These letters (one from our chairman) were published in the Guardian today:

Housing policy represents another lack of strategy in the Queen’s speech (Editorial, 10 May). A combination of housing benefit caps, cuts and the rising prices and rents of a home will inflict ever increasing pain on Londoners. The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors tells us that house prices are falling everywhere except London, and Rightmove says optimistic sellers in the capital have driven asking prices nationally above their 2008 peak. Rents in London are being driven above the caps by a global free market which sees London property as a triple-A-rated safe haven for spare cash. Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, the son of the Libyan leader, was planning to make more than half a million pounds a year renting out his home in north London.

The coalition, with almost total silence from the opposition, has told Londoners to get on a housing ladder that is more like a moving staircase coming down, until the poorest are shunted off the bottom to who knows where as rents overtake caps. In the 1960s, many families were moved from the East End into new towns with newly built homes. This time there is no planned affordable rented housing to move to, just temporary accommodation, overcrowding and debt. Is anybody listening, does anybody care?

Rev Paul Nicolson

Taxpayers Against Poverty

Amelia Gentleman’s special report (10 May) outlines the desperately inadequate living conditions and exploitative landlords to be found in the London borough of Newham in 2012. I have just been re-reading Jack London’s People of the Abyss and have been struck by the frightening similarities in the grim picture he paints of squalid living conditions for the poor of the East End in 1902. He too describes vastly overcrowded, infested houses, with haphazard shacks behind, their roofs strewn with refuse from above. The inhabitants have miserable and precarious lives. The 20th century brought genuine and huge improvements in living conditions for millions, by means of mass access to high-quality sanitation, healthcare, education and social security. I fear that the regressive policies of this government are leading us, 110 years later, to a place where nobody should ever want to go. We should be concerned that the safety net is really starting to unravel. In part, these are some of the unanticipated social consequences of the Olympic project, in a capital city where Boris Johnson’s regime has knowingly presided over a growing housing crisis. The sad predicament of the people Ms Gentleman describes diminishes us all.

Rebecca Knowles Warrington,

Cheshire

Letter published in The Independent, 26th April 2012:

The reckless forced migration of tenants out of London, to who knows where, creates costs for the taxpayer and to the wider economy that the Treasury never estimates (“Plans to house London’s poor in Stoke attacked as ‘social cleansing“, 25 April).

Educational under-achievement has been shown to be more likely as a result of the destabilisation of children’s lives. Deliberate overcrowding to make the rent fit the caps is also likely to lead to more aggressive behaviour both in the classroom and on the streets as young people compete for space and lose some elements of parental and kinship control. Children losing local circles of friends and adjusting to new schools also disrupts educational progress.

The housing benefit caps create unmanageable rent arrears. The stress of the parents in debt is known to affect the children. Debt is related to mental illness, which the Centre for Mental Health has shown is the most expensive illness for the NHS, the economy and in human misery.

There are social and economic consequences in the break-up of well-established local three-generational family structures, as was discovered in the mass movement from the East End to the new towns in the early 1960s. That movement was planned and new affordable housing was ready for the tenants.

This time the lack of any coherent housing policy for the past 40 years means the demand for affordable housing far outstrips the supply; no affordable homes were planned for the new homeless. They face a life of impoverished uncertainty of which Parliament should be ashamed.

Stephen Battersby, Chair, Pro-Housing Alliance, Past President, Chartered Institute of Environmental Health

Peter Archer, Chair, Care & Repair England

Professor Peter Ambrose, University of Brighton

The Rev Paul Nicolson, Chair, Zacchaeus 2000 Trust