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Growth and spatial distribution of poverty in London 2001-2011
01:11:59
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Thank you all for joining us. It gives me a pleasure this evening to introduce Alex Fenton, who is well spent time in Cambridge in land economy, six years there, has worked at LSE up until 2013 in case, he said the analysis of social exclusion and in his own words rather retrospectively is now carrying out PhD at Leibes University in.
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Hanover.
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Managing very easily all of the data collecting data sets, having done this extensively both at Cambridge and lse. So his long standing research interests include poor neighbourhoods in Britain, spatial distribution of poverty in British cities, housing plan and urban policy, deindustrialisation, unemployment, regional divergence, official public administrative statistics and GIS and spatial analysis. His PhD work is looking under comparative sociology and history and public statistics, particularly in regard to the measurement of poverty and wealth and the statistical construction of an economic landscape in the UK and Germany. However, today he's going to talk to us about some work he's had previously as part of a case at Stiko looking at the spatial distribution of poverty and changes in the spatial distribution of policy across London. And just to say that Amanda Fitzgerald Ock is here as a sort of. She's going to be pitching in during the discussion after the presentation. Amanda is with us here in CASE at lse, so she'll be taking an active part in that section of the proceedings. So more no more adieu. I'll hand over to.
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Well, thanks Alan and thank you very much for the invitation to come and talk to you today. Particularly nice to come back to this forum because in many ways some of the ideas and initial questions came out of giving seminar in this group about three or four years ago. And then at the time I commented that I thought, you know, that over 2000, I was pretty sure that over the 2000s inner London had become much less poor and out of London more so, but without really that much idea at that point. I'm not going to say it was a flippant remark, but a sort of ungrounded remark about exactly what had been going on in London in the centre and in the suburbs over the 2000s. Before I get started, I want to say just something to the structure. This has come out of work over several different projects over the past four or five years on housing benefits, particularly on the change in neighbourhoods. And part of work that's being done at the case on a program called the Social Policy in a Cold Climate, which is looking at a whole range of social policy areas under the coalition government and what changes and including with a special focus on London. And there's some really interesting work going on there, which I am no longer deeply involved in. But Amanda Fitzgerald is and she's really deep in the field work at the moment with London councils and also with the analysis of data from a slightly later period than I'm going to talk about today. So since she's sort of deep in the field and deep in the research, she's decided not to present on it at this point, but rather to be here and discuss with you some of the more policies where she may be better placed to comment on on than I can. To give you a rough outline of how I want to structure the talk, I want first of all just to give you the broad picture of what happened in London in the 2000s. What was the change in poverty from a couple of different measures. I then want to pick at those later a little bit and ask some questions about what's going on. Firstly, in terms of the difference between in work and out of work poverty before and after housing cost poverty and then changes in population and housing. The last main section I want to try and link and try make the argument that want to look really quite closely at what's been happening in London's housing market, in the structure of housing development, particularly in the poorest areas, inner London, and also in the nature of housing subsidy in London, and try and make the case that these changes in the structure of development and housing in London over the 2000s really strongly lies behind what we see in the spatial distribution of poverty. And then I've just got a few. I'll really then welcome your questions and just have a few points for discussion perhaps at the end. So these things I'm sure you'll all be already well schooled in. But London falling population until early late 1980s, early 1990s and historically with very high areas of very high poverty, particularly in inner London and especially above all in East London, partly due to the historical structure of London's industry and partly due to where large amounts of social housing was developed in the post war period. So why just a preliminary, why be interested in the distribution of poverty? And it's not necessarily apparent why we should care more about where poverty is than the extent or nature of it. Overall, I think different. Some people might there's a reason for saying we don't care or shouldn't care that much, but there are some reasons people have thought we might do might care. From a poverty relief perspective, how do we tackle poverty? Are there ways we can target local area based initiatives more effectively to relieve poverty? Or is indeed poverty a certain fixation in the 2000s, is poverty aggravated or the effects of it exacerbated when it's concentrated in poor neighborhoods? And therefore, should we seek to deconcentrate poverty through housing interventions or other such policy? Another question is how well are public services, particularly those that are provided by local government, adjusted to the prevalence of poverty? Are schools appropriately funded and our programs appropriately designed to reflect the prevalence of poverty? Should we. What kind of policy should be adjusted to reflect the prevalence of poverty? How much funding adjustment is needed? And these have been running on for a long time. Certainly from the early 1980s onwards, there's a very explicit discussion about funding adjustments. So there's a discourse within fairly narrow policy and funding circles about concentrations of poverty. And then there are sort of slightly more, I won't say esoteric, but idealistic discussions about why people might be worried about the distribution of poverty. One comes up repeatedly is the idea of some social cohesion, that it might be bad to have poverty, but it's yet worse if rich, or at least non poor, live somehow sundered lives from one another in different parts of the different parts of the country and different parts of the city. And another more, perhaps more explicitly, less sort of cohesive, more explicitly kind of radical idea is the idea that there's rights of the city, that somehow we should have the benefits of dwelling in more attractive areas and benefiting from all the things that we might like about living in London or other big cities should be equally shared. But enough about that. I want to move on to some data and to some to examine the kind of gross and then some of the more detailed changes that we saw over the 2000s. This is the kind of thing that as I say, you'll probably be well conscious of. This is an overall broad measure of money coming into households. Gross, disposable household. I've got top line is out inner London, middle line is outer London and I've pegged it to grey line at the bottom. The United Kingdom as a whole. And