Ben Reeve Lewis Friday Newsround #226

[Ben Reeve Lewis is thinking of manning the phones …]

I got a call this week from a very young sounding Labour party member asking me if I would be prepared to spend an evening here and there manning the phones in Euston to answer calls on Sadiq Khan for his bid to be London Mayor.

I said I would in principal but couldn’t commit to specific times or dates and I also said I don’t know enough about his policies to answer queries in detail, to which he replied “That’s alright, don’t worry about it”.

Hmmmm. Doubt I’ll be of much use then.

Caller: What is Mr Khan’s stance on abortion?
Me: I have no idea.
Caller: Well where does he stand on the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership?
Me: Beats me, I only know his housing stuff.

Doesn’t sound the best way to run a Mayoral campaign but if it helps stop the blonde buffoon’s sell off of the capital’s assets to his foreign investor mates, then so be it.

Here and Boston

I don’t know about you but I’ve been loving the viral you tube clip of that woman on Question Time tearfully attacking government over cuts to working tax credit and the thoroughly ashamed look on the MPs face who was lost for words.

She talks of being the working family obediently doing Iain Duncan-Smith’s “Right thing” only to find she is being squeezed even more and I was interested to read that the same phenomenon is going on in Boston.

The housing shortage there as reported in the article is squeezing out the working middle people, leaving Boston a city for the rich and the very poor on benefits, while those in the middle are forced to move out because of housing costs.

A bit like London then and more to the point, a bit like me and Frazzy. Two self-employed, hard working people with reasonable incomes forced to relocate from the city of our birth by unaffordable housing costs.

A cunning plan

I don’t know where we’ll end up yet but I fancy France and I reckon if Frazzy and I, with her mum in her wheelchair, storm the Channel Tunnel at Dover, while everyone is looking at the other end, we might just make it through.

A cunning plan don’t you think?

Alternatively I could make a homeless application and get relocated for free to an area outside London. This practice is becoming more widespread as reported by the BBC this week.

A rock and a hard place

It’s a story that resurfaces regularly in the popular press as a piece of council bashing.

Waltham Forest Council (Ignore the name, its in the middle of London) has placed 57 families in Luton and according to the article, 20 other London boroughs have been busy relocating homeless families in Milton Keynes, Basildon, Thurrock and Slough.

Shelter’s Campbell Robb says:

“Uprooting homeless families and sending them away from their jobs, schools and support networks should only ever be a last resort, but shockingly it’s now the norm in London”

And at the personal end of things relocated mum Nicola Chapman who fetched up in Luton back in June said:

“I’m not happy at the moment, it is giving me really bad anxiety. Also, I am having to take one of my children to school every morning and it is a 40 minute walk away.

I have no friends or family around here. I hope I get moved very quickly. The flat is tiny, it is more like a studio flat. It is very distressing for all of us”

Now lets examine the basic equation that drives this.

• If a person is owed a homelessness duty the council have to deal with them.
• It is illegal to place families in B&B for more than 6 weeks. Shelter and government jump up and down when this comes to light.
• Market rents in London are extremely high.
• Benefit cuts mean that families cant afford the rents.

So in order to stop out of borough placements and bring people home do you:

• Enforce rent capping?
• Abolish the benefit cap?
• Strike out the 6 week rule for B&B?

In the absence of any solutions, homelessness units have little choice but to send people to more affordable areas.

Complaining that councils are letting people down is not pointing the finger at the source of the problem, its just easier to write about “Those pesky councils again….Doh!”

Something wrong in London?

Look also at the latest DCLG figures for homelessness in the second quarter of 2015.

Whilst the rest of England has seen only a 1% rise compared to the same quarter in 2014, London has seen a 12.5% increase and the amount of families placed in temporary accommodation in the capital accounts for a whopping 74% of the national total.

So something is going wrong down here don’t you think?

Pop up housing for the homeless

My old employers, Lewisham council, have steadfastly refused to do out of borough placements (apart from a few special cases) and instead proposed last year to build a pop up homeless village and I hear its still going ahead.

Sounds quite cosy huh? Conjuring images of the Hobbit village in Lord of the Rings or something more chocolate boxy, a pop-up being like one of those children’s books or Christmas Cards, although I doubt it will look like that.

The Lewisham Mayor Sir Steve Bullock points out:

“Like all local authorities, Lewisham has a range of redevelopment sites, some of which are currently vacant while longer-term regeneration plans are developed and subsequently shaped in conjunction with residents. Often the lead times on larger scale regeneration sites mean they can be vacant for three to four years”.

Big Steve’s idea is to use the space while the longer term plans are worked up, quoting some impressive figures:

“Our feasibility work shows that it would be financially viable to deploy a building, move it twice within 10 years and subsequently move it to a final location at that point”

Go Steve-o. I like a radical idea.

What made me smile this week

Finding out about Giethoorn, a town in Holland that has no roads, only canals and it has to be about the prettiest place you could imagine.

Very popular with Chinese tourists apparently who flock each year in the hundreds of thousands.

Presumably in the hope of buying it and building a power station.

See ya next week