Housing

Peckham and Camberwell: campaigning on the Aylesbury Estate

AWL supporter Jill Mountford is the AWL’s candidate in the general election, standing in Peckham and Camberwell against Labour’s Harriet Harman. Peckham is a deprived area in South East London, with high levels of unemployment and poverty. At the centre of the constituency is the Aylesbury estate, home to 8,500 people. The estate gets a lot of bad press, being described by the Daily Mail as “Hell’s waiting room”. Two weeks ago the AWL held an election meeting on the estate. And we found that the people that live there generally feel very differently to the Mail. The homes on the Aylesbury are...

Interview with a socialist activist on the Aylesbury estate

The Aylesbury Estate at Elephant and Castle is at the heart of the Camberwell and Peckham constituency. Built in the 1960s and 70s, the estate is currently home to 7,500 people, but is due to be demolished in stages. The council plan a privately-funded regeneration scheme. The tenants are concerned that vast amounts of money will be made by private companies, as council housing with secure tenancies is replaced with various types of private housing. Inevitably the poorest and most vulnerable will lose out as council housing stock is reduced in a borough which already has 15,000 on its waiting...

Social Housing: Tory rent rise and sell-off plan

After years of New Labour government, it is easy to forget how bad the Tories are. Now the Daily Mirror has reminded us by exposing their plans for a savage onslaught on social housing. At a secret meeting of senior Tories — including David Cameron’s adviser on housing Owen Inskip and Boris Johnson’s deputy Simon Milton — social housing was described as “a dead end”, and the Tories declared their intention of raising council rents to market levels. As market rents are between £150 and £650 per week — with many areas, such as inner London, at the top end of this range ­— this means colossal...

More houses for all, not “locals” vs migrants!

Among the Labour government’s new announcements is that it will “enable local authorities to give more priority to local people” on council-house waiting lists. This populist ploy echoes the notorious “sons and daughters” policy of the Liberal council in Tower Hamlets in the 1990s, which solves no housing problems but served only to point the finger of blame for mammoth waiting lists at immigrants. It is doubly dangerous at a time when the BNP and UKIP are growing. As the “Defend Council Housing” campaign says, “A massive programme of new councing housing is the answer... not to pit those on...

Barnet battles sheltered housing cuts

If there had been a national debate on the fate of sheltered housing for the elderly, the cuts that are happening around the country could never have gone ahead! Why? Because the vast majority of people want to retain sheltered housing and are appalled to learn that it is disappearing. Instead, we are fighting council by council to save sheltered housing, with barely a word about it in the national press. Cuts have gone through in some areas. In some places, notably Brighton and Hove, they have been fended off. In Barnet we are still battling. On Saturday 9 May, at short notice, we organised a...

The truth about slums

Now I recently made a resolution not to read any more depressing books. I'd read books about aid workers in Haiti, Bosnia, Cambodia, Somalia and Rwanda. And before that, I'd read Planet of Slums. Don't let that put you off. This book is a bit depressing because it speaks the truth. It does not pretend that the Western world is doing enough for slum-dwellers nor does it pretend that the problem will go away. On the contrary, it describes a terrifying picture that has haunted the minds of politicians for thousands of years. In Rome, the barbarians rebelled and ever since, governments have always...

Decent homes for all!

All the capitalist pundits, from the Financial Times to the Council of Mortgage Lenders, now agree that Britain is facing a housing crisis. Mortgage approvals in December 2008 fell to less than a fifth of what they were 18 months ago. House repossessions almost doubled in the three months to September last year, according to the Financial Services Authority — a total of 13,161 homes repossessed in the third quarter of last year. The crisis in private sector-owner-ocuppied housing will be all the more severe because it comes on the top of the 20 years of sustandard housing and shortages which...

The left and the housing crisis

Arch capitalists from the Financial Times to the Council of Mortgage Lenders all now agree that we are in a housing crisis. Mortgage approvals in December have fallen to less than a 5th of what they where 18 months ago and all signs point to a mounting wave of repossessions. This crisis in home...

Lambeth workers and service-users fight back

Well over a hundred people attended the "Save Our Services in Lambeth" meeting hosted by Lambeth local government Unison on 11 June, and agreed to launch a Public Services Not Private Profit campaign to unite the various workers' struggles and anti-cuts initiatives currently taking place in the borough. Heenal Rajani, Unison convenor for Lambeth housing, outlined the council's latest proposals. Having narrowly "won" a ballot in favour of an ALMO (in fact a substantial majority of tenants either opposed the ALMO or voted "don't know"), the council now wants to give private companies ten year...

Shelter bosses back down (partly)

After two days of strike action, bosses at Shelter, an organisation providing services to the homeless, have agreed to put "on hold" their plans to cut workers' pay and conditions. The bosses made the concession at a meeting with TGWU-Unite shop stewards on Monday 17th. The dispute now goes to negotiations at the official conciliation service ACAS, and further strikes planned for 19 and 20 March have been suspended. Workers unused to striking, in a sector unused to strikes, have shown that the solidarity they displayed in the strikes on 5 March and 10 March, and in the prospect of further...

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