Camden council has announced plans to contact 761 working class households to tell them that they can no longer afford to live in their homes. The Condem government’s benefits cap will affect 2,816 adults and children who depend on housing benefits in Camden. And the Labour Council’s response? ‘Get out!’
The cap in housing benefits of £175 for a family means that they will no longer be able to afford to live in Camden or anywhere else in the south east. For 2 and 3-bedroom homes in Camden the local housing allowances are £300 and £340 a week but average private rent is £445; Camden has the fourth highest rents in the country. The households affected have an average of three children and would need to find an average of £91 each per week to pay their rent. 900 children could be forced out of their schools and their education disrupted. Labour is conniving in the expulsion of the poorest people in the borough and Bradford, Birmingham and Leicester have been suggested as possible places to move them to. Meanwhile, 56 councillors share £807,473 in allowances per year (April 2010 – March 2011) – 14,400 per councillor.
Labour leader of the council, Sarah Hayward, said, ‘The scale of the cuts, high private rental costs and lack of available housing in Camden will mean that more people will soon have to consider moving from the borough and in some cases London entirely.’ Council leaders are promising that ‘no vulnerable people’ will be moved. So if the thousands of poor people facing the vindictive attacks of a government of millionaires aren’t vulnerable what are they?
On 14 February the council suggested a £1.5 million fund to ‘boost the income’ of the most vulnerable. To put this in context, last year 155 households were registered as homeless with the council – 25% were forced to move out of London. A council spokesman says, ‘Clearly, with 761 households set to be in a position where they could be made homeless, it will be a challenge to maintain that 25%, but that is what the fund would be aimed at doing.’
So what about the other 75%? Hayward sniffles about her ‘deep concern’ and that, ‘sadly the only long-term solution for some households will be to move’. The Camden New Journal quotes another leading Labour councillor as saying ‘Nobody wants to do this, but what can we do? What can we do?’ But their crocodile tears won’t fool working class people. This is the same Labour council that that is now organising ‘roundtable discussions’ with business representatives to sell off local services to private interests. They are the same Labour politicians that pay the council’s Chief Executive Moira Gibb £199,000 a year, with a pension pot of a staggering £2.19 million. This is class war. They know which side they are on. We need to organise and fight for ours.
Louis Brehoney
