Boris' passion-politics is good; piffle-politik is not

Natalie Elphicke is a housing and finance expert and National Director of the Conservative Policy Forum.

Boris’s passion and intelligence are perhaps his greatest strengths. Like an educated John Prescott, one forgives the hyperbole and enjoys the theatre. Not Yesterday. Yesterday’s hyperbole was pure piffle-politik – misinformed, dangerous and wrong.

His comments on the continuing availability of social housing in Inner London are extraordinarily ill-informed.  Particularly given that his office has only recently  published a factual report, “Inner London: Context for the Draft Replacement London Plan” in June 2010 which includes detailed analysis of comparative social housing in the different parts of London. Nearly 35% of Inner London’s housing stock is social housing (according to the Mayor’s own GLA report).  That is double the national social stock for England as a whole (which is 18.5%, according to the Mayor’s own GLA report). Outer London has 17.7% of its stock as social stock, slightly less than the national average but higher than the South East (14.4%) (according to the Mayor’s own GLA report).

And looking even more centrally, Westminster Borough has social housing stock of 22%, again higher than the national average.  In the parts of Westminster which are the most central in London, nearly half the stock is affordable, and the Council is, against all the odds, continuing to build new social homes, under the leadership of its very able Cabinet Member for Housing, Philippa Roe.

Driving the poor out of the Centre of the Capital. Hardly. A forced mass migration from the Inner Boroughs to the Outer Boroughs. To where exactly?  That’s piffle-politik for you.

The challenge for many, too many, people living in Inner London social housing is worklessness and benefit dependency.  Poverty charities calculate that a third of people are not working in London’s Inner Boroughs and just under 30% in the Outer Boroughs. They calculate that one-third of the unemployed are under 25 years old. This is reflective of more than a decade of de-valuing the contribution of individuals on benefit, or equating their happiness to the amount they are paid to stay out of the workplace, assuming that they have no value to give.  The housing and benefit policies of the last decade have been dehumanising, wasteful and destructive.

The package of the Coalition’s housing and benefit changes are born from passion.  Passion that can transform the personal opportunities and mobility to work for thousands of people, including thousands of Londoners.  They can create the circumstances where people are encouraged and rewarded to work, to contribute, to participate, for themselves, their communities and their families.

This big change, this new opportunity, this passion for people, especially the dispossessed young people, and for what people can do, that’s surely worth supporting.  If you were Mayor of London, why wouldn’t you want to be part of that?