what we can see this from the early mid 2000s, inner London starts looking really remarkably rich here. I mean, so both London inner and outer London, both well off compared to the rest of the country, as we know. But at some point in the early 2000s, inner London really starts looking quite radically different, experiencing much faster income growth by this measure. GDHI is not, however, it's a gross per head measure and it doesn't look at the distribution of that income. So it doesn't measure the same thing as poverty. It's a sheer Slightly macro style income measure. What we have inside here is some data from household Survey, the Family Resources Survey looking at poverty rates and this is people who are below the 60% of national median income. The grey line at the bottom is before housing costs. So we see from 2000 the dotted line there really not very much change over the 2000s. The shaded line is the confidence interval and then the top we actually see actually slight increases getting towards the end of the decade looking at poverty after housing costs, suggesting that we know that housing costs were rising certainly lower than the lower end of wages. I'll make a quick plug. We'll see here these lines, the confidence intervals are widening out. That's because there was a cut to the Family Resources Survey sample size. And if anyone is interested in cuts to official statistics and changes to official. I'm doing a talk next week on Wednesday at 4:30. That was a pretty cheap intro anyway. So these are London wide measures or broad area measures? I really want to pick at the detail now of looking at smaller areas, boroughs and neighborhoods to see how the distribution of that poverty over the decade has changed. I'm going to use two sorts of measures and I'm going to really work between these measures a bit to tease out what's been going on. The first measure I want to use is working from Social Security benefit claims. So there's obviously a fairly strong association between poverty and income poverty and claiming out of work benefits. Given that at least for working age adults having living on benefits almost by de facto guarantees that you'll be in poverty. Conceived in income distribution terms, but they're actually beyond that, quite good proxies for looking at people, you know, for looking at the broader range of low incomes, also relatively easy to work with. So we've created a data set called umbr, the unadjusted mean setted benefit rate. That's the number of benefit claims divided by the number of households. Quite easy to aggregate up, can be calculated year on year. And so we have made the data set available on the LSE website. The big problem is that now and increasingly the majority of people who are in income poverty are actually in work. And we don't have a very good small area measure of in work poverty. And it only measures one thing and it's susceptible to the changes in benefit rules which as you know there's been a lot in the last few years but also during the 2000s. So I've kind of to set against that. I've tried to work with a separate different approach to measuring poverty that's much more closely linked to the way that we conventionally conceive of poverty at the national level, which is using survey data, asking people about all their sources of income, looking at their housing costs, looking at the number of people who have to be supported off that income coming into the household. The problem with that, of course, is normally we don't have measures, we can't use that to measure below regional level. So what I've been trying to do is reweight this data so using census data, tie the two together so that we can estimate some of these real income measures as opposed to just benefit proxies down to smaller area level. I won't go into great detail on that, but I'm happy to pick that up. But just to stress that the main idea of that is to look at things like components of income changes, the effects of changing housing costs in different areas in a way that we're really not able to do working with the benefits data. So, as I said, the broad trend in over the 2000s was poverty falling in much of inner London, and markedly so in the high poverty neighbourhoods in inner London to start with, and rather less marked rises in poverty in outer London. So I'll give you a. I thought you'd probably be disappointed if I didn't give you a map or two at some stage in this talk. So here's my first, and this is a very, I suppose, a fairly conventional picture that you would get if you used government data sets like the indices of multiple deprivation. And this is the kind of map that people have produced from those. So the red areas are poorer areas in 2001, down to the sort of light gray being the least deprived areas. And as I mentioned in the sort of, in my initial remarks, that is the pattern of poverty that we've seen in London historically for several generations, of the highest poverty being above all in inner East London, but also in parts of west and South London as well. That's 11 years or sort of 10 years later, see if we can get the transition again. And you can see that firstly in this historic Inner east area of property, which is Hackney Tower hamlet in particular also to some extent in Southwark side of the river, quite sharp falls in poverty rates and then quite sharp rises, particularly in some of the outer areas in east and Northeast London. Problem with this map, of course, that we can't see, you know, it draws all the areas the same size there by their space. We can't see what's going on in the inner areas. So this is a sort of a digest, imagining London split into roughly equal chunks like an orange or so. And then seeing what happens from working from the center out to the edge. So the gray areas, gray sort of zones where poverty was falling and the orange, darkest orange where it was rising the most. So here the biggest falls were as we saw on the map, but kind of pointed out a bit more clearly here in Inner East London. So Hackney, Tower hamlets, the city, bits of Islington and the biggest rises were really out on the edge, up in the northern edge of London, which is Enfield, to some extent also in Brent and to some extent also in Utrecht, eastern edge of London. And what's also striking actually is this sort of, this is a wealthy or more prosperous slice of south West London through Wandsworth down to places like Wimbledon and see very and Putney and so on. Very little change, very little going on there. There are areas that weren't poor and remained non poor in the 2000s. So it's not that all areas of the suburbs became poorer. It's quite pronounced in certain chunks of outer London. And this is just to say, well, let's tally up against what was going on with employment rates and picking out those areas that we saw changing in the hexagon map. The grey line is the overall employment rate. The bottom line is the female employment rate. So in London, steadily rising employment rates from about 65 up to about 68, more strikingly so for women, about 55 up to about 60 just before the in 2010. And these patterns are even more striking when we look only at Inner East London. Picking out that small area which is like Tarahan, that's Newman and Hackney, they're really quite marked rises in employment rates for adults and especially for, for women and then corresponding or counterbalancing that falls in outer falls in employment rates and outer easement. What's very hard for us to know of course is whether this is the changing circumstances of the people there, whether that there's less employment overall in Outer East London so the people there no longer had jobs or to what extent it's changes in