Pro-Housing Alliance

The following letter, from PHA member Paul Nicolson, was published in the Guardian this morning: Housing policy represents another lack of strategy in the Queen’s speech (Editorial, 10 May). A combination of housing benefit caps, cuts and the rising prices and rents of a home will inflict ever increasing pain on Londoners. The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors tells us that house prices are falling everywhere except London, and Rightmove says optimistic sellers in the capital have driven asking prices nationally above their 2008 peak. Rents in London are being driven above the caps by a global free market which sees London property as a triple-A-rated safe haven for spare cash. Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, the son of the Libyan leader, was planning to make more than half a million pounds a year renting out his home in north London. The coalition, with almost total silence from the opposition, has told Londoners to get on a housing ladder that is more like a moving staircase coming down, until the poorest are shunted off the bottom to who knows where as rents overtake caps. In the 1960s, many families were moved from the East End into new towns with newly built homes.

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Two letters from PHA Members were published in the Guardian this morning: It would have been good if the secretary of state for work and pensions had “found his bottle sooner”. He has turned private landlords into the rogue elephants in the housing policy room. Land and property have become cash cows for the wealthy. They jacked up their uncontrolled rents to profit from uncontrolled but secure housing benefit from the 1990s; they are now liberated by the total insecurity of tenants receiving the local housing allowance (LHA) created by a thoughtless parliament in the 2008 crisis. “No welfare claimants here” is appearing in their windows or pinned to their front doors. A housing benefit claimant used to be a secure tenant with the rent paid direct to the landlord, but the coalition insists that the LHA should be paid into the tenant’s often empty, if not non-existent, bank account. Security of tenure is being smashed by the move of uprating from RPI to CPI. Tenants have to move or are evicted, making way for a better, and more secure, profit from Olympic tourists and then from the high demand for homes in London. Migration is forced, with no planned affordable housing

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By Prof Peter Ambrose, University Brighton The Government’s recent capping of housing benefit entitlements is already producing ‘forced migrations’ of poorer and more vulnerable households from expensive inner London suburbs to some outer suburbs – and then from some of these to towns hundreds of miles away such as Stoke.   The Treasury appears to be taking no account at all of the many and varied long-term costs to health, education and policing budgets that will inevitably be a direct result of this policy.   Cost elements under all three headings might include:   - as we know from Australian research and UK research in Stepney and Wandsworth the destabilisation of children’s lives, and quite possibly the overcrowding ensuing, is likely to lead to more aggressive behaviour both in the classroom and on the streets as young people compete more for space and lose some elements of parental and kinship control   - there will be costs involved for school managers in relation to unpredictable falling and rising school rolls, depending which end of the migration one looks at   - there will be disruptions to educational progress as children lose local circles of friends and have to adjust to

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As Chair of the Pro-Housing Alliance (see http://www.prohousingalliance.com/) I am writing to Mayoral Candidates requesting that the various stated commitments to addressing the housing problems in London be demonstrated by agreeing to the following actions should you win the election next week: Set up a project to assess the “exported costs” on health, policing and educational achievement resulting from poor and overcrowded housing conditions and those costs to employers (public and private) attributable to a lack of genuinely affordable housing in the capital. Create a London Affordable rent figure using methodology such as the Living Wage calculation. The word ‘affordable’ must be evidence-based and related to the reality of people’s lives starting with the London Living Wage as income. Take immediate steps to prevent the need for London Boroughs to export households accepted as homeless to other parts of the country, and undertake to carry out an immediate assessment of the impact of the welfare reforms on vulnerable people and those on low incomes London.  Set a target of at least 42% of new social rented homes being 3 or more bedrooms as the supply of larger homes frees up existing smaller homes. This will also address the problem of

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Letter published in The Independent, 26th April 2012: The reckless forced migration of tenants out of London, to who knows where, creates costs for the taxpayer and to the wider economy that the Treasury never estimates (“Plans to house London’s poor in Stoke attacked as ‘social cleansing“, 25 April). Educational under-achievement has been shown to be more likely as a result of the destabilisation of children’s lives. Deliberate overcrowding to make the rent fit the caps is also likely to lead to more aggressive behaviour both in the classroom and on the streets as young people compete for space and lose some elements of parental and kinship control. Children losing local circles of friends and adjusting to new schools also disrupts educational progress. The housing benefit caps create unmanageable rent arrears. The stress of the parents in debt is known to affect the children. Debt is related to mental illness, which the Centre for Mental Health has shown is the most expensive illness for the NHS, the economy and in human misery. There are social and economic consequences in the break-up of well-established local three-generational family structures, as was discovered in the mass movement from the East End to the

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Angela Mawle is the Chief Executive of the UK Public Health Association and a member of PHA.   Well, here we are eighteen months after the publication of the Government’s strategy for public health in England ‘Healthy Lives, Healthy People’ and all we have heard during that time is the cacophony about the NHS Reforms. The clamour started in July 2010 when the White Paper Equity and excellence: Liberating the NHS was published and subdued only a little after the Act was passed in March 2012. As ever, Public Health was squashed into the sidelines by the mighty NHS, our National Sickness Service. Never mind that prevention is better than cure, the Nation’s obsession with doctors, nurses and clinical interventions has led us into a blind alley where we are constantly dealing with the symptoms of societal, economic and environmental dysfunction throughapplying highly technological and pharmacological sticking plasters.   In 1988, Sir Donald Acheson, then Chief Medical Officer saw the over-riding imperative of ensuring good public health, describing public health as ‘the science and art of preventing disease, prolonging life and promoting health through the organised efforts of society’. He later described in his ground-breaking report the ‘Independent inquiry into

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