Background Paper No. 12

The Clearances: Race, Housing and Policing

JESSICA PERERA Published by The Institute of Race Relations 2-6 Leeke Street, London WC1X 9HS

Web: www.irr.org.uk Email: [email protected] Tel: 44 (0) 207 837 0041

© Institute of Race Relations 2019

Acknowledgement: Jessica Perera thanks Marina Vishmidt for advice and support during the completion of her dissertation.

Front cover image: Nu Brand Flexx in South London estate for This Is Grime, 2016 – photographer Olivia Rose Back cover image: Flickr/themostinept

Design: Sujata Aurora/Gratuitous Graphics The London Clearances: Race, Housing and Policing

By Jessica Perera

The riots of 2011 didn’t emerge from within terraced streets or low-rise apartment buildings. As spatial analysis of the riots has shown, the rioters came overwhelmingly from these post-war estates … Sink estates – and frankly, the people who lived in them – have been seen as something simply to be managed. It’s time to be more ambitious on every level. The mission here is nothing short of a social turnaround, and with massive estate regeneration, tenants protected, and land unlocked for new housing all over Britain, I believe we can tear down anything that stands in our way. Prime Minister David Cameron, 2016 The London Clearances: Race, Housing and Policing

Contents

Preface by Lee Bridges 5

Introduction by Liz Fekete, Director IRR 6

Use of terms 9

I. London’s Housing Crisis in a Neoliberal Context 11

II. Social Housing, Gentrification and Estate Regeneration 13

III. ‘Sink Estates’ and ‘Managed Decline’ 17

IV. Localised Hostile Environments and Policing Inequality 20

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PREFACE Professor Lee Bridges, IRR Council Member

Writing in two special issues of Race & Class individual, familial and cultural forms of in the early 1980s,1 I began exploring the banishment and exclusion, whereas estate linkages between developments in urban ‘regeneration’ appears to be directed at the policing in Britain following outbreaks of wholesale physical dispossession of BAME civil disorder and a range of social policies. and working-class residents from council and Even then, it was evident that there other forms of public housing. This perfect were parallels between measures being storm of mutually-reinforcing policies is now meted out to Britain’s Asian communities being brought to bear on a new generation of under increasingly repressive immigration young black people. legislation2 and the policing of inner-city black communities through the use of a combination of increased police powers and the implication of the police into various programmes of social provision, the better to improve intelligence on and target particular individuals, groups and areas. Similarly, cutbacks in public expenditure imposed initially in the late 1970s by the International Monetary Fund foreshadowed future ‘austerity’ measures and the onset of ‘managed decline’ and the ultimate devastation of public provision of social housing.

In this background report, Jessica Perera does much more than simply update this earlier analysis. Rather, she demonstrates how, under policies largely developed since the financial crisis of 2008 and the urban riots of 2011, a dangerous symbiosis has been forged between housing policies directed toward ‘regeneration’ of London’s council housing estates, on the one hand, and new forms of policing under which the administrative powers of a range of state institutions (local authorities, housing associations, social services and schools) are being aligned with more traditional criminal law sanctions, on the other. The latter forms of policing result in a much more powerful set of punishments which can result in

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INTRODUCTION Liz Fekete, IRR Director

After the 2011 ‘riots’ in England and Wales, policies like the ending of the Educational prime minister David Cameron, London mayor Maintenance Allowance. Housing experts had Boris Johnson and Department, Works and long warned that the gradual social cleansing Pensions Secretary, Iain Duncan Smith laid of London was eroding community bonds, the blame squarely on ‘gangs’, described as leading to young people being dispossessed a ‘major criminal that has infected of family, community and social identity. streets and estates’ and an obstacle to Community workers like Stafford Scott and ‘neighbourhood rejuvenation, community criminologists like Patrick Williams and action and business development’. An existing Becky Clarke were charting the links between discussion about what was to be done the criminalisation of young working-class about London’s so-called ‘sink estates’ was BAME people in London and Manchester due transformed overnight into a ‘race’ debate, to the joint enterprise doctrine, the Gangs underpinned as it was by a highly racialised Matrices and the moral panic around ‘gangs’. alarmist language about ‘gangs’ and ‘gang Urbanisation scholars and housing activists nominals’ (today’s equivalent of yesterday’s were linking the social cleansing of the muggers). A stigma began to be attached to capital with the benefits accruing to another black and multicultural neighbourhoods and cohort of young people, this time middle-class council estates, linked now to dangerous gentrifiers. black youth subcultures like Grime and Drill. All this happened at around the same In The London Clearances: race, housing time that the Home Office was introducing and policing the IRR seeks to build on the its Ending Gang and Youth Violence (EGYV) existing research in ways that foreground strategy, which provides local authorities more emphatically the connections between financial incentives to gather data on urban policy, housing and policing. Our young people in gangs or at risk of gang aim is to link knowledge which focuses on involvement. The Conservative government’s institutional racism in policing policy with existing Estate Regeneration Programme was that which focuses on housing dispossession, also accelerated; involving the selling off regeneration, inequality and exclusion. The of local authority-owned housing estates to purpose is not only to explore the connective private partnerships and the decanting of tissue between housing and policing, but social housing tenants outside the capital in to develop a much-needed race and class a process that has been described by Simon perspective on these issues. After all, London Elmer and Geraldine Dening as the ‘London has the largest BAME population in the Clearances’.3 country with that population predominantly concentrated in social housing. If we are Politicians could have looked to the real to provide a wider evidence base for NGOs causes of the riots, such as social pressures and community campaigns combating due to austerity-induced welfare benefit institutional racism in policing and/or cuts, the closing of youth clubs, aggressive resisting housing injustice and the race/ police operations and ill-thought out class social cleansing of the capital, it is

