in the first place because those boroughs lack sufficient housing stock of their own? The outcome seems grimly predictable. Those who have their housing benefit sharply reduced will have to move to somewhere cheaper, possibly smaller and very likely far from where they're living now. They may have to leave behind friends and extended family members they rely on. Those in work will have to travel further, as will their children if they're to continue attending the same schools. Their quality of life will not improve.Such additional pressure and expense will deepen the ludicrous London poverty trap which results from housing benefit being instantly withdrawn if unemployed claimants take a job. There will be an accelerated demographic shift, as more and more Londoners on low incomes become "exported" from the more prosperous boroughs to poorer ones where rents are lower. The ideal of socially mixed London communities, to which all political parties subscribe, will become harder to achieve. And the bleak irony will be that the cost of an economic crisis that began because people with little money were sold mortgages they could not afford will be being paid by Londoners with little money and less hope than ever of living in one of the richest cities in the world with stability, security and dignity."
Iain Muir ● 5929d3 Comments ● 5929d