London's vulnerable families will not benefit from being forced to move north

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/apr/24/london-vulnerable-families-forced-north

Version 0 of 1.

Is this the beginning of an exodus of all but the highest paid from London? Is its status as a plutocratic city state, detached from the rest of the country, about to become permanent? If so, you wouldn't expect Newham, one of the city's poorest boroughs, to be the first to try moving its statutorily homeless up north, where there are few jobs – and where, in the words of the council's letter to a Stoke-based housing association, "communities may benefit from additional family integration within their local area".

It's a sign of how impossible the mismatch between housing and job supply has become that an area that once had some of the cheapest homes in the capital and which retains a high proportion of social housing compared with other inner-city boroughs, can no longer afford to pay the market rate to make up its shortfall in affordable housing.

I used to live close to the borough's western edge, now all but obscured by the encroachment of get-rich-quick apartment blocks that face on to a flyover. (It's amazing how developments of private one- and two-bedroom flats can flourish, like mushrooms, overnight, while the smallest social housing scheme takes years to appear and each one is rare enough to be heralded as the solution to the national housing crisis.)

The pressure on London's housing stock comes from one overriding factor: until now, its boroughs have offered at least some affordable family housing that is broadly near sources of work. It's not the fault of local authorities that there is such a mismatch between housing supply and job supply. A borough like Newham is a victim of its own success in the sense that it's a place to which people move in the hope of improving their lives.

But now London councils have run out of right-to-buy homes to cannibalise. These are homes that were once held publicly, but councils have spent millions leasing them back from their now private owners at market rates, and they'll be first to be hit by the cap on housing benefit levels.

The cap isn't a pragmatic policy decision: like the freeze on council tax, which has forced councils into making some drastic cuts in services, it's an expression of an ideology which seeks to place national burdens on local, preferably individual, shoulders.

Cutting housing benefit is just one expression of a wider approach to housing which John Hills – the LSE economist and author of the last government's key report on social housing – has described as "an engine of polarisation". Iniquities in housing lead to iniquities in access to jobs, decent education and social support. An already financially and socially vulnerable family can't possibly hope to benefit from moving to an entirely different city, unless they've miraculously found work in Stoke, where nearly 10% of working-age males claim jobseeker's allowance.

London is an expensive place to live precisely because it has become a cash cow to successive governments. The capital, and the collective efforts of the people who live there, subsidises the national economy. Both the previous and the current government were, and are, happy for that to be the case, as it is easier to create financial and service sector jobs there than to revive the fortunes of former manufacturing centres, such as the Potteries, in the north.

Less than a year after the coalition failed to save 1,200 jobs at the Bombardier train factory in Derby by awarding the Thameslink contract to an overseas rival, a Tory council, Westminster, is considering shipping people on its housing list to, you guessed it, Derby. Real people pay for such shortcuts, and live harder lives directly because governments have taken the easy way.

• Follow Comment is free on Twitter @commentisfree