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Morning Briefing: young people trapped in small towns due to high city rents

Young people priced out of cities, tenants trapped in dangerous ACM-clad blocks, Clarion tenant moved four times after repairs issues, and all your other major housing stories of the day

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Picture: Getty
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Morning Briefing: young people trapped in small towns due to high city rents #ukhousing

Young people can no longer afford to move to cities where wages are higher because of the high rents properties in those areas require, The Guardian reports.

The paper was following up on a report by thinktank the Resolution Foundation that found a decline in the number of young people moving from small towns to seek their fortune in big cities.

It found that the number of people aged between 25 and 34 starting a new job and moving home last year had fallen by 40%, compared with 20 years ago.

Lindsay Judge, senior research and policy analyst at the Resolution Foundation, said: “Young people today are often stereotyped as being footloose when it comes to work.”

“But in fact they are moving around for new job opportunities far less frequently than they used to. A key reason why people move around for work is the lure of a bigger salary. But increasingly those pay gains are being swallowed up by high housing costs.”


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The Independent runs a letter from Labour, which warns the government that another Grenfell-style disaster could happen in a high-rise block if it does not take action and speed up the removal of dangerous cladding.

The letter was sent by shadow housing minister Sarah Jones, and estimates that 60,000 people are still living in tower blocks covered in aluminium composite material (ACM) cladding. This includes 8,400 social housing homes, and 16,400 homes in privately owned buildings.

Today, Inside Housing revealed that hundreds of leaseholders are still living in dangerous non ACM-clad blocks that would not be affected by the the government’s £200m ACM cladding remediation fund launched by the government last month.

In her letter to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, Ms Jones wrote: “I am concerned that the government sees the latest fund as a panacea to the cladding scandal. But this is not the end – it is the start of a large body of work which should have been completed long ago. What’s more, important questions remain unanswered.”

In the local press, the Islington Gazette reports on a woman who claims she has been moved four times by housing association Clarion due to major disrepair issues.

Samantha Trent, who is a single mother, told the paper that she had been moved after some of her properties had mushrooms sprouting off furniture, “ice cold” bedrooms and floorboards that were at risk of collapsing.

The 43-year-old also claimed that she had taken all her work leave to wait for repairs workers who either do not turn up or cancel at the last minute.

Clarion apologised for the “highly unusual case”.

The Evening Standard covers new figures from the Mayor’s Office showing that the number of council homes being built is at its highest level since the 1980s.

The figures broke down the record of London’s 32 boroughs and found that Brent was the biggest builder with nearly 1,200 homes started between in the three months until 31 March 2019.

The smallest number was in Lambeth, where only seven had been started, while Bromley and Westminster built 10 and 15 respectively.

The Guardian reveals that the installation of solar panels on properties across the country dropped by 94% last month, following the government’s move to cut subsidies for their installation.

In April the government announced that it would stop solar feed-in-tariffs, a subsidy that had encouraged more than 800,000 homes to fit solar panels to their roofs.

The Labour Party accused the government of actively dismantling the UK’s solar power industry.

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