Should Wales house London’s homeless?

Last week’s Guardian report that London councils are considering acquiring properties in parts of Wales to house homeless people generated responses that were mostly along the lines of “we don’t want London’s scum”.

Putting up an invisible barrier along Offa’s Dyke to immigrants isn’t quite the “welcome in the hillsides” that Wales likes to imagine it offers.  And replace “London” with “Pakistan” and these responses begin to look distinctly dodgy.  So what might be a response based on social justice?

First, we should recognise that everyone has a right to a decent home. People don’t have a right to a luxury apartment, but they should at least have somewhere dry, secure and not over-crowded. Indeed the right to be housed is one of the articles of the UN Convention on Human Rights.

This sounds fine, until the economics kick in.  Very simply, there is such a shortage of both private and socially-rented housing that many homes are too expensive for people on low incomes to afford.  Hence Housing Benefit, which provides help with rent for people on low incomes.

Second, people are free to live where they chose, not just in the UK but in the EU. Someone from London is perfectly free to move to Merthyr if they want just as people from Merthyr Tydfil can and do move to Cardiff, London and beyond.  But some places have more people wanting homes than others – and so some places are more expensive than others.

This is where the difficulties really start. A look at a property rental site shows that the cheapest 2-bed flats in Newham, one of the London boroughs reported to be considering relocating people to Merthyr Tydfil, start at around £900 a month.  This is the same as the  maximum Housing Benefit that someone in Newham can claim for a 2-bed home.  Nor is social housing any better – the council’s lettings website points out that there are thousands of people on its housing register and concludes bleakly “The majority of people who apply will never be housed.”

But you can forget any idea about Newham being prosperous.  Branded one of Britain’s worst places to live in 2007 it has more in common with the possible destination of its homeless than you might think.  It has lower levels of economic activity and higher levels of unemployment than Merthyr, and gross median earnings of men working full-time are just £27 a week more in Newham than in Merthyr. The combination of high rents and low wages mean that in Newham about half the typical male full-time wage of  £509.50 a week gross goes on rent.  This gap in affordability far exceeds that experienced anywhere in Wales, even in holiday- and retirement-home hot-spots.

Rather than reviling Newham residents who are struggling to afford a home, perhaps we should be sympathetic to their plight.  Like Wales they face tough local economic conditions, but with the added twist of sky-high rents.  So what to do?

Well, the long-term solutions to Newham’s housing problems don’t lie in exporting people to low-rent areas like Merthyr.  Areas usually have low rents because they have low demand for housing, which, in turn is because they have few jobs.  Sending more people to places like this to look for already-scarce work is no help at all.

Instead, Wales’s MPs and the Minister for Housing in Wales should be urging the Westminster Government and Newham Council to find some solutions on their own patch. This will mean building affordable housing, bringing rent levels under control and increasing the limits on benefits payable in London.

It also means building a more balanced UK economy in which economic growth is not concentrated in London and the south-east of England, while Wales and the north-east slowly decline. And it means having a more equal society, in which the vast wealth of London’s millionaire’s doesn’t contrast so much with the Merthyr-level wages of Newham workers.

In the meantime, we need to ask if we are comfortable having 3 or 4 bed-properties that nobody wants in parts of Wales while families live in one-room bed-and-breakfasts in Newham?  Are we comfortable that at the same time as we boast about Wales’s welcome to refugees we say we don’t want families from London? And if Wales doesn’t want London’s homeless, are Cardiff’s homeless OK?

How we treat people in need has a lot to say about the kind of Wales we really are.