population. And that's not a question I can decisively answer, but I'm going to try and I'm not going to give you a convincing solution to that, but I'm going to try and show some why some of these population patterns have been, might have been changing. So as I said, the first step after that sort of broad picture I wanted to do was to kind of pick at this in a couple of ways. I've just presented broad poverty Rates without really thinking much what's going on behind those changes in poverty rates. So there's three ways I want to pick at that a bit. And the first and perhaps most important of that is to question what are the changes in poverty rates down to? Simply. So a poverty rate is number of people in poverty divided by the number of all people or all households in an area. So the most obvious way of thinking of a poverty rate falling is the number of. Of people in poverty falling. But actually, I want to suggest that what's going on in much of Inner East London, or in inner London as a whole, was actually more people, more households altogether. And that is driving the change in poverty rates a lot more. And then I wanted to also then pick a little bit and look at the question of what is the structure of poverty? Is it out of work poverty, is it poverty before or out after housing costs? So first to population and poverty count. So here, stacked up by these are all the neighborhoods with the poorest neighbourhoods at the top and then the least poor neighbourhoods in 2001 at the bottom, and broken them up into 10 even groups. Inner London on the left and outer London on the right. So in each of these groups, divided by how poor they were at the beginning, shown in grey, the change in the number of households. So more being bigger, net increase in households, and a little red line being the number of poor households. So everywhere is growing since London overall was growing. But we can see that household growth, I mean, if these were inner and outer London, we would expect, if there was no relationship between growth and poverty, we'd expect the bars to be the same size in group. What we see that inner London, lots and lots more households, very fast growth. And particularly that growth being concentrated in the neighborhoods which at the start of the decade were the poorest and that with only very marginal growth, the red bars on the left in the number of households who are poor, and then almost the opposite picture in outer London, so that we see quite large increases in poor households, these red bars, particularly in the somewhat less prosperous parts of outer London at the start of the century, and then really quite small, or growth in household population in the poorest areas. And actually we would expect, given that inner London is slightly smaller, it includes less population, expect inner London bars to be somewhat. Have less household growth if household growth was distributed evenly across the city. And that's really not the case. So that fastest growing areas were both, you know, were really the least and most prosperous bits of the inner city. So the second way I wanted to pick at it was to say, well, it was a question a bit exactly what's going on behind this? So at the moment I've mainly worked with this, you know, poverty proxy measure and some of these. This is the poverty rate in 2001 and the poverty rate in 2011. So if they're below the dotted line, these are the boroughs that had falling poverty rates and what I expect we find Hackney and Islington here under the line. Those were the ones that had some of the most red areas, the highest poverty areas in 2001. And we see some of the boroughs that were up in north and Outer London, like Enfield, Brent, Barnet and so on, above the line with the largest increases in poverty. But there's some puzzles in here. So Bexley, Havering, Barkley and Dagenham are all below the line. I think that's one, you know, shows one problem with these, one problem with these poverty measures that are only based on benefits. These are areas with relatively high proportions of old people and pensioners, or particularly poor pensioners were amongst the greatest beneficiaries of Labour's changes to benefits. So that these purely benefit measures don't pick up some of these changes in benefit policy, benefits for, in this case, benefits of pensions becoming more generous. So there's often a bit of a discrepancy, especially for some of these areas, between the purely benefits rate and a poverty rate as it's more conventionally conceived. This, I think, is even more telling or a more important question for us that informs what was going on in Inner London over the 2000s. What I'd like to do is show the additional amount of poverty, additional poverty rate in each area that's due to people's housing costs. The principle in poverty measurement being that you can't escape paying housing costs. So your income should be normally considered whether it's able to meet the needs of your household after your rent or mortgage has been paid. In London being more expensive, we see that even at the beginning of the decade, places like Tower Hamlets, Lambeth, Hackney, all had, after housing costs poverty rates about 10% or so higher than before housing costs. So the number, that's an additional percentage, additional proportion of households being pulled into poverty by the expense of their rent, often in Hackney and Islington, and much lower rates in outer London boroughs like Havering, Bexley and so on. What was very striking is looking at, well, Tower Hamlets, but also Westminster, Hackney really jump out as this additional poverty as a result of housing costs rising very sharply during the 2000s. So what I'm suggesting was going on here was that there's, you know, it is indeed a fall in the number of people claiming housing, sorry, claiming means tested benefits, on out of work benefits. But these reductions in poverty due to that are really being offset by, or to quite a large extent by additional people struggling with housing costs and finding their housing costs relative to their wages or benefit income too much to manage so that we've got a change in the nature of poverty going on in London rather than just a simple decrease. So in the last section, I want to touch a bit now on the kind of patterns of housing developments that might lie behind some of this not so much housing costs which I've just touched on, but on the development of new housing of which there was a lot, arguably not enough, but certainly a lot in London in the 2000s. The most striking thing, look at this data, which I'll show in a second, is how much the development of new housing was concentrated inner London, not outer London, and how much within inner London that was concentrated in the neighbourhoods which right at the beginning of the decade were the poorest neighbourhoods. So neighbourhoods that were already densely built up, that had high populations and relatively poor populations were the ones where the largest amount of additional housing was developed in London in the last decade. And this was not merely additional housing, but it was generally in the city centre housing of a higher value than was there up until that point. So it was. I put gentrification in quotes, but we don't really have a better word for it. But there was a form of kind of capital intensive and type of gentrification of upgrading of the housing stock that's going on. And then also this is not a matter of simple capital movements, but this is a matter of state policy, both to encourage development in that encourage development in poor areas and particularly in social housing estates, but also that change the nature of the way low income