London council's 'social cleansing' of housing benefit tenants

The_White_Horse

social cleansing or scum removal - whatever. its long overdue.

oh no, i myself have been a victim of social cleansing - i have been cleansed from Hampstead, Kensignton, Chelsea, Regents Park etc. How dare I not be able to live in these areas I cannot afford.

ILW

Loughton_Monkey wrote: »

So what happened to the bright idea about the 'legacy' of the 2012 Olympics?



Quoted from the official London2012 site.

So 2800 homes is the legacy. It has cost around 10 billion. Can some clever person do the sums for me and work out a cost per home?
I am having a problem with the decimal points.
Seems to be coming out at around £3.5 million each, surely that cannot be right.

Wookster

wotsthat wrote: »

It's no coincidence that the council involved is 100% labour.

That's a typical Labour strategy: Duck for cover anytime some tough decisions are required. Then snipe from the sidelines.

Jennifer_Jane

The reporter on BBC news said to the Labour councillor that the BBC had checked Rightmove and that there were lots of places available. The councillor said, perhaps, but that they don't accept Housing benefit people, and it was the ConDems fault for not building affordable housing.

To me it smacks of politicking, but I have no problem with people having to move from one area of England to another for economic reasons. The councillor said that some of these people have jobs, but gave no breakdowns of how many of the 500 families did have jobs.

It's time that people came to the conclusion that there are choices in life: pay for yourself and live where you like, but if the taxpayer is paying, life is out of your control, but you are helped. Why should having benefits be such a cushy number for people.

I support the Government, and only worry that they will not be strong enough because the media and Opposition will snipe at them. Too many turn-arounds going on.

Apparently Stoke have declined the offer, I wonder which part of Stoke this was? I assume it was the Labour controlled areas.

Edited as have now read the OP link! North Staffordshire area for the Housing Association: so presumably Labour (Joan Walley?)

the_flying_pig

Offensive to use a term like 'social cleansing' for something like this.

The fact is that London has & will always have more LA housing than any other region of the country, in other words room for a couple of million poor people [assuming, probably unwisely, that said housing goes to the right people] to live for next to nothing.

The policy is basically looking at all of this LA housing, then adding a pretty hefty HB allowance for many hundreds of thousand more people on top, and saying 'that's yer lot'.

Very difficult to credibly label this as anything even vaguely approaching 'cleansing'. Moving away from expensive areas that you can't afford to live in is a fact of life for millions of people.

Wookster

Jennifer_Jane wrote: »

The councillor said, perhaps, but that they don't accept Housing benefit people, and it was the ConDems fault for not building affordable housing.

It seems he has conveniently forgotten that Labour were in power for 13 years.

chewmylegoff

ILW wrote: »

So 2800 homes is the legacy. It has cost around 10 billion. Can some clever person do the sums for me and work out a cost per home?
I am having a problem with the decimal points.
Seems to be coming out at around £3.5 million each, surely that cannot be right.

the 2,800 flats on the olympic village site which you are referring to cost about £1 billion to build, and have already been sold - half to some qatari fund, and the other half to a social housing organisation. I think for a total of about £800 million.

So the total cost to the taxpayer of building the houses was actually about £70,000 per unit. If you want to attach the waste of money on everything else to the cost of constructing the homes, you can do if it makes you feel better.

There are further plans for more houses to be built on the olympic site after the games, various figures are banded around and I'm not sure how they will be funded.

Of course the houses are not the only legacy of the games. Some of the sporting facilities will remain and can be used to help to train future generations of atheletes and hold sporting events. Also the olympic stadium will host the 2017 athletics world championship, an event which I know will be close to your heart.

Norfolk_Jim

People who have their housing costs paid for them are in a very fortunate position wherever they are given a place to live.
I could have some sympathy for people who are moved to really run down areas where you can get a terraced house for 5k but live in fear. I can also feel some sympathy for families having to relocate their kids in new schools or lose family connections but when the alternative is a box under an arch somwhere such sacrifices can be overcome.
This story just seems like political mischief to me and does no credit to socialist ideals.

grizzly1911

ILW wrote: »

Apparently there are around 1000 families on the social housing waiting list in Stoke already. Cannot see them being too pleased.

3000 families on the Stoke waiting list and 23000 on the Newham list apparently

Generali

The use of the term 'social cleansing' by the BBC is pretty reprehensible IMO.

It appears to imply that capping housing benefits is somehow morally equivalent to the horrors euphemistically called 'ethnic cleansing'* in what was once called Yugoslavia.



*A term that was used to defend the cowardly decision by the Governments of the EU not to use the military to intervene in a series of genocides.