This is the man reported as wanting to decamp people to Stoke on Trent. The problem, according to The Economist is that
A whole lot of 2011 Census data has just come out, which I don't have time to go through doing comparisons, but I'd guess Lewisham has many of the same challenges. So I wonder if Lewisham also considers how its policies impact the sort of people who live here, and to what sort of mix it aims for. Do you aim for people who are more likely to vote for your political party, who will be less of a burden on the taxpayer, local or national, or do you give up, thinking it is all too complex?More than half of Newham’s people do not speak English as their first language. The borough is funded by central government on the basis that it has 242,000 people, but the council reckons it has 300,000, and the police think the tally is 320,000—especially tough, when the council’s discretionary grant from the government is coming down from £310m ($482m) to £240m over three years. It is hardly surprising that Newham is weighed down by debt, and its financial position is deteriorating.
Gentrification is not a word that a Labour politician would ever use to describe his plans, but that is what "Sir" Robin’s look like. He wants to reduce the churn in Newham and turn it into a place where people buy houses, settle down and raise children.
Improving education is one way of doing that, and there Newham is doing a remarkable job. Two decades ago its students got about half as many good GCSEs as the national average. Now, despite Newham’s poverty, they are only a whisker below.
Housing policy is another. The council was recently accused of “social cleansing” because it wrote to housing associations around the country, to see whether they could accommodate any of those on housing benefit.
I have some sympathy for how The Economist concludes, although I'd have used rather different language, so I've done some subbing
The final paragraph is an example of a point, which I have made many other times on this Forum, that we need more policies set at the London level. The saving grace of Steve Bullock is that he is perhaps not so dynamic.Cities need [lower price] housing
[High quality] housing is obviously better than [less high quality] housing, but [less high quality] housing [can be] better than none, and when the state gets into the business of licensing goods supply tends to fall. As Henry Overman, professor of economic geography at the London School of Economics, puts it, “schemes that restrict the ways in which we can use housing tend not to be beneficial to the poor.”
...
even if reducing the supply of low-rent property were good for Newham, it would not necessarily be good for London. The churn of people has kept the city’s economy turning for centuries, and the latest batch of immigrants must have a place to disembark, find their feet and move on from. This process may not be good for the place where the newcomers arrive; but for the people who move on and up, it tends to work.
