This Saturday is a great opportunity to see the Westminster Morris Men – established in 1953 in the City of Westminster, they have been widely recognised as one of the country’s leading mens’ morris teams.
Westminster Morris Men
Saturday May 12th is the Westminster Day of Dance when 12 Morris Teams will be touring London’s West End laying on free displays of dance. The guest teams joining the Westminster Morris Men are the Jockey Morris Men, Earlsdon Morris Men, Hammersmith Morris Men, Ravensbourne Morris Men, Thrales Rapper, Moulton Morris Men, Thaxted Morris Men, Yateley Morris Men, East Surrey Morris Men and Woodside Morris Men.
The sites close to Pimlico where you can see dancing are:
10:15-10:45
Victoria Embankment Steps
St Margaret’s Church, Westminster Abbey
Westminster Cathedral Piazza,
Victoria Street
Tate Britain
11:00-11:30
Cardinal Place, SW1
St Margaret’s Church, Westminster Abbey
12:00-12:40
The Sanctuary, Westminster Abbey
I was ill – I caught a debilitating disease for which the medical term is Domii Pauci – my G.P. identified the problem and got me an appointment with a specialist who had devoted his life to curing people with this complaint. I prepared a wet fish, and finally the day came for my appointment and I marched into his surgery and announced:
“You bloodsucking leech! How can you live off the misery of your patients! How dare you sit in your comfortable surgery, taking taxpayers money? I am going to make sure that you never practise medicine again! Then I hit him round the face with a wet fish. I don’t think we will see HIM in surgery again!
At least that was the message that I got from today’s Independent in their story:
Yes there is a problem, especially in London: a modest two-bedroom place in London’s Zone 2 – a standard monthly rent is indeed £800, even £900. The Independent reports hundreds of furious Londoners bombarding with their renting horror stories. One had a 35 per cent rent hike imposed on them at Christmas; another was forced to desert their Stockwell flat after a 40 per cent increase. “My tiny flat in the East End went up by £200 a month for the next occupants when I left”. Clearly the patient is sick, sick with Domii Pauci – a housing shortage.
The Independent’s solution is the wet fish: “Private landlords can do as they please, of course. Having a roof over your head is a basic human requirement and, when there is a lack of houses to go around, it is a need that can be exploited. A landlord knows that, if their tenants don’t like an outrageous rent hike, their only option is to put themselves back at the mercy of the ever more pricey private renting market. According to Shelter, annual rents in inner London went up by 7 per cent last year – or just under £1,000 for a two-bedroom house. When people’s wages are flat-lining, that’s a big hit.”
As a Landlord of some 20 years I have seen this coming, indeed it’s why I am a Landlord. The strange thing is that the Government hasn’t seen it coming, and still doesn’t understand why it is happening, and getting worse. The fixed costs of being a Landlord are increasing exponentially – Pimlico Flats has had to take on an employee solely for the purpose of administering deposits, council tax, utilities. Computerisation has enabled big corporations like Westminster City Council to remove thinking from their activities and leave automated mailshots. New regulations require building work to prevent such things as “death by only having one lock” ……. again, many of the new initiatives are good, and contribute to tenants well being, but some don’t. And all carry a cost, and at the end of the day the tenant bears that cost, not government, or the landlord.
It’s time for Government and Shelter to examine what leads to higher rents, and what leads to lower rents, and to act accordingly.
Meantime don’t be surprised if Landlords leave the Planet saying thanks for all the fish.
Nearly half of Westminster’s 22,000 council homes have been sold through Right-to-Buy in the past 30 years, and because government rules don’t allow local authorities to keep the proceeds of sale the properties haven’t been replaced by further social housing. Of course many of the flats purchased under Rent to Buy have been recycled into Private Sector renting – I personally know of 4 people who were able to retire to the country in middle age on the proceeds of the Right to Buy windfall which could be as much as several hundred thousand pounds in extreme cases.
This has left the council with a situation where they are paying housing benefit to tenants who are renting ex-council properties from private landlords – and this costs the council around four times the rent charged for a council home rented directly from the council, and on occasions up to five or six times the council rent.
What a mess – but probably not a mess that the government wishes to acknowledge as it stems from a conservative policy a generation ago, rather than something that can be neatly pinned on the last government.
