Housing

On Wednesday 13 February, Lambeth Council voted through another cuts budget. The document included a line in a table cutting £500,000 from Children’s Services. Five children’s centres are to be closed, seven more will have their service provision cut, and staff across the borough will lose their jobs.

Amber Rudd, the new Tory Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, has scrapped the plans to extend the two-child limit on Universal Credit for those with children born before April 2017. She has also postponed the next stage of Universal Credit roll-out, due to hit three million in-work tax-credit claimants within the next few weeks was postponed.

Station staff on London Underground’s Bakerloo Line South Group, which includes Oxford Circus, Piccadilly Circus, Charing Cross, Lambeth North, and Elephant and Castle, have voted by 88% for strikes against short-staffing. Tube union RMT has announced strikes for 26 December and 14 January.

When the Minimum Wage was introduced, the bottom scale of local government pay was well above it. Now each time the Minimum Wage is increased, a couple of points at the bottom of the local government pay scales have to be removed because they’re now below that Minimum Wage.

Under pressure from housing campaigns, in July London Mayor Sadiq Khan agreed that residents of estates threatened with demolition should have a democratic vote on the future of those estates.

However there is a lot of devil in the detail. The residents ballot requirement only applies to schemes that have GLA funding — although the GLA could have used its powers to ensure all estates under redevelopment could have a ballot.

On the last Friday in July Serco emailed less than a dozen public authorities and NGOs in Glasgow to inform them that as of the following Monday it would be implementing a policy of changing the locks on the accommodation of asylum-seekers who had been refused asylum.

It is unlikely that the timing of the announcement was coincidental. The Scottish and UK Parliaments were both in recess, as too was Glasgow City Council.

The number of people sleeping rough in the UK is at a record high, after a 73 per cent rise in numbers over the last three years.

According to the latest snapshot analysis by UK local councils, there were 4,751 people sleeping rough on a given night in the autumn of last year. That represents a 169% increase on 2010 figures. In the course of last year 8,108 slept rough in London, a 121% increase on 2010 figures.

The past week has seen my perfectly reasonable, cool, and otherwise rock ‘n’ roll friends descend into a royal wedding frenzy not seen since … well, ever, really.

Somehow, Meghan Markle being divorced, mixed-race and from “a broken home” seems to have made it hip to celebrate this royal wedding in a way that Kate and Wills never was.

The Grenfell Tower Inquiry opened on Monday 21 May with tributes to those who died in the tragedy by their family and friends.

On Saturday 24 March around 100 Labour Party activists attended “Re-imagining Local Government: London for the many and not the few”.

This event came out of discussions between London Momentum members and left activists. We wanted to create a forum for the left to think about what it would do if it won seats in the May elections.