More than anecdotal stories were telling of growing numbers of London's keyworkers needing to commute from places as far away as Taunton. That was more than a decade ago, before house prices and rents peaked.
The removal of housing benefit, not just for the unemployed, but also those on poverty wages living in high property-valued parts of inner London, while politically, reportedly, a popular doorstep issue, will just end up making recruitment for low waged employment increasingly impossible, unless staff are to be chain-ganged from off the streets and homeless hostelries.
1.6 million is nearly 1 in 6 of London's population if one includes the outer suburbs.
London has a crisis in housing provision throughout. Are those to be ethnically cleansed in a manner of speaking from Westminster and neighbouring boroughs expecting to be housed in Barnet, Bexley and Croydon? And if not, Watford? Maidstone? Maidenhead? How will the job prospectants be able to afford ever-mounting public transport fares? Might this be the real long-term meaning of Norman Tebbit's "get on your bike"?
When will the powers-that-be think the unthinkable solution - building new council housing, yes, but as an urgent first step doing up all abandoned habitable property in council ownership and requisitioning private property left empty for, say, a year?
S-A
The removal of housing benefit, not just for the unemployed, but also those on poverty wages living in high property-valued parts of inner London, while politically, reportedly, a popular doorstep issue, will just end up making recruitment for low waged employment increasingly impossible, unless staff are to be chain-ganged from off the streets and homeless hostelries.
1.6 million is nearly 1 in 6 of London's population if one includes the outer suburbs.
London has a crisis in housing provision throughout. Are those to be ethnically cleansed in a manner of speaking from Westminster and neighbouring boroughs expecting to be housed in Barnet, Bexley and Croydon? And if not, Watford? Maidstone? Maidenhead? How will the job prospectants be able to afford ever-mounting public transport fares? Might this be the real long-term meaning of Norman Tebbit's "get on your bike"?
When will the powers-that-be think the unthinkable solution - building new council housing, yes, but as an urgent first step doing up all abandoned habitable property in council ownership and requisitioning private property left empty for, say, a year?
S-A
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