households were subsidised to meet their housing costs in the 2000s. A few more maps. So this is breaking London up into 1km squares and then saying how much new housing was built in each of those or what net new housing was there in the over the 2000s. So much of this is new building. Some of it can also be changes of use, people splitting houses into flats. But the really big changes come up where large new developments are taking place either on existing housing sites or sometimes on previously derelict or industrial sites. And the striking pattern, these darkest areas where, well, in some cases up to 5,000 new dwellings. I've captured 2,000 to show the pattern a bit more clearly, but there's a very dense pattern of development, large amounts of new housing being built where already housing was relatively dense in the centre, particularly around the east and the north of the centre, and then to some extent also along the river. So this is. This here roughly is the kind of Canary Wharf area there, as some of you know, as the business side of it is developed, so the housing side. And as I mentioned just now, this was not simply a matter of building the same thing as was already there, or in many cases it wasn't. It wasn't just adding on like for like. It was actually, you know, shifting up in the value of housing relative to what was there. I won't go into great detail about the measure here, but this is using council tax records which have a number of dwellings by council taxpayer. The great advantage, or it's not very useful for many purposes, but one advantage is that new dwellings are priced relative to their notional value in 1993 or 4. So that it should be in principle a like for like valuation of what the new dwellings are like relative to the old dwellings in a way that market prices are much harder to get to that on. And again, the red areas are where there's upgrading, so where what was being built over the 2000s was more valuable than or higher value dwellings than what was there at the start of the decade. And again, the pattern is similar. What comes out most strikingly, I think, from this is the concentration and the kind of upgrading of dwelling value that took place along the river. So that's not just in the east reaches of the Thames, along bits of the Lee Valley, but also in the western reaches. The big developments is some of, you know, in bits of Wandsworth, Lambeth and then into the, you know, further into the western boroughs. And very little of that, this kind of upgrading pattern taking or taking place outside of the inner boroughs, some odd spots up in the northwest, in the southwest, but really this kind of upgrading process very distinctly taking place along the river and to a certain extent and less markedly in the inner east boroughs. Whereas we've already seen poverty rates were falling the most swiftly, as you'd expect, perhaps the poorest areas are typically those that are built up most densely. So the pattern of poverty in London has often been that, you know, the most deprived areas were relatively dense or high rise or mid rise, often social housing extension. So I showed you the pattern merely by geography. This is said to look again, how does the pattern of development match up with the deprivation levels at the start of the decade? And as I did in the earlier slide. We've got the most poor at the beginning of the beginning of the century. Areas at the top down to the least poor at the bottom split into again 10 decile rooms. And the line shows you at the left end where the density at the start of the decade. So you might expect, notice that was around 40 to 50 dwellings per hectare in the most in the poorer part of inner London, down to somewhat below 40 dwellings per hectare in the less poor. And then in outer London, between 10 and around 20 dwellings per hectare. That perhaps is not very surprising that poor areas are relatively dense. What's more surprising is how much the line measures how much denser each area got. And you can see that pretty much follows a pattern of deprivation. So the areas that were already dense were the ones that had the most new dwellings in and then got denser faster. So the biggest line being that of the poorest, the poorest 10% neighborhoods in inner London which received the largest number of new buildings. I'll stick with that for a second. I mean, just to point out that I mean also then I haven't got a slide on this, but there's also a correlation between the amount of new housing, if you look at those poor neighbors, to the amount of new housing and the fall in poverty. So what's going on there, I think, is that people are building new dwellings, new dwellings either by developers, by rsls, particularly on social housing estates, which was enabled partly as a matter of policy, partly as a matter of financial expediency. And the majority of the new populations explaining much bigger populations in those areas are at least by benefit measures, non poor, but possibly in rather precarious circumstances. And so it's not just a matter of government policy to or at least a side effect of government policy to encourage development of new housing on these areas in the poorest areas. And explains perhaps what's happening relatively inner and outer London, but also the way in which poor households were being subsidised and given help when their housing costs were unaffordable. The two main planks of government policy for a long time, not merely in the 2000s to do this that were purely. Sorry, purely housing measures, apart from other general poverty measures, rather give people a house on a low rent, either a council house or a house with a housing association or a social landlord or and increasingly to pay people, give people either landlords or direct to tenants to help them with their rent in the private sector. And of course these things, all sorts of changes going on with these over the 2000s housing being sold off, demolished in the social sector and more people receiving housing benefit. But these things were going on slightly differently in inner and outer London. So the solid lines at the top are the total number of, best guess at the number of households in subsidy. So that's either getting a social rented house or receiving housing benefit to help pay their private rent. And then the grey line, so the colours haven't come out brilliantly, but the grey line is at the very top is inner London. And then the red line, solid line beneath it is out of London. And of course this means that the percentage of people out of London having more people in it altogether, more households in it altogether, but out of London has historically had far fewer subsidised households and inner London far greater proportion of households either getting housing benefit or living in sexual housing. I've got the figure somewhere in the presentation, but at the start of the decade it was about 20, 22% of households in outer London were subsidised and in inner London Something like 40, 42%. And one of the things in this notable thing that happened is that outer London has a lot more households, 100,000 more households who are at least in housing need and receiving subsidy to get in their housing. But that growth came up almost entirely through this dotted line here at the bottom, which is the number of people receiving private help with their private rent. And this is important, it's important not to sort of see this either in a sort of stark black or white. This in many ways gave people the opportunity to live where they would not perhaps have otherwise been able to live. Low income, often working households were then able to live through the extended use of private sector housing