Housing

Industrial news in brief

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. RMT has also declared victory in the “battle of Baker Street”, after London Underground reinstated an unjustly sacked station worker, and trumped-up disciplinary charges against another were dropped. Tube bosses were forced to back down after 41 out of 61 workers balloted at the station voted for strikes...

Labour and housing markets breed insecurity

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. One reason why the decline in local government services is not so noticeable is that there’s been a huge hit to the pay of what was always mostly a low-paid workforce. Productivity figures are usually dubious — on the standard measures, real estate is reckoned to have the highest labour productivity of any sector — but it...

8,000 homes up for demolition

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 3 November residents from 34 estates that are threatened with demolition, but fall outside the rules for ballots, will protest outside London City Hall. The background...

Protests against Serco attacks on Asylum seekers’ housing

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. At a rate of up to ten a week, 300 asylum-seekers – many of whom would be in the process of appealing but still awaiting written confirmation of this, or, alternatively, might...

Expropriate the landowners!

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. General homelessness has shot up. Just over 59,000 people were accepted as homeless by local councils in England last year. That figure is 19,000 higher than it was 2009-10. The vast...

Celebrating wealth

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 fact that the guest list was studded by showbiz names simply seemed to prove the point. But is there really anything hip about watching a bunch of obscenely rich people all congregating under the same roof? Especially when there are thousands of homeless...

Grenfell inquiry must expose truth

The Grenfell Tower Inquiry opened on Monday 21 May with tributes to those who died in the tragedy by their family and friends. Families are being given as long as they want to tell the inquiry about those they lost, and many are choosing to use photos and videos as well as words. The first day of the inquiry heard tributes about Logan Gomes, a baby born still-born after the fire, as well as of Khadija Saye and her mother Mary Mendy, Denis Murphy, Joseph Daniels, and Mohamed Neda. The inquiry, led by controversial retired Judge Sir Martin Moore-Bick, was announced by Theresa May the day after...

Starting to re-imagine local government

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. An ill prepared left, devoid of strategy and ideas could be subsumed in the right-wing swamp that currently makes up the majority of councils. Local government policy is dominated by a managerial ethos in which officers dictate many of the decisions and councillors...

Labour set to gain in council elections

The local government election campaign has now started. On 3 May there will be elections in 150 councils, with 45 of these being all out. Corbyn’s Labour is expected to do well, particularly in big cities. After May there will be more left-wing, Corbyn supporting councillors. There continue to be many stitch ups in Labour and plenty of right-wingers managed to be reselected however, including notable cases like Haringey, there has been an upsurge in newer and returned activists being selected. They will at least want to shake up the way that Labour has run local government since 2010. Since...

When Labour councils resisted Tory housing policy

Rosalind Robson continues with the story of the 1972 resistance to the Housing Finance Act by Clay Cross council in Derbyshire. Read Part One here That the Labour council of the small Derbyshire town of Clay Cross fought a Tory government over its policy of raising rents by an act of Parliament — the 1972 Housing Finance Act — is well known. What is less well known is that Clay Cross was not the only council or set of councillors to initially opposed the Act. In fact hundreds of Labour councillors initially refused to implement the Act. Eventually all but a few, including eleven Clay Cross...

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