This morning, I went to Stratford to report on the Focus E15 young mums‘ attempt to attend Mayor Robin Wales’ proceedings committee. As readers of this blog will know, these young mothers – all classed as homeless and all living in temporary hostel accommodation – have battled for months for secure social housing for themselves and for the rest of us. They wanted to appeal again to Wales for social housing today.

As I arrived, I was handed a copy of this week’s Newham Recorder, which carries a column from Wales about Newham council’s recent crackdown on rough sleepers round the Stratford Centre. As part of a programme that the council charmingly refers to as “a rude awakening for rough sleepers”, Asbo warnings were recently slapped on 28 people who were sleeping out around the mall. The council has been “helped” in this endeavour by the police, the UK Border Agency and Thames Reach.

I found Wales’ column purely extraordinary (you can read the whole thing here). There’s a nasty, punitive thread running through it – a bit like shit through a goose, as the great Justin McKeating would say. It hits exactly the Clean Up or Piss Off pitch that Edwina Currie keeps aiming for. There’s a rough sleeping problem around Stratford centre, Wales says, because there is “easy access to waste food and cardboard,” (he sounds like he’s talking about drawcards for rodents in that bit). Rough sleepers who “refuse offers of assistance from us or our partners cannot expect to continue to sleep on our streets.” They can expect Asbos if they try, it seems. The council is “offering support to those who will accept it and enforcing the law where necessary,” Wales informs us. “I realise that this is a tough message,” he goes on to say, “and that some people will be instinctively unhappy with it.”

Bloody right. I’m one of those people. I bet there are plenty of others. This stuff is appalling. There is nothing remotely forgiving about the piece that Wales has written here. There’s no political context. There’s no detail about the many reasons why people might be trying to shelter from awful weather in cardboard in a walkway and getting pissed to block it all out. There’s nothing at all about the realities of the fallout from this government’s dreadful “welfare reforms” – JSA sanctions, homelessness, severe mental health problems, the loss of hostel housing, being thrown off employment and support allowance and so on and so on and so on. As it happens, I’ve talked with a great many people who are in and out of street homelessness and there’s inevitably a complicated story at the back of it. We need to hear more of these stories and less about Asbos if you ask me. I’ve talked to people with serious mental health conditions who’ve been displaced when their hostel accommodation has been closed. I’ve talked to people who’ve lived in tents while their ESA problems have rolled on and on and they’ve tried to address their serious addiction problems by moving towns. I’ve talked to people who lost their businesses in the recession and ended up unemployed, sanctioned and homeless.

I doubt that Asbos would have sorted those situations out, but it seems that you get councils going for it. And all this in a column from a mayor who Private Eye tells us this week has been using Newham’s repairs and maintenance services to carry out work on his home. This service “undertakes work for non-council tenants and this service is available to any Newham resident,” the council told blogger Mike Law (the story says that Wales paid about £1500 for the work). Which must be great if you have a house and money to pay for its upkeep. It’s probably less exciting if you’re homeless, eating food off the pavement and wrapping yourself in cardboard every night in the Stratford Centre to try and keep warm. There’s something very wrong with all of this. There’s a poisonous inequality inherent in it and the finger of blame is being pointed at people who deserve it least. I think here of the many boarded-up flats on Newham’s Carpenters Estate – homes that sit empty as the council wags a warning finger at 28 people who sleep in a mall and have nowhere to go and may not want to be strongarmed into “specialist support.” Those people may not want to take instruction from mayors who have enough money for their own housing and repairs. They may be sick of seeing the political class come down on the poorest like a shitload of bricks. They may just want decent social housing and paid work, but can’t get either. God knows that is happening everywhere.

Anyway – trying to make that point to the political class is almost impossible now. As I said at the start of this post – this morning, the young women of the Focus E15 housing campaign tried to enter a mayoral proceedings meeting to appeal again to Wales for social housing in the borough. This is a campaign that should interest anyone who isn’t rich and doesn’t own a huge house outright. Without secure social housing, we’re all at the mercy of increasingly merciless private landlords. We’re all looking at short tenancies, badly-maintained flats and skyrocketing rents. But the women have been told that they must take 12-month private lets in the private rental sector, or they’ll will get no more “help” from the council. They wanted to talk to Wales about this again today. Unfortunately, they were told that the meeting was over and that they weren’t allowed in. You’ll see that in this video:

I’d ask the council for a comment on this, except that the council won’t talk to me. That part of things has gone a bit emotional, in a crappy council way. As I wrote here, I can only guess that my earlier stories about the Focus E15 women’s battle for secure social housing and the rotten standards at the temporary hostel they’re living touched a nerve. So, we’ll take what I write as written. Apparently, a press officer turned up later on today to say the mothers should have been let into the mayoral proceedings after all. Pity the proceedings were over.

So. The Focus E15 campaign remains extremely important and will only become more so. These women are pointing up the problems with the private rented sector, the terrible lack of secure social housing and the way that people on benefits and low incomes are treated if they dare to ask for it. Just remember – this is all coming your way, unless you’re rich. Very rich.

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.