benefit to live in a broader range of areas. And out of London, of course, that's what households throughout London's history have done, tend to move out and move on as they've gone with families. So that it's perhaps not unreasonable that the benefits or subsidy system enables low income households to do the same over the life course. On the other hand, it was extremely high cost, it's extremely expensive, as you can imagine, paying people's rents in London, the same is happening in and to a certain less extent. So whilst the number of total amount of social dwellings was declining slowly but steadily by about 25, 30,000, we have a large increase in amount of people claiming housing benefit. So I want to wrap it up at that point and just to summarise, what I've suggested is going on firstly, in outer London, rising poverty, although not as, not incredibly Quickly as the falls in Inner London. And these falls are mainly being in out of work poverty or a large amount of it being picked up by people who are claiming out of work benefits. And some of this is offset by changes to the benefit system. So that Outer London, by the nature of its population composition, benefited rather more from the targeting of Social Security increases at pensioners and a relatively modest amount of housing development going on in Outer London compared to certainly relative to the starting population and a correspondingly slower increases in population and households than some of the very fast things that were going on in Inner London. And amongst all the households in Outer London suggested a rising proportion of those are people receiving in one way or another some kind of subsidy because they can't afford their housing. And most of that coming through more expenditure and more claimants of housing benefit or local housing allowance. And then Inner London, as clear from the maps at the beginning, as I said in the introduction, there's a hope of convinced you very striking marked falls, especially in the poorest neighborhoods, in poverty rates as we can best estimate them by the kind of measurement we've used for a neighbourhood level. And this somewhat confirmed by rising employment rates in London and especially in traditionally historically poor boroughs like Hackney and Islingsome. But there's this sort of picture of at least falling poverty is somewhat offset by perhaps what might as a precariat of this is more working age households, more households in work, but an increasing proportion of those finding their housing costs, putting them into poverty. So that when we look at, you know, when we use a kind of true poverty measure or, you know, full income measure, we see that sort of the kind of crude picture somewhat tempered also that this was not reductions in number of poor households, but that the changes in poverty rates are much more to be attributed to very fast increases in population, reflecting very fast rapid development, especially in the poorest areas and especially in Inner East London, of new housing. So just a few words on what might be the prospects and what. And then a couple of points for discussion which strike me, but I mean the first thing to observe is that although there is this change going on in the 2000s, by no means that London has in 10 years flipped inside out in its in the spatial distribution of poverty that Inner London and particularly boroughs like Tower Hamlets, Newham, Hackney are still, whatever measure we might use of employment, of benefit claims or of income measures of wages, much the poorest parts of London and still amongst the poorest parts of the country, although they have tended to improve their position somewhat relative to the big northern cities. So, I mean, one. One question is whether that change will continue or accelerate. You know, is this the sort of. Are we just seeing the start or the beginning period of a long process of a sort of restructuring of London, reshaping of London so that it might look more like. No. Will London in 10 or 5 or 30 years look more like Paris, for example, which is one people always quote, where with a relatively prosperous and well to do core and poor deprived suburbs or exurbs. A couple of things that might be going on. One, of course, is changes in housing benefit, which I've spoken about here before, I won't talk in great detail about, but just to mention that clearly that the structure of subsidies for private sector tenants and the strong incentives to move out of inner London, and that's already being picked up in the claimant figures. Also questions about, you know, the contribution of rent. So one of the claims made for changes to housing benefits that would help bring down private rents. No sign of that happening as yet, as probably some of you experience yourselves. So that kind of component of poverty which is coming from households struggling to pay their housing costs, shows at the moment no signs of abating and likely increasing. And then there are also questions that, you know, more in the realm of housing and planning about what kind of housing is going to be delivered under the mayor's framework and so on. Is it going to be affordable housing? Is it really going to be housing that's targeted at the income poor? And that's, you know, those are really open questions that will affect how this evolves further, some sort of follow on policy questions. And I think, you know, Amanda, I think you're better placed to pick up on this than I am. You know, what do these changes mean for the provision of services, particularly for local authorities who are concerned to provide, for example, social care, education and so on. One of the notable features of the changes to local government. Local government's been amongst the most hard done by and the most hard hit by the reductions in expenditure since 2010. And that was a very regressive change, partly undoing what was sort of progressive in the technical sense rather than in any political sense, in the changes under new label, which tended to dish more money out to poorer neighbourhoods. Sorry, to poorer authorities, that the changes in local government funding were both deep and tended to affect poorest boroughs both in London and out of London. And so there's questions really about what are the challenges for local authority services provision with reduced funding and this regressive change and the changes in the structure of poverty in London. I suppose aside from those, some last thoughts, aside from those fairly narrow or more pragmatic questions, are really what I suppose firstly, just to underline what I would like to do or what I hope try to do, is really to try and connect the traditional classic poverty studies to the housing policy, an analysis of both the market and the degree of marketization. Because I think what characterizes what we saw certainly in the housing development in the third section is that not only these are decided changes, these were government policy and they were the increased use of market mechanisms in the provision of housing. Both the use of subsidizing private sector consumption side subsidy rather than supply side subsidy and social housing and the opening up of land within government publicly owned land, social housing estates to capital investment producing this pattern of densification and rapid housing development in the poorest neighbourhoods. There's a question about which way around we want to look at that. So a lot of the stress within discussion about the housing crisis, which of course is rarely out of the news, is a question of housing supply. And I think there's a question here about what, you know, also what are the London's problem, of course, insofar