As readers of this site will know, I’ve been posting recently about social housing landlords (councils and their HAs) who prioritise people in work ahead of people who are not in work for social housing. I have found this worrying, to say the very least. It’s bad enough to know that filthy rich private landlords like Fergus and Judith Wilson are closing their doors to people who are on benefits. It is REALLY bad when you hear that social housing landlords – the landlords who you’d think were supposed to help people who are in real financial straits – are excluding people as well.

I wrote about Newham’s employed-people-are-our-priority housing policy last week. Here’s another example. On Thursday, I spoke for a while with Jeremy Birch, who is leader of Hastings borough council. I rang Jeremy to talk about his views on Hastings’ role as a place where London boroughs send impoverished tenants to live. As you are likely aware, London boroughs are using the private rental sector in Hastings to place tenants who are affected by the benefit cap and/or supposedly can’t be found appropriate housing in London. I’ve been speaking with a number of young women in Newham who are facing that sort of “move” to Hastings, miles away from parents and childcare.

Anyway – Jeremy Birch made a startling revelation during that conversation. He told me that Hastings borough now had housing projects from which it actively excludes people who are on benefits.

We were talking about the effects of rent pressures on rent and house prices when he said this:

“We have a project in one of the wards where houses of multiple occupation are particularly prevalent. We have a project where we’re buying up, with the housing association, some of the worst of these properties and renovating and improving them. The social landlord [that] is responsible for the running of them. The lettings agreement is that they will only take people who are in employment (my emphasis). The reason for that is to try and rebalance the nature of those communities, so that they are more settled and more stable communities.”

In other words – people who are in situations that Birch described as “benefits dependent” will be excluded from those improved homes. I have spoken with a couple of lawyers who think such an exclusion/discrimination could warrant legal challenge.

I’ve got more work to do on this – I want to know more about the definition of “benefits-dependent” in that context and I want to know more about the places that excluded tenants will be sent to, if they’re sent anywhere. Jeremy Birch says that exclusion policy only applies to that housing project at the moment. Elsewhere in the borough, people are housed according to need. You take my point, though. We’re in a messy and very unpleasant environment here. It seems that some people are allowed housing and others are not. It seems that some people are thought worthy of improved and renovated housing, while others are not (which is doubtless why these young mothers and their children are living in this sort of cramped and dirty place). It seems that social housing landlords are taking those decisions blatantly. It seems that private sector landlords are not the only ones who are thinking Cull when it comes to people on benefits.

Jeremy Birch is not keen on taking people who are benefits generally. He can’t stop London boroughs placing London tenants in Hastings private housing, but he makes it clear that he’d like to. “We’re a deprived community in the south east, who are trying to reduce the amount of benefit dependency in our own borough. While we welcome anyone who wants to come to Hastings to move here, we are not happy that we would be taking further people who were benefit dependent. That is putting extra pressure on the services that we’ve got in the town.”

I will be doing more on this. The point to note for now is that this “we’re taking these people, but not those people” rhetoric is the sort of line which ends with people on benefits being chucked in the workhouse, because all other doors have shut. You can find yourself on a benefit for all sorts of reasons – job loss, illness, disability, domestic violence, sickness. Just remember that as all this carries on, it won’t just be private landlords who want you gone.