These letters (one from our chairman) were published in the Guardian today:

Housing policy represents another lack of strategy in the Queen’s speech (Editorial, 10 May). A combination of housing benefit caps, cuts and the rising prices and rents of a home will inflict ever increasing pain on Londoners. The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors tells us that house prices are falling everywhere except London, and Rightmove says optimistic sellers in the capital have driven asking prices nationally above their 2008 peak. Rents in London are being driven above the caps by a global free market which sees London property as a triple-A-rated safe haven for spare cash. Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, the son of the Libyan leader, was planning to make more than half a million pounds a year renting out his home in north London.

The coalition, with almost total silence from the opposition, has told Londoners to get on a housing ladder that is more like a moving staircase coming down, until the poorest are shunted off the bottom to who knows where as rents overtake caps. In the 1960s, many families were moved from the East End into new towns with newly built homes. This time there is no planned affordable rented housing to move to, just temporary accommodation, overcrowding and debt. Is anybody listening, does anybody care?

Rev Paul Nicolson

Taxpayers Against Poverty

Amelia Gentleman’s special report (10 May) outlines the desperately inadequate living conditions and exploitative landlords to be found in the London borough of Newham in 2012. I have just been re-reading Jack London’s People of the Abyss and have been struck by the frightening similarities in the grim picture he paints of squalid living conditions for the poor of the East End in 1902. He too describes vastly overcrowded, infested houses, with haphazard shacks behind, their roofs strewn with refuse from above. The inhabitants have miserable and precarious lives. The 20th century brought genuine and huge improvements in living conditions for millions, by means of mass access to high-quality sanitation, healthcare, education and social security. I fear that the regressive policies of this government are leading us, 110 years later, to a place where nobody should ever want to go. We should be concerned that the safety net is really starting to unravel. In part, these are some of the unanticipated social consequences of the Olympic project, in a capital city where Boris Johnson’s regime has knowingly presided over a growing housing crisis. The sad predicament of the people Ms Gentleman describes diminishes us all.

Rebecca Knowles Warrington,

Cheshire

There are two stories highlighting the rise in overcrowding and “sheds with beds” in this morning’s Guardian and Independent. These also come hot on the heals of ippr’s report this week explaining why the housing situation in London is such a mess and making some practical suggestions government and the Mayor can take to turn the city around.

We know from our NextDoor project, which helps people effected by cuts to thier benefits, that scores of families are relocating and overcrowding which exacerbates these problems (read Romin Sutherland’s report here), despite some journalists trying to deny this.

Z2K wrote to all the mayoral candidates drawing attention to the suffering of impoverished tenants as a result of the housing benefit caps. Only the Conservative and Labour candidates replied.  None of them addressed the issues. The new Mayor will have to address a rampant global free market pouring money into the London property as a triple-A-rated bond investment for the very wealthy. The pace of foreign investment in London property is now reaching catastrophic levels from squeezing impoverished Londoners out of their homes and rents are raised above the caps. Their suffering is result of a global glut of private tax free wealth, around $11.5 trillion in overseas accounts, nations with GDPs in surplus and tyrants ripping off their fellow countrymen treating property as a safe haven in a trouble world.  Is the new mayor brave enough to put 99% of Londoners first?

Find copies of the responses below.

Rev Paul Nicolson, Chair,

Zacchaeus 2000 Trust.