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 Such Thing As The Big Society

David Cameron's Big Idea is the so-called "Big Society". Originating in the Conservative manifesto, it is now central to the Coalition Government's Agreement and objectives, setting out
"to create a climate that empowers local people and communities, building a big society that will 'take power away from politicians and give it to people."

The Idea, which at one point Cameron attributed to none other than Jesus Christ, is underpinned by five pillars - more powers to local communities, more powers to local councils, encouraging volunteering (including suggestions that volunteers run post offices and pubs), supporting the development of mutuals and co-ops, and more openness in government's workings. And of course, it needs its own special, Tory-placeperson team to promote it - the Big Society Network.

The stench of Tory ideology suffuses the B.S.

All seemingly vaguely laudable, were it not for the background of massive cuts in public spending and the inevitable wiff, or more appropriately, stench of anti-state ideology in the Government's thinking and actions. It is also very cynically selective in terms of memory and facts, on several counts.

Firstly, this week, the False Economy Project showed how the cuts in spending are impacting seriously on many of the very charities that are meant to deliver the Big Society . This year alone, £110 millions in public funding is being cut from their grants towards running a huge range of services, from social care to educational services to support for young offenders.

Central Government in the Gauleiter-like form of Communities Secretary Pickles has attacked local councils for cutting grants to local charities. He callously ignores the fact that (a) the cuts are being imposed on local government by Central Government and (b) thanks to the ongoing Thatcherite agenda adopted by all Governments since the 1980s, the voluntary sector is no longer voluntary in any traditionally  recognisable sense. Rather, in many cases, charities have become the third arm of providing (at low cost and no-profit) a wide range of public services. Consequently, the Conservatives' cuts to local government will inevitably harm charities - most public funding to charities is channelled via local councils.

It was with Care in the Community in the late 1980s, followed by the "voluntarisation" of social housing, that there began a substantial contracting out of public services to the voluntary/charity/third sector. And as that continued under major, Blair and Brown, the sector itself changed massively. For example, in social housing, from being a small, local or specialist movement in the early 1980s, it has been purposefully developed by Tory and Labour Governments into a number of increasingly large groups of national or at least regional businesses, far removed from its original purpose. But it is at least still not-for-profit and it is a key provider of services, so to suggest that somehow it would not be affected by cutbacks in public spending is ingenuous to say the least.

But the other factor is the collective amnesia about how many of our public services were established in the first place - many of our hospitals and GP services long preceded the NHS; and not thanks to the random generosity of Victorian philanthropists as Received Wisdom might claim. Rather, these and other public services were established by the actions of millions of men and women, joining together through trade unions and mutual societies to establish voluntarily the services the community needed for its health and well-being. Alongside this, through political action and the Labour Movement, they agitated, ultimately successfully, to have these provided by the state rather than by voluntary action. Why? Because rightly, in a society with the means ours has, health, housing and other basic needs should be a right, not something obtainable dependent on the strength of local mutual aid societies.

The Tories cite mutuals as a way forward for the Big Society. If these were replacing privately owned businesses, fine. But where they have had a great chance to rekindle the mutual spirit, by turning the nationalised banks into mutual building societies run for people rather than profit, what have they done? Along with their Lib Dem allies, the Tories have announced they will sell off the good bits back to the private finance sector to apparently rebuild confidence in Britain! It seems we are all happily confident in the efficacy of private bankers once more - it's the rest of us who are the problem now.

The fact is that the charitable works that Cameron and Osborne laud from a century ago, probably in the mistaken belief it was all about nice industrialists rather than the mass of people, were done in the absence of public services. They were done from necessity and shared need to fill a huge gap in the well being of society. What they are doing now - closing services, shutting post offices, making people redundant - is the opposite. It is taking the ultimate objective of the charitable works of the past - the creation of a secure society - and dismantling it.

The consequences of such barbarity, of returning the welfare of millions to the randomness of the Victorian Age, when life was short and brutal, a Pandora's Box is being opened up. With the Thatcherite nostrum of looking after the self first and foremost, the riots in Tottenham last night, and now this evening in Enfield, may be just a glimpse of a terrifying future for us all. With youth services and other public facilities in that area slashed and unemployment rising, whilst no excuse for the violence, it serves as a serious reminder of what can happen when the value of society is discounted and the social contract torn up, regardless of the deceitfully honeyed words so knowingly whispered by H.M.'s Executioners.

"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.