Brent SOS Libraries still needs to raise £30,000 so please support these events (Click image to enlarge):
WEMBLEY MATTERS News and views on local politics, the environment, climate change, culture and local history
Friday 3 June 2011
Housing Benefit Cap - the stark reality
Guest blog from Andre Rostant:
Myself, my wife and our eight young children have been told that, before January 2012, we must move to "the fringes" of London or further afield,... as a letter from Westminster Council benefits puts it: "to make sure that people on benefit are not living in accommodation that would be unaffordable to most people in work".
Our rent is £2000 a week for an ex 3 bedroom council house.Mr Cameron and Westminster Councillor Philippa Roe say we need to be “realistic”. To any reader who already has their pen out, let’s make something clear: under the new housing benefit rules,a “normal" married couple with two children, earning £48K a year between them and paying the median £530 a week for a privately rented 2 bed Westminster home will receive as little as £1.7K a year in housing benefit - leaving them to pay over £25K a year rent - that is 80% of their take home wage each week. That is: "the average rent for a two bed home in Westminster is now more than 80% of the combined ne tincome of two normal working people on typical wages" which, apparently, is realistic.
Rent levels have nothing to do with housing benefit: I have asked landlords, including our own, and been consistently told that the market is “buoyant" and rents will not go down when benefits are cut.Official research also mainly suggestsit is “unlikely rents in inner London will drop significantly”. So, what is going on here? Many campaign groups have alluded to it, Karen Buck hinted at it but was constrained by political sensitivities and even Boris took his mind off avoiding Bob Crow long enough to comment.
What’s going on is Cameron’s Big Solution: a policy of ethnic and social cleansing which slithered in over the back of the sparkling propaganda coup of holding up to scorn and ridicule a handfull of confused refugees (people fleeing war, persecution etc) - placed by chance in expensive accommodation by Councils, describing these refugees as “asylum seekers”.They also highlighed stories about benefit cheats and “scroungers” who in reality make up a small minority of those on benefits and whose motives and reasons are actually far too diverse and complex to lump into any meaningful category.They only just stopped short of depicting these people as rats.
As Mr Cameron crudely and tritely says: “immigration and welfare reform are two sides of the same coin”. Propaganda is wont to ignore inconvenient truths: UK benefit rates are not fabulously more generous than those of many other European countries, and the bulk of refugees are put in far from salubrious accommodation. Mr Cameron asserts that Immigration has put “real pressures on communities... on schools, housing and healthcare... significant numbers of new people… not able to speak the same language...not really wanting or even willing to integrate…” and, he says of the unemployed and working poor:“if they're out of work, or on a low wage, and living in an expensive home in the centre of a city [that] the decision to go back to work, or take a better paid job could mean having to move to a cheaper home, in a different part of the city, in order to escape benefit dependency.”
How is a poor manual worker going to simply make “the decision” to take a better paid job? The combination of benefit “reforms” will force poor people to move: families like mine, single poor people, including pensioners who have worked all their lives, hard working unskilled people, the disabled and the ill. People will die: not least unsettled pensioners, those whose medical or psychiatric treatment is disrupted, those who break down (Iknow at least one recent local suicide has been directly attributed to benefit cuts).
Already disadvantaged people will be rendered utterly destitute because of the reality that hard work counts for nothing while the money you have - pretty much however you got it - counts for much.Of course, black people and other minorities will be disproportionately afflicted, because we are, in reality, more likely to be poor. So, Mr Cameron will fix “undesireable” immigration, welfare dependency and parasitism by resettling us all, somewhere out of the way of “hard working taxpayers” of the big society: so that better paid work or, indeed, any work sets us free...
I do work, as it happens, as do more benefit claimants than are unemployed - the OECD predicts that without rent subsidy low paid workers “will be restricted to poorer areas with few jobs” where we will “become locked in a cycle of worklessness” in other words: ghettoes.Where to from there?Well, barring a miracle, thousands of us, including my family and I, are on our way to “the fringes of London” or further afield, for a start.Perhaps the Government might offer to lay on trains for us...
Cameron’s Big Solution
Myself, my wife and our eight young children have been told that, before January 2012, we must move to "the fringes" of London or further afield,... as a letter from Westminster Council benefits puts it: "to make sure that people on benefit are not living in accommodation that would be unaffordable to most people in work".
