London council pays tenants to leave the crowded city

The average flat for rent in Wandsworth, a London borough about 8km from Charing Cross, is priced today by letting agents Foxtons at £549 (about €740) per week. Not per month, per week.

A cramped one-bedroom goes for just shy of £300, a two-bedroom for £465. For a three-bedroom property be prepared to pay more than £800 weekly.

The pressures are not confined to private tenants. Wandsworth Council is now offering its tenants a cash sum if they will vacate flats and rent privately in Birmingham.

Earlier this year, the local newspaper, the Wandsworth Guardian, reported the council has housed families in Birmingham, Leicester and West Bromwich, because it was too expensive to house them in the borough. In a letter received by tenants in the past week, the council said it had rented properties in Birmingham with low rents, often with access to a garden.

“In some instances, they have a private driveway,” the council writes, offering £3,500 in cash to tenants relinquishing a two-bedroom flat.

A tenant in a three-bedroom property is being offered £4,000 to leave, while the few in four- and five-bedroom properties are being offered £5,000 and £6,000 respectively.

Callous

The Conservative-controlled council has been condemned as callous by opponents, but councils throughout the city are struggling to cope with housing pressures.

In February, the city’s population topped 8.6 million – the highest since before the second World War, which led to evacuations of heavily populated parts of the East End.

The Conservative-inspired “bedroom tax” – which they have tried and failed to dub “the underoccupancy charge” – has created further tensions. Under it, tenants must pay a charge, usually between £14and £16 per week but sometimes more, if they are deemed to have an unnecessary bedroom, or else move to a smaller property.

The theory of the charge is that state-owned housing should be used in the most efficient manner for the greatest happiness of the greatest number.

In practice it hasn’t been so cut-and-dried. Councils lack smaller properties to move affected tenants into. When they have them they are often far away from existing family ties.

Thousands of families – some affected by the bedroom tax but more often people who have been on a waiting list for any property – have been shipped out by local authorities to privately owned properties in Ramsgate, Manchester, Bradford, Hastings, Pembrokeshire, Dover and Plymouth. The council continues to pay the rent.

In March, an official document reported that 5,437 families had been moved out of London boroughs in the last quarter of last year – the highest number on record. In all, London councils have found places for 49,789 families – the exact number of people involved is unknown – outside of London between July 2011 and July 2014.

Right to buy Some of the problem is down to a lack of properties: Margaret Thatcher’s “right to buy” in the late 1970s was hugely popular, but it reduced the number of properties available to rent.

It could be argued that the decision to sell off such properties moved millions of people up the social ladder, giving them a base from which they could move higher. And it did, in many cases. However, the decision to ban councils from using the money raised from those sales to build new homes was based on ideology, nothing more.

Five years ago, mayor of London Boris Johnson insisted welfare reforms would not lead, as he put it, to "Kosovo-style social cleansing".

“You are not going to see thousands of families evicted from the place where they have been living,” he said – although it is clear those reforms have contributed to the numbers moving.

The London exodus, which is not yet a flood, is exacerbating the housing pressures in the locations chosen by the boroughs, since London tenants are taking up places that would otherwise be available for locals there.

Anti-immigrant feelings

Often, the action has fuelled anti-immigrant feelings in towns and cities far from London, even if the arriving tenants had rarely left Southwark, let alone ever seen a foreign country.

If re-elected, the Conservatives want to go further. Tenants should be able to buy more than 1.3 million homes from housing associations, according to prime minister David Cameron.

Tenants in London buying their home would enjoy a £102,700 discount, while those elsewhere in England – the measure would not apply in Scotland, or Wales – would save £77,000.

The housing associations – which are run as charities, effectively – would be fully compensated, he vowed, although the associations have threatened legal action.

Part of the money under the Conservatives’ plan, if they get the chance to implement it, would come from the sale of the 200,000 best properties still in the hands of councils.