Your report that Wandsworth Council has been offering to pay its tenants up to £5,000 to ditch their homes and move into the private sector almost 130 miles away in Birmingham shows the scale of the housing crisis we face in London.
I am concerned that changes the new Government is proposing will makes things worse. Extending the right-to-buy to housing association properties will diminish an already insufficient stock of social housing.
A further cut to the benefit cap, which takes no account of the higher housing costs in London, will make huge swathes of the capital more unaffordable and exacerbate the social cleansing of inner-London that we have already begun to witness over the past five years – the kind of social cleansing Boris Johnson assured us he would not let happen.
We urgently need to increase house building and make housing genuinely affordable for Londoners. The new Government’s manifesto made precious little mention of building more homes.
We now need a Mayor who will get to grips with our housing crisis so Londoners are not made to feel unwanted in their own city.
FIONA TWYCROSS
AM London-wide Labour Assembly member
- Send your letters to: letters@wandsworthguardian.co.uk
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