as it might be a problem is very high income inequality. You know, to what extent do we understand the kind of differential consumption and inequality in housing consumption as a contributor or as a possible solution to housing to the housing problem of overcrowding? So Becky Tunstall at York has shown quite nicely how the changes in inequality kind of show up in changes in inequality in housing consumption. So over the last 30 years tended to get greater income inequality and that shows up as the most prosperous households or the best off households consuming correspondingly unequal amounts of housing. So it's kind do we need a bedroom tax for the wealthy? And I answered in that because I think, I don't think it's not because I wanted necessary to replace employment policy as a replacement for employment policy or traditional welfare transfer policy as a replacement for poverty policy or necessarily to replace housing inequality as a replacement for housing supply. Just that these kind of employment increase in housing supply are overemphasized or almost exclusively emphasized as solution to this recurring problem, you know, recurring policy domains of poverty and inadequate housing. And I think there's a second question which really for me, which is more of a methodological question is about what's the comparative approach? What should we be looking at London against? I mean, one is to think about London and as a global city and its global relations and people in this room have done very interesting work, for example, on international migration and how that's changing labour market structure, but also on capital flows. Where is this money coming from that's building the housing? Why are rents rising? And how much is London's employment and growth structure a consequence of its position in relation to other world cities terms? And then another question is, you know, we should be comparing it to just other cities in general. Are these questions other generic answers or to some of the housing and planning problems that we can draw from this or London? Is London so, way so special or odd or idiosyncratic that what we see in London doesn't hold? And then there's questions, you know, should we be comparing London to other British cities? So, and I mean, I think this is perhaps, you know, there's a say that London perhaps overstated how special London really is and how special some of these features really are. I mean, Amanda again has been doing some interesting work on comparing these sort of poverty, decentralization of poverty in London to looking at other cities. And we see something similar going on, although less markedly and less swift in other large British cities, you know, and is this kind of high poverty rate something that's distinctly London or is it, you know, an urban feature which is, you know, which is of course been analyzed urban poverty as a topic as old as sociology, I suppose. The last question, which I, you know, I would be interested to have your thoughts on. And it strikes me, you know, living in Berlin now, I mean some of the. Berlin is a very different city in many ways. Different housing structure, different. Not a rich city by any, you know, by any comparison to London. But with this question of rising rents, the decentralization of poverty, the questions about the generosity of welfare benefits, does it enable low income households live in the centre? And these questions are constantly thematised in the local press. People talk about them, they're action groups, you see graffiti everywhere about it. And I'm curious in a way, you know, am I missing something in London? Is this thematised? What is the, you know, is this imperceptible? And why, you know, are these political questions and are these in the big sense as well as just some maps? Anyway, I'll leave it there and thank you very much.
- [50:33]
A
That's why I start off with a clarification to make sure I understood. I mean, in many senses we really be talking about the decentralization of proxy, but we're not really talking about the dilution of proxy in a sense. But if we went away from percentages to actual numbers would make be looking at a very different story. We still have numbers wise a much more consistent story of poverty in the centre that's only changing when we look at the percentage in relation to all these new residents.
- [51:03]
B
There certainly is not a wholly answerable question from using static data. Certainly see that it appears in working in the 2001 census. Some of it is really preferential migration. So the poor households moving to poor areas, households in lower so people on economic grouping experiences. It is really some deconstruction. There is something going on there and I think I would also name it that in a sense that there's something, you know, there's some policy decision which has these effects. This is not just trying to argue with it is that it's not meaning kind of aleatory that this pattern has emerged that there's some real things going behind there to pick that. But I think, you know, you're quite right to call it deconcentration. You know, if you look at segregation measures those are falling both for rich and for poor, which is really interesting. So they're both poor households and the richest 20% and 10% are less segregated in 2011 than they were in 2001. So some of it is really dilution and. And again I think that can be attributed to some of the housing values I've spoken about.
- [52:14]
A
Ok, I'll open it up to the floor and final position. This time round we'll go for one of our RUPP students.
- [52:22]
B
First.
- [52:24]
C
I would like to know whether you think that the mixed community's agenda is rather making it more difficult for for local authorities to tackle poverty with area based policies or on the corporate. It makes it easier because as you said we need to concentrate or dilute poverty. So it's kind of a burden of poverty is more equally distributed among public.
- [52:55]
B
I mean, I suppose it depends a bit what you think area based policies are really for. You know, are they. So I mean coming back to the first slide I sort of made a distinction between thinking about spatial justice and poverty relief. So one view might be, you know, we or have in the past and there isn't really a neighborhood policy anymore but in the 2000s spent money to targeted particular very poor neighbourhoods. So was that in order proportionally it was in order to reduce poverty in these neighbours or is that, you know, is it really more important that people who live in poor neighborhoods don't unduly or excessively more exposed to worse features such as crime or poor local facilities, poor schools and so on. So it's like a kind of compensatory funding that. And so I mean. Or is it, you know, with the main kind of thrust of poverty relief being through employment and transfers? And so I think the question about whether mixed communities insofar as a policy or as a result is important depends a bit on whether what you're trying to do. So it would be a problem if you thought that was your main way you're going to relieve poverty was by implementing neighbourhood programs. But really the amount that was spent on neighbourhood programs is pretty small compared to both what local authorities spend overall and to what's spent on conventional tax transfers, welfare type of policies. So I sometimes. Probably not, I think because I think about area based policies and targeted policies really as being more important for addressing difficult conditions and the uneven experience of difficult conditions and poor services than it really is about hoping that it will be the major plank of a poverty reduction strategy.
