H&F to ship poor out of borough

More leaked documents. You have to think that there are some civil servants working inside Hammersmith Town Hall who don't much like the political masters they are working for because another revealing document has made its way out - this time to the Guardian - who have broken the story that our Council are actively looking to move 500 people up out of this borough and up to Derby.

And that's just the start of it - plans are also afoot to deny those who are considered no to be making "an economic contribution" (translation: the unemployed) tenancies for longer than 5 years. 

This is also an old story, first broken by Paul Waugh in the Standard in 2009, in which he revealed similar plans, again centred on the White City Estate in W12 and linking them to comments Council Leader Stephen Greenhalgh had made about council housing "warehousing" poverty and turning into "ghettoes". And this is the man who will shortly be handed responsibility for, er, White City.

Greenhalgh is of the 'radical' wing of Conservatives, along with one or two others in senior positions. He and his colleagues seem to genuinely believe in a 21st Century version of Victorian ideas that the tougher you are with poor people the better it is for them in the long run. 

And yet they are capable of less draconian but no less innovative schemes to tackle unemployment and social malaise as we saw in this project in Shepherd's Bush back in August last year. 

The problem is that it's a lot easier and cheaper simply to ship people up North than it is to invest in schemes that actually try and include people such as the InComE project in Shepherd's Bush which tries to encoiurage social mobility. And Boris has already said that he will simply 'delay' plans to get rid of people like this - not stop them. Voters may wish to consider this at the polling booth today.