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vital that we examine issues of race and class least 170 London council estates either are simultaneously. undergoing or are subject to consultations over demolition. Some background to the report, its author and how it came to be written may be It is these policies, Perera argues, that necessary. In June 2018, the IRR, concerned have led to such dramatic reductions in that the government’s regeneration plans for the social housing stock at the same time specific council estates in London mirrored as dispossessing once vibrant inner-city areas about which BAME communities had black and multicultural working-class long since complained of over-policing, neighbourhoods of their old community decided to investigate further. Fortuitously, networks. In ‘”Sink estates” and “Managed at exactly that time, Goldsmiths postcolonial Decline”’, the author looks more closely at studies and global policy MA student Jessica the way the terminology of ‘sink estates’ has Perera contacted IRR, offering her services gradually embedded itself in the housing as a volunteer. Jessica quickly emerged as debate, most notably since 2005 when New the ideal person to work with the IRR on Labour introduced its ‘positive gentrification’ the project. She was asked to carry out a policies. As already indicated, the tenor literature review of central, local government was to become more racialised after the and the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime ‘riots’ of 2011, with the state ignoring the (MOPAC) documents, as well as build up case structural causes of the ‘riots’ in favour of a files on issues related to the government’s narrative that focused on gangs and ghettos, Estate Regeneration Programme, anti-social and a supposed socially deviant behaviour orders, gang injunctions, Gangs emanating from some of England’s worst Matrices, dispersal orders, public space council estates whose residents had an protection orders and specialist police alleged propensity for anti-social behaviour operations such as Operation Sceptre and and criminality. Operation Shield. Fascinated by what she was discovering about location-specific policing Finally, having laid out the framework of and local authority redevelopment plans, housing and urban policy, in ‘Localised Jessica then decided to change the topic hostile environments and policing inequality’, of her MA dissertation so she could further the links between housing and policing explore the issues she was already researching policies in poor BAME working-class at the IRR as well as gain better theoretical neighbourhoods can be explored. The hostile underpinnings for her research.4 environment is a term usually associated with the government’s immigration policies The report is divided into four sections. where it denotes Home Office administrative Having set out the neoliberal context for and legislative measures designed to make the housing crisis in Section I, in Section stay in the as difficult as II, ‘Social housing, gentrification and estate possible for those without leave to remain. regeneration’ Perera then goes on to describe Perera’s innovation is to develop it further four decades of housing policy and legislative as a description of the location-specific change. It starts with Margaret Thatcher’s policing that has intensified since the 2011 1979 raiding of the social housing stock and riots in direct relation to the Home Office the infamous Right-to-buy policy, proceeds spearheaded multi-agency EGYV strategy, through New Labour’s urban renaissance as well as the government’s gentrification strategy (‘positive gentrification’) and ends policies and bid to demolish council estates, with the current Conservative government’s largely in areas where the disturbances Estates Regeneration scheme, under which at took place.