- [54:58]
D
Could you explain what spatial justice is? Because it seems to me that's the confused concept which runs through this.
- [55:10]
B
I'm not a proponent of it particularly, but I suppose it's what I've just touched on there, that certain goods and things that are publicly provided, natural goods are spatially distributed and that access to the enjoyment of them is spatially conditioned. And that in some measure or another we would want the access to those spatially located goods not to be equaller or equaller than it is or not unduly equal. And it has the same confused concept in that well, how much inequality is tolerable. But that's roughly what I take spatial justice to have to mean sort of equalization of access to goods that are located somewhere.
- [56:03]
D
But is the problem not that it ties it to areas rather than tying it to people? So you might think that principles of quasi spatial justice would be that your welfare should not be affected by where you came from rather than where you happen to be living at a point in time. There's a lot to watch show. There seems to be people moving around the map rather than things that are happening in terminal.
- [56:31]
B
Yeah, Casey said that you'd be interested in individual outcomes, if that's what you mean. I mean the experience of poor public services that are important to people. Outcomes are quite strongly located. I mean put on the school would be the most striking example that you like to be in a bad school because you're in a poor area. That doesn't necessarily mean that you should not have poor areas. My broad view would be that don't be surprised you have an uneven distribution if you have an even spatial distribution. If you have an uneven distribution full stop, I think that's would ness it up. So either you make schools and poor areas better or you, you know, or you have a just in front of them. And that seems to be the most sensible line to be thinking along rather than seeking a redistribution of people as an end in itself.
- [57:30]
E
Yeah, I mean you suggested that a lot of the results you see here are to do with the, I guess the kind of re demolition rebuilding subsidiation paradigm of kind of ailing 19 or post war midwire housing stock. And I was just wondering to what extent you think your findings are related to, you know, just kind of coming to the period where that housing stock is kind of falling apart and needs and needs regenerating. Whereas in maybe like 10 years time or perhaps even now there's hardly any of that housing, particular housing stock that was shotgun together and kind of falling apart about that will be left. So to what extent do you think your findings are related to the cumbling of public housing program?
- [58:18]
B
Yeah, you're right. There was certainly at least a very strong, you know, looked at what local authorities were doing and why they were doing this demolition and rebuilding and densification of very poor neighborhoods. It was often not, you know, because they were pursuing a mixed communities policy. Because they said we want a mixed community here. It's because they said, well we can't. This, we have this affordable homes target. We need to get to that point. We need to have so much decent standard and we can't do it with this. This is too difficult, this stuff is too decayed. I mean people had different views about whether, where and when that was true. But that was certainly the rationale for it was not to do with a. So I mean there isn't, I mean because there being so practically no social housing or very little social housing, certainly virtually no counter housing. Whether that's true, whether that is a cycle now, but I think some of the broader pressures will continue to bear. So I don't think it is just a kind of effect of housing generations. And also that change wouldn't have happened perhaps to the extent and speed which it did without things like the affordable decent homes standard. And that was a strong policy push to get that done. It wasn't just sort of a natural aging cycle of those houses because I mean many of them were already in a pretty decayed state, you know, and nothing could be done about them in the late 1990s.
- [59:42]
A
Another question at the back and then maybe two at the back and maybe bring Mandarin.
- [59:48]
F
Thanks. You start off with a very interesting discussion about the nature of data and I just wondered what you might think about if you. Is it that you can only do this sort of stuff relationship to the census data? I mean your starting and ending was 2001 and 2011. Now, if we're working on trends, I happen to work on African cities, but I do have a loan. If you're working on trends in the middle of your date, you've got a short shock, horrendous shock, the financial crisis. The nature of your trend is somewhat muddied. So this isn't really. It may not really be a trend. So I wonder if you'd like to reflect upon that a bit because really the nature of money and so on has dramatically changed the last two to three years and it's similar. I mean I live in Harangue, so I know a bit about this. There was a second question as well. However, again it's about data. You talked about various. Talked about pensions and stuff. You didn't talk about women very much. You mentioned that men, women's employment rates. But there's just been research that's been done by Chris Hamnet on cities research Group of Kings from which I can't. And. And he did a seminar recently in which he showed that the impact of the very recent changes within the last 12 months or so are dramatically focused on women with children, particularly female household heads with children, and that it is they who are very much going to be pushed out of the inner parts of London. And in fact they're deliberate. That's deliberate as well. So I wanted to. You like to comment. They're both things about data really. How much can your data focus on the type of households rather than these sort of broader things? And this issue of trend when you've got the world's greatest financial crisis of God knows how many decades, isn't it?
- [61:48]
B
Well, I'll take your question about the. Using the two time points and you're quite right. Two striking things, two important things that are going on. Firstly both the crisis in 2007 and then rises in unemployment after that falls actually falling in inequality because lower the top end of the bottom end of incomes being somewhat protected by benefit system and benefit rules, whilst higher incomes falling more swiftly. So the benefits stuff is quite nice because it allows us to look year on year and you can see a very sharp. You can see whether that is a longer term trend and what it picks up this very sharp rise in unemployment and that sharp rise in unemployment Affecting poorer neighbourhoods more severely. So more people in vulnerable employment and being affected by that. What I think is it doesn't quite. It gave me enough confidence to feel that that snapshot is not totally misleading that we have there, that some of these things are going on. And I certainly, you know, go back to. Here, for example. You know, I think there's something. There's already some sense that something might be, you know, what's going on over 2000 as a whole. That's obviously not spatial, highly spatial, detailed data, but it's some sense that we can, you know, whether there's, you know, very big jump and of course you can see some of the effects, you know, whether that's an effect or whether that's an outlying point in 2008. But it. Men and women. Yeah, I mean, that's one of the reasons I wanted to start working with some of these survey data and trying to bring together survey and sensit data because the benefits data tends to be analyzed in a very household insensitive way. It's just a raw number. It gives us very little sense of either how the incomes of households are changed by what components, whether by low pay or now increasingly by benefits changes. But I have to admit I haven't gone a long way in teasing that out by gender. But I think that's one of the reasons what I wanted to push is a little bit beyond simply using benefits IND type data, because it begins to look at some of the questions about the more precise nature of who and how it's affected.
