Happy New Year - let the social cleansing begin...

The Chartered Institute of Housing has published a report showing that, as new housing benefits rules come into effect from this month, there will be a short fall in the availability of rented housing set against the permissible housing benefit levels to be paid of some 800,000 properties, many of them family properties. In effect, millions of adults and children are to be left with stark choices - eat or have a roof over your head; or, perhaps even more tellingly about this government's real intentions, walk the streets where you are now, or move...preferably far away.

The problem is at its worst, unsurprisingly, in the better off boroughs of London, where at a stroke, tens of thousands of people in need will no longer have their housing costs met in full. The result will be a huge increase in demand in poorer areas, which are already struggling to cope, and so the anticipation is that these social outcasts will move away altogether to inhabit the dead zones of many of our decaying seaside resorts, far away from their social superiors, and also from any prospect of living in areas where there might be some reasonable chance of decent employment.

It is unsurprising that this is happening - the Government has trailed it long enough, with the Lib Dems contented support, as part of its combined strategy of deficit reduction and breaking so-called welfare dependency. The Housing Minister, Grant Shapps, has even suggested people should move onto boats - perhaps hoping these new Boat People might be conveniently washed away, out of sight of Tory voters.

Yet how is it that driving people away from areas they have lived in and may have some work, however limited or low paid, is going to break welfare dependency if they end up in some poky bed and breakfast in Southend? Or is it just another way of creating a large pool of even cheaper seasonal staff to service the well-heeled on their summer jaunts down to the coast? Someone to do retired Aunt Agatha's shopping for a few beads and nuts when she heads off to her retirement flat in Eastbourne?

Driving people out of their homes and communities - somehow, this perhaps more than anything else we have seen from the Con Dems, is the epitome of the drive back to a society that would make Victorian times look like a paean to egalitarianism. It is moving beyond gated communities to entire boroughs and counties with gates which might be invisible, but no less firm and unyielding than the iron ones that close off the cowering middle class revanchists keen to cling onto their material wealth.

It is a social cleansing that will lead only to more division, more tension and isolation between different groups in our battered society - at a cost far, far greater than any pounds or pennies saved through this most bitter turn of the screw on some of the most vulnerable people in our town and cities.

"No Grant" Shapps and the Social Housing Scandal

UK Housing Minister Grant Shapps visited Collyhurst in north Manchester today to talk to local people after a long promised Private Finance Initiative (PFI) redevelopment scheme for the social housing estate was scrapped. £250 millions of promised funding has been withdrawn, leaving the local council, housing organisations and local community groups scrabbling to apply for a much reduced £39 million pot which is by no means guaranteed.

Grant Shapps & boss Eric Pickles

However, Mr Shapps was decidedly upbeat about all this. Although on Radio 4's PM programme (at 42 mins) the chair of the local community association sounded decidedly despairing, the Minister insisted the residents had "got localism" and rather than worrying about losing at least £210 millions of development funding, were busy planning for the future.

Well, of course they would be doing that. Unlike the wealthy Mr Shapps, they have no choice and no means of going elsewhere. Like 1.8 million people on social housing waiting lists, they are stuck where they are now that the Government has effectively gutted both the redevelopment and maintenance budgets for the sector. With housing welfare also under extreme pressure, the housing associations which are now the main providers of low cost social housing are busy cutting costs, staff and services. A whole swathe of people among the poorest and most vulnerable are struggling to keep a roof over their heads - and when they do, as likely as not it will be leaking.

But perhaps one of the most staggering comments from Mr Shapps, once he had surveyed the estate with its rotten window frames, mouldy walls and, for residents, huge heating costs, was this:“(Collyhurst) is clearly in a state which needs long overdue work. The interesting thing is most  of the estate dates from the 80s but it’s in a terrible condition.”

We live in times which have no history, no knowledge or awareness of what has gone before - or perhaps it is just denial. Because of course social housing constructed in the 1980s and early 1990s will be in a terrible condition now : built to the most minimal standards under the Thatcher Conservatives, the materials and specifications used were appalling. What had been a charitable movement to provide housing for people with specific needs was being steamrollered by Conservative Government policy to replace general needs council housing. Funding was being poured into the sector but with tight conditions about what was to be built - nothing too good, basically - and then with a requirement for progressively more and more privately-raised funding to be used.

The consequences were obvious to everyone, as I learned when I attended the opening of a new sheltered housing scheme in Bradford, a city at that time run by Shapps' current boss, the intellectually-flatulent Communities Secretary, Eric Pickles. As local dignitaries slapped each other on the back, I stood looking at the communal lounge with one of the senior staff who had worked on the building. The timber fittings were well varnished, new carpets lined the floors and rather pleasant sofas and easy chairs were positioned for residents to relax on over a cup of tea with their neighbours. It had all the appearance of a community in the making.

"It looks really good," I complimented.
"Well yes," the developer replied. "But let's face it, it won't be here in twenty years."
"Why?" I asked in surprise. "Is something else due to be built here?"
"No," came the reply. "But it's built with crap. It will all have fallen down by then!"

Grant Shapps' party's last Government destroyed decades of good housing practice. Like its 1960s Labour predecessor with its well-intentioned but misguided foray into tower block construction, the 1979-97 Tory regime ignored the long view. Unlike Old Labour, it happily skimmed plenty off for its construction industry allies - though with its continuing smooch with the PFI after Blair's ascension, New Labour did little to improve things.
 

Listen @  http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b00y374t/PM_31_01_2011

Now, as Shapps retreats to the comforts of his 5-bedroomed detached house in Hertfordshire, perhaps at the controls of his very own personal aeroplane, the occupants of social housing everywhere are left with his twisted NuSpeak ringing in their ears, his smarmy smile beaming down at them as he slices their communities and life chances away.

In an increasingly rare flash of insight, a leading Lib Dem Councillor has decried Shapps and Pickles as the "Laurel and Hardy" of the Government. But as many people in Collyhurst huddle in cold rooms and damp houses in tonight's freezing January weather, it really is no laughing matter.