WE HAD a grim reminder of our nation’s regional disparities with the news that local authorities in the affluent south are forcing homeless families to move hundreds of miles to poor northern towns such as Blackpool, Bolton, and Hartlepool. If they refuse to go, there are only the streets.
A dozen London councils have spent £140 million buying properties in the poorest parts of the country. Others find private landlords in northern towns and give them a year’s rent in advance. With one payment, the families are off their books, saving councils thousands of pounds a year.
The number of homeless families forced upon already disadvantaged northern communities has doubled in the past two years, Freedom of Information requests lodged by The Guardian reveal. Councils are paying millions to private firms that specialise in moving homeless families to cheap, sparsely furnished properties outside the capital. Their adverts tell landlords that they need only the minimum of a cooker and fridge freezer: “In certain cases we may also ask you to provide beds.”
Now, 94 per cent of Enfield’s homeless families are housed outside London — 59 per cent of them in north-east England. Women and children are being “bundled into taxis in the middle of the night with little more than the clothes on their backs”, Jonathan Brash, the MP for Hartlepool, says. It is “cruel in the extreme”.
The injustice is not confined to the families who are moved. The sudden arrival of dozens of outsiders fuels community division in areas already struggling with long council waiting lists. It is, Mr Brash says, “ripping at the social fabric” of his town.
Another favoured destination is Blackpool. It already has one of the lowest levels of social housing in England — and almost 12,000 families on the waiting list. To add insult to injury, 400 homes are due to be bulldozed there this summer and replaced with 230 new properties.
Many of the 800 residents — who are in the poorest tenth of the UK population — do not want to leave. They held an angry and emotional public meeting in protest. The Leader of Blackpool Council, Cllr Lynn Williams, was perplexed, asking how anyone could say “regenerating one of the most deprived areas of the country is a bad thing.”
Yet, the residents — one quarter of them disabled and many over 80 — are unhappy. Rents elsewhere in Blackpool are more than double. “There’s no way I can afford that,” one mother with four children said.
Those who own their homes have had sums offered in compulsory purchase. The amount “wouldn’t buy a hovel”, one widower in his sixties riposted. “This is a perfectly warm property . . . and there’s nowhere to move to.” Why replace 400 cheap homes with 230 unaffordable ones, he asked.
A father of two disabled children took his own life, in part, the coroner ruled, because of a Blackpool Council compulsory-purchase order.
“This area may be deprived financially, but it makes up for it in community spirit,” the Revd Matthew Lockwood, who leads the local Beacon Church (News, 9 January), says. “A much better idea would have been to use the money to improve the homes rather than undertake a mass demolition.” But there are few beyond the Church to speak up for the powerless.