The stories that won’t make headlines in George Osborne’s Evening Standard
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Version 0 of 1. Recently, MPs getting to work early have had to step around sleeping bodies in the underground tunnel that leads from Westminster tube station to the House of Commons staff entrance, forcing them to reflect on London’s rocketing homelessness problem. At street level outside the station, there are often several people sleeping by the stall where copies of the Evening Standard are handed out. The former chancellor George Osborne can scarcely have failed to notice the phenomenon as he made his way in to work. Is it an issue that will make front page news on the Standard any time soon? Given that homelessness charities believe responsibility for the growing numbers of rough sleepers in the capital (where rough sleeping has more than doubled since 2010) lies squarely with spending decisions made by the Treasury, it may prove an uncomfortable cause for the newspaper to champion once Osborne starts his new job as editor on Tuesday. There are a whole range of issues that are set to cause awkwardness for reporters. How will the paper cover the fallout from cuts to local authority budgets in London, when those cuts were overseen by the new editor? Inner London councils have already lost about 40% in central government funding since 2010, and the thinktank London Councils predicts that core funding from central government will have fallen by 63% in real terms, equivalent to £3.9bn, over the decade to 2019-20. These cuts have led to closures of youth services, children centres, libraries and day centres – all traditional campaigning themes for local papers, but perhaps less likely to be splashed on the Standard’s pages now. No one doubts that the ex-chancellor will bring energy, political clout and a healthy contacts book to the paper. Many former opponents are inclined to view his appointment positively, hopeful that he will transform the paper into an anti-Brexit platform. Osborne is clever and fun and will make the Standard an exciting place to work. But there is real concern that his editorship may impose an obstinately rosy filter on some of the grittier problems that London faces. How will the paper cover the rise in stabbings in the capital, when the Metropolitan police’s assistant commissioner has sought to pin some of the blame for increases in gun and knife crime on cuts to police funding? It’s temping to imagine some hasty modifications to the paper’s style guide so that the phrase “government cuts” gets automatically switched to “vital efficiency savings”, the bedroom tax altered to “removal of the spare room subsidy” and stories about those impoverished by cuts to benefits rejigged by editors to become stories that highlight the restoration of fairness to Britain’s hardworking families. Some of London’s Labour MPs are despondent at the timing. Andy Slaughter, MP for Hammersmith, is not thrilled that his constituents will be reading a newspaper edited by the ex-chancellor throughout the election campaign. “The main issues that we are campaigning on are directly the consequences of policies created by George Osborne, particularly the funding of public services. He has a direct interest in not correctly reporting the outcome of his own mistaken decisions,” he says. Claire Kober, Haringey council’s Labour leader, says all the difficulties her council is facing – social care, housing, schools funding – have their roots in Treasury decisions. “For people on low incomes in the city, life has became considerably harder. We are only just beginning to see the cumulative impact of welfare changes of recent years,” she says. The Standard may not show much enthusiasm for writing about the rise of London’s food banks, widely understood to have been triggered by welfare cuts. Food bank use in London since 2010 is estimated by the Trussell Trust to have risen by 1,642%; last year the charity handed out 111,100 three-day emergency food parcels to Londoners. The painful fallout from cuts to disability benefits, which Osborne consistently argued were necessary, may also not elicit huge interest. How the paper covers the rollout of universal credit across London will be worth monitoring. Its launch elsewhere has seen food bank referral rates running at more than double the national average. Osborne’s decision to introduce a steep £3bn reduction in the work allowances (the amount recipients can earn before their benefits start to be taken away) remains controversial within the government, but the actual impact on recipients is yet to be felt. The Institute for Fiscal Studies warned last week that a freeze in benefit rates and cuts to child tax credits, along with the less generous universal credit, could leave nearly 3 million working households with children on tax credits on average £2,500 a year worse off, adding to the pain for London’s most vulnerable residents. “London has the highest child poverty rate in the country – that’s a national scandal,” says Imran Hussain, the director of policy with the Child Poverty Action Group. “People are finding it increasingly tough to pay rent and will cut back on other essentials to make ends meet, but there are limits to how much people can cut back on food and clothing. It is happening on George Osborne’s doorstep. We would want him to cover that issue without fear or favour; we hope he will. But a lot of the things that are driving child poverty flow from decisions made by the chancellor between 2010 and 2016.” Under anyone’s editorship, these issues are the opposite of clickbait: relentlessly bleak, and not really what people want to read about when they travel home. If your eye is on the capital’s parallel and exciting transformation into a globally successful, thriving international hub, it is easy to shrug off mention of these problems as the tedious, muesli-fuelled bleatings of a Dave Spart leftist hand-wringer. There will be no need to justify jettisoning these worthy subjects for more upbeat, glossier pieces. The best test of the paper’s new direction, then, will be how it covers London’s housing crisis, which affects everyone in the capital. Slaughter says: “I am seeing the most appalling conditions, particularly in the private rented sector, where you get illegal HMOs [houses of multiple occupation], properties which have been divided and redivided because landlords can only make money out of