ML-Implode News - The great London property squeeze sees spillover into substandard housing

There is a direct link between the wealth of those at the top and the capital's housing crisis -- which affects not just those at the bottom but the majority of Londoners who struggle to buy properties, or pay extortionate rents. The 2008 financial crash created a new politics of space, in which people on low incomes are forced out of their homes by rising rent and the wealthy are encouraged to use property for profit. These trends are not limited to London. The same currents of global capital are also transforming San Francisco, New York and Vancouver, European cities from Berlin to Barcelona and towns and cities in the UK from Bristol and Manchester to Margate and Hastings. This isn't gentrification, it's another phenomenon entirely. Global capital is being allowed to reconfigure the country.
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The shortage of affordable housing has given rise to a range of problems in private rented accommodation, from slum landlords and "beds in sheds" to middle-class Londoners under the age of 45 who can no longer afford to live in the city. A generation is being affected and our essential services, such as hospitals and schools, and the majority of our small and medium-sized businesses, are being undermined.
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Although it is notoriously difficult to get accurate figures, a 2013 report by the Migrants' Rights Network concluded that Ealing may have as many as 60,000 occupants in illegal structures, and Slough borough council, which deployed planes equipped with thermal imaging equipment in an effort to spot them, may have as many as 6,000 beds in sheds. In 2013 a BBC investigation found estate agents renting out beds in sheds in Willesden Green and Harrow.

Newham's licensing scheme has been widely praised, and many councils have expressed wishes to emulate it. But in 2015, to the delight of landlords, the government made it clear it did not want to extend the scheme's use, with then housing minister Brandon Lewis describing licensing as a "tenants' tax".

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The great London property squeeze sees spillover into substandard housing