You couldn't make it up! More from Bloomberg's health fascism

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Apparently Bloomberg's Nanny State (formerly known as New York City) is banning food donations:

"In conjunction with a mayoral task force and the Health Department, the Department of Homeless Services has recently started enforcing new nutritional rules for food served at city shelters. Since DHS can't assess the nutritional content of donated food, shelters have to turn away good Samaritans," 

Totally barking mad - heaven alone knows what the justification is - or rather here it is:

DHS Commissioner Seth Diamond says the ban on food donations is consistent with Mayor Bloomberg’s emphasis on improving nutrition for all New Yorkers. A new interagency document controls what can be served at facilities — dictating serving sizes as well as salt, fat and calorie contents, plus fiber minimums and condiment recommendations. 

So New York's homeless and hungry will get Mr Bloomberg's State Approved Diet.

Tell me, is the alternative to this man so truly awful that they keep re-electing him?

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Housing crisis! What housing crisis?

A great deal of column inches are being dedicated to England’s housing crisis - mostly coming from the ranks of housing organisations themselves:

Is a dysfunctional housing market creating Generation Rent, with most young people permanently frozen out of home-ownership by huge deposits, shortage of supply and high property prices?

The National Housing Federation thinks so. Research it commissioned from Oxford Economics foresees an ‘unprecedented crisis’ with the proportion of households living in an owner-occupied home falling to just under 64pc over the next decade, compared with a peak of 72.5pc in 2001.

This prediction is based on assumptions of soaring private rents, long waiting lists for social housing, and a new house price boom, all driven by an under-supply of properties.

The core point of this analysis lies in that final sentence – the ‘under-supply’ of homes. Now there are two possible ways to answer the question as to whether we have an ‘under-supply’ – data on homelessness (it would seem logical that when there are too few houses there will be more people without houses) and figures for house prices (excess demand will drive prices upwards).

The problem is that neither of these measures actually tells us that we have an under-supply of homes right at the moment. The latest official homelessness statistics show a sharp increase:

During the 2010/11 financial year, there were 44,160 acceptances. This is an increase from 40,020 (10 per cent) in 2009/10 - the first financial year increase since 2003/04

On the face of it this is a problem – but is it due to a lack of housing? Or are people becoming homeless for other reasons? And bear in mind that all of those ‘homeless’ people will be housed – sometimes in temporary accommodation (although these numbers are falling).

So we need to look elsewhere. If there really is a crisis – that we really don’t have enough houses – then we would expect the numbers of people sleeping rough to rise. Indeed, given that the most vulnerable and least well off are most likely to be homeless, we might expect these figures to have risen during the “crisis”.

The latest figures (and we should treat them with caution a quite a few genuinely homeless people don’t get counted) show that 1,768 people were sleeping rough at the time of the count. While we should be concerned about these numbers they again do not suggest a “crisis”.

The reality is that, despite an unprecedented surge in population and a rising birth rate, we are managing to provide housing for all but a very few. This does not speak to me of ‘crisis’ but of a problem being managed.

So why do the National Housing Federation, the Chartered Institute of Housing, the Royal Town Planning Institute, charities like Shelter all tell us that there’s a housing crisis – something demanding of urgent, if not immediate, action?

The central part of these organisations’ argument is that to address this housing ‘crisis’ it requires government to provide more subsidy – ideally in the form of direct capital grants to affordable housing providers. Here’s the NHF again:

At the heart of the problem remains a chronic under-supply of new homes. In 2010/11 just 105,000 homes were built in England – the lowest level since the 1920s.

More government investment in affordable housing would stimulate a wider, faster economic recovery and help fix our broken housing markets, according to the Federation.

There are some huge challenges facing the housing sector – not helped by a sclerotic planning system, the stickiness of house prices and a social housing sector that has, since the 1980s, lived on a steady diet of government subsidy via direct grant funding. But we do not have a crisis, there isn’t a huge increase in people without houses – if there were these problems then house builders would be tripping over each other to build new homes to satisfy that pent up demand. That they aren’t suggests to me that we can be more considered in our approach to housing.

This talk of crisis seems mostly to be special pleading from a sector so used to public subsidy it doesn’t know how to operate in the real housing market.

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Westminster and the homeless - how UK Uncut are completely wrong and misleading

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The latest UK Uncut fib relates to Westminster Council's proposals to "fine the homeless":

Westminster city council, the richest and most powerful council in the UK, is proposing a new bye-law to ban rough sleeping and “soup runs” in the Victoria area of London. The proposed new bye-law will make it an offence punishable by a fine to “sleep or lie down”, “deposit materials used as bedding” and to “give out, or permit another to give out, food for free”.

Clearly this is the work of Evil Tories as they crush the poor and vulnerable? How very dare they!

But when you look briefly into the matter it doesn't quite seem that way at all:

Westminster Council wants to pass a byelaw to stop rough sleeping and soup runs on Westminster Cathedral piazza and the surrounding area.

Westminster Council announced yesterday it has launched a consultation on the proposals with residents, businesses, local day centres and hostels and the voluntary sector.

If it gets a positive response from this, it will ask the Communities and Local Government department to pass a byelaw. It wants this in place by October.

Westminster Council estimates up to 100 people at a time congregate around the piazza while food is being given out and said people travel into the area to receive food hand-outs. The council has said vulnerable adults will be asked to leave the area before being subjected to any enforcement.

So why is the Council doing this? Here's a representative of homeless charity St Mungo's on the subject:

‘While we recognize the compassion involved in providing food to vulnerable people, those in distress and rough sleeping need services that will support them off the streets for good and give them the opportunity for longer term better housing, health and work as they move on with their lives.’

And, for good measure the Chief Executive of another homeless charity, Thames Reach:

‘Street handouts do little to help people make the step away from rough sleeping. Instead they frequently prevent people from facing up to the reality of the harmful lifestyle they have adopted.

‘The Westminster Cathedral piazza and surrounding area has been the focus for soup run activity and rough sleeping for many years and this has inevitably had a detrimental impact on the lives of people living and working in the immediate vicinity.’

So it seems that, in truth Westminster are working alongside homeless charities to try and deliver better support to rough sleepers!

So UK Uncut lied?

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