Our rent is £2000 a week for an ex 3 bedroom council house.Mr Cameron and Westminster Councillor Philippa Roe say we need to be “realistic”. To any reader who already has their pen out, let’s make something clear: under the new housing benefit rules,a “normal" married couple with two children, earning £48K a year between them and paying the median £530 a week for a privately rented 2 bed Westminster home will receive as little as £1.7K a year in housing benefit - leaving them to pay over £25K a year rent - that is 80% of their take home wage each week. That is: "the average rent for a two bed home in Westminster is now more than 80% of the combined ne tincome of two normal working people on typical wages" which, apparently, is realistic.
Rent levels have nothing to do with housing benefit: I have asked landlords, including our own, and been consistently told that the market is “buoyant" and rents will not go down when benefits are cut.Official research also mainly suggestsit is “unlikely rents in inner London will drop significantly”. So, what is going on here? Many campaign groups have alluded to it, Karen Buck hinted at it but was constrained by political sensitivities and even Boris took his mind off avoiding Bob Crow long enough to comment.
What’s going on is Cameron’s Big Solution: a policy of ethnic and social cleansing which slithered in over the back of the sparkling propaganda coup of holding up to scorn and ridicule a handfull of confused refugees (people fleeing war, persecution etc) - placed by chance in expensive accommodation by Councils, describing these refugees as “asylum seekers”.They also highlighed stories about benefit cheats and “scroungers” who in reality make up a small minority of those on benefits and whose motives and reasons are actually far too diverse and complex to lump into any meaningful category.They only just stopped short of depicting these people as rats.
As Mr Cameron crudely and tritely says: “immigration and welfare reform are two sides of the same coin”. Propaganda is wont to ignore inconvenient truths: UK benefit rates are not fabulously more generous than those of many other European countries, and the bulk of refugees are put in far from salubrious accommodation. Mr Cameron asserts that Immigration has put “real pressures on communities... on schools, housing and healthcare... significant numbers of new people… not able to speak the same language...not really wanting or even willing to integrate…” and, he says of the unemployed and working poor:“if they're out of work, or on a low wage, and living in an expensive home in the centre of a city [that] the decision to go back to work, or take a better paid job could mean having to move to a cheaper home, in a different part of the city, in order to escape benefit dependency.”
How is a poor manual worker going to simply make “the decision” to take a better paid job? The combination of benefit “reforms” will force poor people to move: families like mine, single poor people, including pensioners who have worked all their lives, hard working unskilled people, the disabled and the ill. People will die: not least unsettled pensioners, those whose medical or psychiatric treatment is disrupted, those who break down (Iknow at least one recent local suicide has been directly attributed to benefit cuts).
Already disadvantaged people will be rendered utterly destitute because of the reality that hard work counts for nothing while the money you have - pretty much however you got it - counts for much.Of course, black people and other minorities will be disproportionately afflicted, because we are, in reality, more likely to be poor. So, Mr Cameron will fix “undesireable” immigration, welfare dependency and parasitism by resettling us all, somewhere out of the way of “hard working taxpayers” of the big society: so that better paid work or, indeed, any work sets us free...
I do work, as it happens, as do more benefit claimants than are unemployed - the OECD predicts that without rent subsidy low paid workers “will be restricted to poorer areas with few jobs” where we will “become locked in a cycle of worklessness” in other words: ghettoes.Where to from there?Well, barring a miracle, thousands of us, including my family and I, are on our way to “the fringes of London” or further afield, for a start.Perhaps the Government might offer to lay on trains for us...
Sunday 29 May 2011
Barry Gardiner's NHS Meeting
We now have fuller details of the meeting which will take place at 3pm on Sunday June 12th at Brent Town Hall. This public meeting will outline and discuss the Government's NHS proposals.
Speakers include:
Diane Abbott MP - Shadow Minister for Health
Barry Gardiner - MP for Brent North
Ann John - Leader of Brent Council
Representatives from the British Medical Association & the Royal College of Nursing
Local Health Care Officials
This should be a really interesting event, please do your best to attend.
No confirmation of attendance needed.
Saturday 28 May 2011
Barcelona fans take over Fryent Way
The fans arrived in good spirits, coached in from various London airports and a little bemused to find themselves in what appeared to be the middle of the countryside. They soon found their way to the stadium by way of the Paddocks and ASDA...
