If London's poor are being purged, why are there more of them?
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Version 0 of 1. It has become a received wisdom on the left that poor Londoners are being pushed out of the heart of the city by an influx of rich people - especially foreigners with money to burn - and the effects of government benefit reform. The reality is far more complex, as a series of studies have shown. The latest analysis on the 28% of Londoners who meet the official definition of being “in poverty” - that is, being members of households whose income is less than 60% of the national median - comes from the Centre for London think tank. Its recently completed Inside Out report confirms that the distribution of poor Londoners across the 32 boroughs has changed during this century, with rates of poverty falling in traditionally poor inner East London and rising in many Outer London boroughs. Newham, Tower Hamlets and Hackney still top the poverty rate chart but the gap between them and, in particular, Brent, Enfield and Ealing has narrowed significantly. At first glance this seems to fit the ubiquitous “social cleansing” narrative, which habitually contends that poor Londoners are being displaced in large numbers from the more expensive parts of the capital as wealthy incomers gentrify once low-cost neighbourhoods and benefit caps force people to move to cheaper, outlying areas or even out of London altogether. A closer look, however, shows that such assumptions should be questioned. It is true that several Inner London boroughs with large working-class populations of long-standing have seen substantial increases in the proportions of their residents employed in professional and managerial “higher-skilled occupations” in the past ten years: Hackney’s has soared by a table-topping 15% followed by Islington, Lewisham, Lambeth, Westminster (which is by no means all wealthy), Southwark and Tower Hamlets. But that doesn’t mean that poor residents have become less numerous in those boroughs or in Inner London boroughs as a whole. The overall populations of all of them except Kensington and Chelsea (K&C) have been rising, primarily due to “natural increase” - the difference between the numbers of births and deaths. Further figures supplied to me by Centre for London, compiled from official household income data by the academic Alex Fenton, show that increases in the numbers of people in poverty have contributed to those rises too. Between 2001 and 2011, almost all Inner London boroughs saw rises in their absolute numbers of poor households, with the figure for Tower Hamlets going up by a substantial 7,000. Even population-static K&C’s rose by about 4,000, indicating that by this measure Britain’s richest place has become relatively poorer. The three exceptions were Camden, Hackney and Islington, which saw drops of about 1,000, a few hundred and 4,000 respectively, but even they still contain a lot of poverty - the latter two are in the national top tens for percentages of children and older people in deprived circumstances. So although the balance between affluent and poor households has swung somewhat towards the affluent in traditionally poor parts of Inner London, there has been no reduction in the actual number of poor households in most of them. In fact, the opposite is true and is also true for its more prosperous boroughs. All that said, the largest increases in absolute numbers of poor households, as well as the largest percentage increases, have been mostly in Outer London boroughs. Enfield had a big rise of 10,000 such households between 2001 and 2011 with suburban Hillingdon, Barnet and Croydon not far behind. Even Kingston and Richmond saw hikes of 4,000 and more. Only Barking and Dagenham experienced a (very small) fall. What has brought about this shift in the geography of London poverty? Again, the belief that the cause must be displacement from Inner London, driven by spending cuts and “the rich” is not borne out by the facts. For example, the recent London Poverty Profile report showed that there has actually been a fall in the number of house moves made by benefit claimant households in the private rented sector since 2011 - from 19,600 to 18,100 - and most of those that have moved have remained residents of the same borough. Only about 3,000 households a year have moved out of London altogether. A Department for Work and Pensions analysis published a year ago found that large majorities of claimants affected by the benefit cap in Inner London from May 2010 and who moved house remained in Inner London and that the same was true of Outer London claimants. According to the Centre For London researchers, a much more likely explanation for the larger increases in poor households numbers in Outer London boroughs compared with those in Inner London is that incomers, arriving from overseas and other parts of the UK in roughly equal numbers, have become more likely to settle in those parts of the metropolis, presumably because rising housing costs, including in what were once cheap inner London boroughs, have rendered Inner London unaffordable for most of them. None of the above implies that there are no poor families or individuals in London being re-housed against their wishes in unfamiliar, outlying areas of London with all the uncertainty and disruption, not least to children, that can entail. As diligent London MPs know all too well, such people certainly exist and many of their stories are heartbreaking. It is also the case that many poor London households are getting poorer and cutting back on other things in order to avoid the anxiety that comes with moving home, even if not very far. It may be that the full impact of benefit reform has yet to work its way through the system: as this number crunch from the New Policy Institute (which compiles the Poverty Profile for Trust for London) points out, interim measures to cushion the force of housing benefit changes may have lessened flows to cheaper places. The possible future effects of the Housing and Planning Bill when it becomes law provide further reasons for concern in this respect. For now, though, claims that there is a mass, ongoing outward purge of London’s poor, while seductive for campaigners and some journalists, are not only inaccurate, they risk sidelining the most pressing and widespread problem facing what are, in fact, rising numbers of low-income households right across London, even when members of them are employed - the wearing, worrying, sometimes unequal daily struggle to make ends meet in one of the most successful big cities in the world. |