- [64:22]
G
Given that your research shows very clearly that big concentration of new housing in places where poorest Londoners lived hitherto. And didn't we also know that a lot of that housing will have been under occupied or certainly not been social housing? Presumably going back to the spatial justice concept or whatever, this is going to produce heroic mixing of communities. And it is sort of one thing that politicians have desired to do for decades, which is to get large numbers of better off people living in poor neighborhoods is being achieved at scale within.
- [65:04]
H
London, is that right?
- [65:05]
B
Yeah, yeah. Whether that's a, you know, whether, you know what, whether it achieved what politicians wanted to achieve, I don't know. No, no.
- [65:14]
G
But it's just interesting to observe that how there are all sorts of in between. Rich people oppose housing more than poor people and boroughs concerned. Labour boroughs are more in favour of developing the conservative ones often. So there's lots of intermediate variables. But it's interesting, it must have had that effect to some degree, mixing communities, however accidentally.
- [65:38]
B
Yeah. It's not that this was happening like you say really on a large and you know large and very widespread scale that it wasn't something really that took place in a few regeneration projects but was really you know a widespread effect and also as I said that the rich became less segregated which was which is a slight reversal of what other people suggest was happening UK wide you know in the last couple of decades.
- [66:07]
I
Two very quick comments. That was very interesting but in a way wants to particularly intriguing is to see how much the outer boroughs which have dug in their heels so effectively for years to stop them getting this awful working class people like.
- [66:27]
B
Avoid building.
- [66:28]
I
Social housing if they possibly can are getting all this poverty in their areas through the way the market, the private one they've stuck with the private market and lo behold as well we saw last week otherworldly I mean poor people hitting them out there. That's just fascinating to see certain mix which they certainly will not try to achieve. The other comment I wanted to, I wanted to ask you whether you can comment on in the light of all this whether this very important policy adopted by the Olympic legacy system and Newborough in particular but also embodied in the London plan that the aim for east London is convergence with the London language. You're showing that convergence can be achieved by just importing more rich people doesn't necessarily have any benefits. You comment on this kind of way put policies formulated.
- [67:30]
B
I mean it's not it's an odd formulation. I've never heard of it in the myself but I haven't followed the Olympics very closely. But I mean just sort of yes is the answer that you could achieve in that But I think also the caution I would put to that it's not about importing lots of rich people. I think that rich, non poor and lots of people really not necessarily possible and that's what I really a bit cautious about. You know there's a slightly overplayed image sometimes of you know shipping in rich people. Somehow people are really quite you know we're not in you know precarious or low paid but not picked up by the kind of measures that we're using. That's something. Amanda, you've been doing some work in Agitabur well yes we did and we.
- [68:20]
C
Got Brent is one of our case studies which as we saw from some of that data is an interesting case that they've had an increase in poverty barriers now to borough and what they were telling you was an issue of overcrowding for them. So these are populations that have been particularly dispersed around the borough. There's a concentration going on at the LSOA level of those poorer households. Only a particular neighbourhood's being developed as the richer part of that borough. And how to redistribute the local authority there in laws to reflect that and it's quite a challenge for them.
- [69:01]
H
You're studying sort of 10 year period that's probably part of a much longer trend. I mean, you know, thinking back sort of 60 years ago, you know the Docklands, all those sort of factories around central London were presumably occupied with a low income jobs and that's where the low income people live. Now all those, those jobs have gone and low income people are more likely to be, well they certainly not going to be likely to be working in the central London offices but they're likely to be up working for I supermarkets and shops scattered all over London. And so one would have expected that this was actually a trend which had been going on for 40, 40 years. And the second thing is that the affordable housing requirement in London, 50% of new homes in any large development is supposed to be affordable housing. Presumably has an impact in scattering affordable housing around.
- [70:03]
B
Yeah, I mean on the long term trends I think one thing I've not seen, I think Danny Dorling's made the best efforts to look at that. I mean might be two ways I can say going the one way of course the losing population, you know, up to late 80s it might be well that it was losing its more prosperous population more quickly. So that even though we've got at one point people in low paid or relatively low paid working class occupations, those disappearing with whether those people then finding new jobs or whether that being unemployment, I think it's a bit hard to be sure And I would really like to see a bit of work that looked at London and you know, that sort of neighbourhood level detail depends, you know, is that how much people demand on site affordable housing, how scattered it is and what are the routes by which new sites are coming up and how is that negotiated? It's not something I've followed in the last couple of years so closely. So I don't know whether now there is still where there's an easing of pressure to demand on site affordable housing and whether that's part to achieve that 50% or whether that's still as much a favourite policy as it was perhaps in the late 2000s.
- [71:19]
H
It's a policy which is resisted by I think the conservatives in power certainly in my borough. One of the factors is it's now actually labor controls.
- [71:42]
A
I think just because of the timing.
- [71:44]
B
Sorry.
- [71:48]
A
Just to thank you once again. Thank you very much for your presentation.