Act now on threat to our NHS
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| "The NHS will last as long as there are folk left with the faith to fight for it" Nye Bevan |
Stuart Jeffrey, Green Party spokesperson on health, wrote in the Guardian:
Turning the wheel slightly and easing off from the accelerator are not signs that Andrew Lansley will steer the NHS away from the cliff edge of privatisation (Report, 23 May). His plan must be stopped before we lose our NHS to market management. Of course, the true driver for this sorry state of affairs is the prime minister, who has overall responsibility for the actions of his cabinet colleagues. If Cameron and Lansley are able to turn the NHS into a full-blown insurance scheme, it will be a car crash.The website 38 Degrees continues to organise opposition. Here is their latest message:
Andrew Lansley's NHS listening exercise closes in just 4 days. We need to move fast to flood it with objections to his dangerous plans.
Thousands of personal submissions to the listening exercise will make it much harder for Lansley to spin the results. He'll have to publish the figures, whether he likes it or not. They will tell a clear story: the overwhelming response is against these dangerous changes to the NHS.
It's easy and fast to send your message to the listening exercise using the 38 Degrees website. It only takes a couple of minutes. There are suggestions for what issues to raise, and you can see what other 38 Degrees members are already saying.
Get started here:
http://www.38degrees.org.uk/nhs-listening-exercise
There are signs our pressure is starting to work. Yesterday, Nick Clegg said he thought Lansley's plans need to be watered down and delayed. But today's Daily Telegraph reports that Conservative hardliners have started planning their fightback. They are determined to rush Lansley's plan through. We need to keep the pressure growing!
We've already created a huge stir this week with our hard-hitting newspaper adverts. Next week we will submit a copy of our 400,000-strong petition. So now, let's back all of that up with thousands of personal submissions telling the listening exercise we don't want our NHS ruined.
We have got until 5 PM on Tuesday, May 31 to send messages. Send yours now:
http://www.38degrees.org.uk/nhs-listening-exercise
Lansley wants to use the listening exercise to claim he's building support for his plans, so he can plough ahead. But by working together we can make that impossible.
The British Medical Association's own submission to the listening exercise says Lansley's plans should be scrapped. Nurses' groups, health care charities and patient groups all seem to agree. If we all keep working together, we can protect our NHS for future generations.
The listening exercise closes in four days. Please take a couple of minutes to write in now:
http://www.38degrees.org.uk/nhs-listening-exercise
June 4th - challenge councillors on library closures
A message from Save Kensal Rise Library Campaign:
Regular monthly surgery with Councillor James Powney who made the decision to close Kensal Rise library and has been vigorously attacking our campaign in his blog, Council Executive member Bobby Thomas who voted for the closure, and Councillor Claudia Hector who voted for the cuts but has pledged to pay for a lift in the library out of her own pocket.
Regular monthly surgery with Councillor James Powney who made the decision to close Kensal Rise library and has been vigorously attacking our campaign in his blog, Council Executive member Bobby Thomas who voted for the closure, and Councillor Claudia Hector who voted for the cuts but has pledged to pay for a lift in the library out of her own pocket.
Saturday 4th June, 10.30 until noon,
St Mark’s Church Hall, All Souls’ Avenue, London, NW10 5HX (5 mins walk from Kensal Rise library)
St Mark’s Church Hall, All Souls’ Avenue, London, NW10 5HX (5 mins walk from Kensal Rise library)
Local MPs and Councillors speak on green issues
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| Photo by Jon Goldberg www.jongoldberg.co.uk |
There are appearances from Sarah Teather MP (Brent Central), Barry Gardiner MP (Brent North) and Willesden Green Councillors Lesley Jones, Ann Hunter and Gavin Sneddon.
New CPZ for Civic Centre
The construction timetable and building phase details for the Civic Centre are now available on the Brent Council website HERE The plans include details of the cranes that will be deployed, traffic movements and public transport links.
The plans for the Civic Centre also include the introduction of a Controlled Parking Zone (CPZ) in the area. Consultation on this will commence in September 2011. The CPZ will cover a large area (Click image to enlarge)
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| Boundaries of the area that may be affected by CPZ (from planning documents) |
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