Housing Policy, Newham Style

A local authority that has major problems with its housing waiting list decided to demolish a structurally sound council estate and send its residents elsewhere. The mooted replacement, to which they then gave their enthusiastic backing, was a new campus for University College London. It's so obviously immoral that you could easily assume this was a malevolent, Shirley Porter-style episode from the height of Thatcherism. It is, instead, the policy of a local authority that has 60 Labour councillors out of 60 and a high-profile Labour mayor – a one-party state.  The London borough of Newham – the borough in question – recently made the news when it transpired they had asked a housing association in Stoke-on-Trent to rehouse hundreds of those on its massive waiting list. The association refused, but it was unclear what the leaked request really meant – was this political theatre on the part of the Labour council, drawing attention to what Tory policy was forcing it to do?  Read more on the Guardian website.