What have we done in 50 years?

The London Borough of Tower Hamlets celebrated its 50th birthday on 1st April. Staff gathered in the Town Hall to mark the occasion. A cake was cut. Senior staff said appropriate things – including inviting residents to send in words and pictures which will make a commemorative exhibition.

The world has changed a great deal since 1965: here, we look in detail at three of the key developments which the Council has highlighted. All is not what it seems.

Education
Tower Hamlets only became an Education Authority in its own right when the Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) was abolished in 1990. From the start, the new LEA set about “closing the gap” between achievement in its own schools and the national average – with notable success. Now, 65% of the Borough’s school students go on to university. In December 2013 an independent academic report concluded that Tower Hamlets had “some of the best urban schools in the world. However, some of the pillars on which that success was built are being toppled. Good funding was crucial to the new LEA’s progress: if you have an area where so many parents are on minimal incomes, investing money raised from income tax in education is not pandering to scroungers – it’s levelling the playing field. A close second in importance was co-operation: schools and Tower Hamlets College worked together to give pupils a wide choice of subjects; they, in turn, worked with academics and agencies on special projects which helped pupils achieve. Now, the Coalition has cut that funding – partly through general public spending cuts (welfare benefit cuts will lead to more children going to school hungry), and partly through giving preferential funding to competition rather than co-operation (academies and free schools eat up funding, reducing what is available to state schools, a process begun by Labour).

Employment
The percentage of the borough’s adult population currently in work is 68.1% – the highest since records began in 2004. However, various factors need to be borne in mind before we celebrate. First, there’s been a huge amount of housing built for private sale in the last ten years. Those who have obtained mortgages to buy it and live in it are, necessarily, in work: that bumps up the percentage of the population who are “in work” without getting any residents into new jobs. Second, many of our residents who have found jobs recently are in part-time and low paid work. The Council is trying to address this problem by paying its own workers a living wage and insisting that its contractors do the same: that is a wise move.

Homes
Over the last five years, the borough has been a top performing authority in delivering affordable homes: more than 4,500 new affordable homes have been built. The scandal is that many thousands more non-affordable homes have been built. Many of these lie empty, having been bought to raise a profit rather than accommodate people, and many others have been bought up by small scale private landlords, whose rents soak up huge percentages of tenants’ incomes and, quite often, large amounts of public subsidy via housing benefit. The upshot of all this is that we still have around 20,000 households on the housing waiting list. This borough is a victim of government policy: our residents live in misery while we deliver up profits to the rich.
The Council says that by March 2016, the proportion of social homes in Tower Hamlets which fail to meet the “decent homes” standard will have fallen to under 10%. It is not clear whether it is referring only to those social homes that it owns or whether it is also referring to those homes which the last couple of Labour Administrations passed over to the private sector. Tenants of transferred properties have paid an extremely high price for their new kitchens and bathrooms. The increasing number of tenants of private landlords are not, of course, covered at all. That’s still a large number of people paying high rents for substandard accommodation.

The scale of achievements over our first 50 years has depended on who has been calling the political shots. Nationally, the last Labour Government looked at places like Tower Hamlets and allocated central funding so that boroughs like ours could tackle the challenges we faced. It did some bizarre things as well: it started the break-up of comprehensive state education; it presided over public sector homes being shifted into the private sector; it institutionalised low pay (by setting a low minimum wage and subsidising this with in-work benefits). However, the Conservative/Liberal-Democrat Coalition has gone so very much further in the wrong direction – reducing funding to the Council. The Mayor’s Administration has done a great deal to minimise the impact of these funding cuts, but there is no doubt that the Coalition has put progress in this Borough into reverse.

The Council is inviting past and present residents to share their photos, memories and views of the borough. The material we provide will form the basis of an exhibition in the summer. Let’s hope that what is submitted allows the curators of that exhibition to show the contrasts in this borough between the haves and the have nots; between the haves and the taken froms.

•To find out more or to send in your pictures, words and works, visit www.towerhamlets.gov.uk/50