benefit tenants by cramming them into substandard tiny accommodation, because of the restriction on government funding. “There has been a 130% rise in street homelessness nationally, which is just the most obvious symptom of the bigger housing crisis. This has occurred because of the benefit cap, the bedroom tax, the caps on local housing allowance. This is a direct consequence of Osborne’s policy. Why would he feature that on the front page?” To be fair to Osborne, he introduced several homelessness prevention initiatives, including more money to get rough sleepers off the streets in his last budget in 2016. But homelessness charities say these measures have been overshadowed by the lack of affordable housing, an inadequate house-building strategy and cuts to benefits and local authorities. Even the new housing minister, Gavin Barwell, conceded this year that “the housing market in this country is broken, and the cause is very simple: for too long, we haven’t built enough homes”. One leading homelessness charity figure (who asked not to be named, unwilling to annoy the paper) says: “The sector has been warning of diminishing affordable housing and the draconian effects of welfare reform for a long time. These have been a catastrophe for homelessness. It is approaching the high point of the 80s when we saw cardboard cities in London. This is the fifth richest country in the world, and we are seeing countless people living and dying in the streets. This isn’t an election issue in London. No one is talking about ending rough sleeping, there’s no aspiration. And yet we know how to do it – we almost succeeded in the 00s.” It is safe to assume that the story of how Emily Bartlett’s family has been split in two is not likely to be featured in the Evening Standard any time soon. After being evicted with her children from her home in Newham last May (the landlord wanted to raise the rent), she was rehoused 18 miles away in Tilbury, Essex, because caps on housing benefit have made much of even outer London unaffordable for benefit recipients, including those who are working. She had to give up her job as a school lunch monitor because of the move, and decided her 11-year-old daughter would be better off staying behind with her mother, so she could continue at school. At the end of last year, her partner (a forklift driver) left her, which meant there was no longer anyone in the family working, so she was hit by the benefit cap. This leaves her with only £7.01 a week in housing benefit contributions to her £440 weekly rent (the rent in the emergency accommodation secured by Newham council in Essex is higher than the rent she was paying in London before her eviction). Even if she stopped buying food for the three children who live with her, she wouldn’t be able to pay it. The council has told her she faces being rehoused in the Midlands. The Bartletts are one of thousands of low-income families who have been pushed out of the city in the past seven years, in a process campaigners describe as “social cleansing”. Osborne dismissed criticism of the rehousing policy when he was chancellor as “frankly, ill-informed rubbish” and “shrill, headline-seeking nonsense”. Bartlett has been forced to move seven times since her daughter was born, usually because of rising rents in rapidly gentrifying east London. It has been devastating to be forced to live apart from her oldest child; the prospect of having to move 100 miles further is unimaginable. “When I leave it upsets her. She cries. It gets to a point where she thinks I don’t love her any more because I’m here and she’s there,” Bartlett says. Her doctor has recently doubled the dose of antidepressants she is taking. She knows several other families who have been moved out of Newham to properties outside London. “It’s like they want to make it a place for richer people and push out the poorer people.” Her MP, Labour’s Stephen Timms, says he is seeing more families like hers being rehoused out of London, sometimes as far as Birmingham. “It is a growing problem,” Timms says. “What’s the cause of it? My mind is in no doubt it is Treasury policy.” About 19,000 people have been affected by the benefit cap in London. Analysts question whether it has had the effect that Osborne and colleagues hoped for, since only 5% of those capped in the first wave moved into work. The policy was conceived to address a situation where, in Osborne’s words, “people who did the right thing – who get up in the morning and work hard – felt penalised for it, while people who did the wrong thing got rewarded for it”, but the government now recognises that most of the people hit by it are not able to be in work. Only one in seven of those hit by it up until last November were even required to be looking for work. Jasmine Wright, 25, is the mother of premature triplets housed in a fifth-floor flat, 78 stairs up, with a broken lift, so she hasn’t been able to take them out for a walk for the past two months. This is her third flat in a year; the previous two were so mould-ridden that her sons (now 18 months old) got ill. “I know people in temporary accommodation are being housed outside London. I can’t do that because I need to be near the hospital,” she says. “I don’t think I’m being difficult. I’ve always worked. I want to go back to work when they’re two. This situation has drained me of everything.” Wright’s MP, Labour’s Karen Buck, says: “In half a lifetime of working with people in housing need I have never experienced such hardship and, in some cases, absolute destitution.” These have never been core themes for the Standard, apart from when they are included in the paper’s incredibly successful charitable campaign, the Dispossessed Fund, which has raised £18m for groups tackling poverty across the capital. Most recently, it delivered £350,000 in grants to charities helping Londoners suffering from “hunger and food insecurity”. Under the new regime, will there be much appetite for continuing this focus on the city’s most marginalised, given how tightly the causes are bound up with government policy? In some ways, the fund chimes entirely with the Cameron-Osborne desire to build up a “big society”, getting charities to step in when the state is rolled back. One London MP was anxious “not to be mean when they are raising money, but what good is a £35,000 charitable grant for a youth project when youth services in the area have just lost £350,000 in government funding?” |