Unscrupulous landlords are forcing poorer tenants out of their London homes, freeing them up to rent out to visitors to the Olympics this summer, according to the housing charity Shelter. At the same time, the government’s cap on rent subsidies (Housing Benefits) for those out of work or on low incomes threaten to force less well-off tenants out of the capital. Newham Mayor Sir Robin Wales says that they will have to move people as far afield as Stoke-on-Trent if they are to meet their obligations to house the homeless. Fears of ‘social cleansing’ featured in the Mayoral election where Tory incumbent Boris Johnson made sure to distance himself from his own government’s policy to beat off the challenge from veteran left-winger Ken Livingstone.
Critics of London’s ‘Social Cleansing’ have fixed on the changes to the law regarding housing benefits and the Olympics, but failed to notice that working class Londoners have been being forced out of the nation’s capital for some time now – thanks to the ceaseless rise in house prices. On the London Programme in 2003, I said that without opening up more land to building in the green belt, house prices would spiral out of control, pricing ordinary Londoners out of the capital. Mayor Ken Livingstone slapped me down saying that he would never sanction building on the green belt.
Today Eva Wiseman, a commissioning editor on the upmarket broadsheet, the Observer, says that she cannot afford to rent in London’s once poorest borough, Tower Hamlets, let alone buy a house. She cites Shelter’s estimate that you would need an income of £67,669 to rent there (average income is £26,244).1
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