Survival of the financially fittest? Where the London Plan is leading us

 By TheeErin

Not too long ago London Mayor Boris Johnson warned that the government’s new cuts to Housing Benefits will lead to Balkan style social cleansing. You could therefore be forgiven for thinking that he is, like many Londoners, a fan of the residential diversity that makes this city great – unlike Paris, for example. But if the London Plan is anything to go by, you would be wrong.

Far from softening the impact of the policies he so publicly decries, the Mayor’s proposed plans for London’s housing will actually make matters worse for poorer Londoners, forcing them out of the inner-city.

As Nicky Gavron and Steve Hilditch note, the London Plan’s housing strategy shifts the balance of homes on offer away from social rents (typically 50 per cent of market rates, or less) towards what the government calls ‘Affordable Rent’ (up to 80 per cent of market rates, which is what the government advises Housing Associations to charge).

In many areas this will have a big impact on tenants, pricing them out or forcing them onto housing benefits if they are not already on them. As the London and Quadrant Housing Association says: “If a tenant were charged 65% of the market rent on a one bed home in Haringey their rent would be around £137 per week, a full £52 higher than a social rented home”. It would be much the same in Islington, but for the local authority’s decision not to follow the ‘Affordable Rent’ strategy, and instead subsidise Housing Associations in their own way.

The London Plan also encourages developers to put up more market-priced housing in areas of high social rented tenure – including areas that have benefited from regeneration schemes. Yet there’s no encouragement to build more socially rented housing in areas of high market tenure, such as Kensington and Chelsea, Wandsworth or Westminster. 

Add to these shifts the fact that Boris has scrapped Ken Livingstone’s policy that at least half of all new residential developments across London should be affordable, with 70 per cent at social rents, and you will see that the Mayor is slowly but surely phasing social housing out of London’s residential landscape, leaving a small residue of ghettos for the poor.  

With no provisions in place for future build, the social rent sector will get smaller and smaller, pushing those on the lowest incomes out to the fringes of the city, or to wherever they can find rents that are somewhere near affordable.

If left unchallenged, the London Plan and the housing benefit reforms will together speed up a process of gentrification that has continued across the capital since the 1970s. For some this may not seem like such a big issue; surely we should celebrate nicely renovated Victorian terraced housing and the proliferation of bijoux boutiques. Are they not better than run down shabby neighbourhoods where houses are overcrowded and local economies stutter? Others know better: social heterogeneity is a source of London’s appeal which must be protected from the vagaries of unfettered capitalism.

This brings us to a big question that has exercised urban theorists for years, and must now be addressed by ordinary Londoners: do we all have a Right to the City? Or is the city something we only have the right to purchase and consume? Put differently, should we all – regardless of our incomes – be allowed to live in and enjoy the city? Or is that a privilege that only money can buy? The London Plan’s housing strategy is setting us firmly on the path that favours privilege.