Continuing Centrepoint.

 

Last week I texted into LBC that to deal with asylum and economic migrants from Rumania there should be more centrepoint hostels over cross rail sites.

 

A potted history is that CEntrepoint was a hostel when in economic good times the property cartel of crown estates and westminster council  and the Duchies of the Royal Boroughs didn’t know what to do with the sleaze of sex shops, drug dens and few affordable properties pegged to a monopoly style property system in the UK since the second world war and recovering bomb sites.

 

This continued with the refusal of the Thatcher government to build properties with the sale of council house receipts and the growth of housing benefit top up by local authorities so that some families could live in their home areas where they had settled.

 

This created a cat and mouse game where accommodation addresses and how far up the Piccadilly line from heathrow you could get.

 

The charities that then stepped into the breach were the red cross and Princes Trust that sought to mentor the youth and those who had drug problems on how to settle in the United Kingdom elsewhere and set up businesses.

 

This generated investment capital for part rent part buy housing associations around the home counties for families to relocate, reducing ghettoisation or increasing it depending on the borough.

 

Now with benefit capping, a return to housing hostels for initial employment screening and hello if EU nationals is a good idea as they could come here legally anyway.

 

They can then use the profits from Oxford and Regent Street to build houses elsewhere in the country and where there has been investment in public transport such as trams and rail to take workers to work.

 

So theres no need to collapse the stock exchange in a tit for tat revenge as occurred in the 1970s and 1980s.

 

The problem comes when illegal squats are tolerated as their desperate ways of funding themselves and relaying funds can cause problems.

 

 

James Ware