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When I first came to work at the Institute of businesses and gentrifiers, marginalising of Race Relations in 1981, much like Jessica young black people and their class-based Perera, as a student, I was employed to cultural rights as well as BAME communities monitor policing in the capital, first collating as a whole. The section ends by discussing the a newsletter called Policing London and then targeting of black subcultures, where Perera working on an update to the IRR’s 1979 describes that experience using her term evidence to the Royal Commission on Criminal ‘vernacular landscape’ to signify all the urban Procedure. Subsequently published in 1987 as spaces and places where young black people Policing Against Black People, the report drew either live or frequent, including council together hundreds of case studies involving estates, youth clubs, chicken shops and ‘the police and black and Asian communities, streets’, now being targeted by police and mostly in the Metropolitan area. There is local authorities alike. a clear link between the policing of black subcultures today and the public order Since 1987 and the writing of Policing Against policing policies charted in Policing Against Black People we have come full circle with the Black People. After the urban disturbances state (central government, local government of 1981 and 1985, a new Metropolitan and the ) threatening Police chief, Sir Kenneth Newman who had all the things that make the lives of young from 1976–1980 served as chief constable black people bearable, the ‘life-style, the of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) in dignity’, to quote Sivanandan, ‘which they Northern Ireland, was appointed. Newman have carved out from the stone of their lives’. introduced a policy of targeting ‘symbolic What is important to remember though, is locations’, clubs, meeting places and cultural that gentrification destabilises community venues of particular significance to the black organising, mobilisation and action against community. Targeting has evolved since then, and other forms of structural as has policing culture, under the impact of racism. While twenty or thirty years ago, New Labour’s anti-social behaviour (ASBO) communities could draw inspiration and culture. strength from established black community and neighbourhood campaigns, today’s What is different today is the creation of targeting of BAME populations comes at a an expanded criminal justice system that time when they are being dispossessed of blurs the line between criminal, civil and community networks and decanted from the administrative law powers, epitomised by the capital. Anti-social Behaviour, Policing and Crime Act 2014, leading to sanctions being used against The London Clearances: race, housing and young people, particularly young black men. policing is the fruit of a creative relationship Hence, in Section IV, Jessica Perera also between Jessica Perera and IRR, which we describes some of the novel ways in which hope to develop into a more concentrated the ASB frameworks interact with local research study of the issues raised in this authority policies aimed at meeting the needs report.

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USE OF TERMS

Accumulation by dispossession – a phrase Deregulation ­– the removal or reduction used by David Harvey to describe how, since of government regulations and restrictions the emergence of neoliberalism, capital in a particular industry; usually to increase accumulation has been largely through competition for capital growth. dispossessing the poor of public (state- owned) assets, land and wealth which are sold Dispersal Powers – under the Anti-social off to private ownership. Behaviour, Policing and Crime Act (2014), dispersal zones were renamed ‘dispersal ‘Affordable Housing’ – the official definition powers’, giving the police power to exclude is of housing provided at less than market individuals from demarcated areas for up to prices/rents within a local area, so as to cost 48 hours for alleged anti-social behaviour. no more that 80 per cent of average local market rents. Affordable housing for sale is Educational Maintenance Allowance – to be provided at a level at which mortgage provided financial support in England, payments are more than that which would be as well as Wales, Scotland and Northern paid in rent on council housing, but below Ireland, to young people aged 16-19, from market levels. poor backgrounds, who were either fulltime students or undertaking unpaid work-based Austerity – politically motivated economic learning. policies that aim to cut government spending on public services (including welfare services) Gangs Matrix – is a database of suspected in order to reduce the overall government gang members in London. Similar matrices are budget deficit. in operation in other UK cities.

Brownfield land – any land that has Gentrification – the material process of been previously developed, but currently renovating and improving deprived economic not in use; frequently land that has been areas so as to attract wealthier residents. contaminated with industrial waste, causing pollution and contamination. Financialisation – the growth and power of the financial sector in its operations and Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) – a influence on society, particularly on not-for- defined geographical area where businesses profit sectors (i.e. housing) which turns them are required to pay additional taxes to fund into commodities. a variety of public services, such as street cleaning, security, policing and aesthetic Localised hostile environments – a term, improvements. specific to this work, to capture a diverse set of punitive and disciplinary measures, The commons – land, resources or assets including, inter alia, racial profiling and owned by everyone. policing, territory-targeted stop-and-searches and residential evictions.

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Managed decline – the deliberate neglect Private Finance Initiative – the funding of buildings (i.e. housing) that renders them of public infrastructure and services such as unsafe and uninhabitable. hospitals and schools through capital raised from private sources, frequently involving Met Patrol Plus – a scheme which allows long-term contractual commitments on public businesses in London to ‘buy-in’ additional bodies to pay rental and service charges for police officers from the Metropolitan Police their use of the facilities. Service. Regeneration – urban planning term to Neoliberalism – an economic theory that describe large-scale redevelopment projects advocates freedom of the market and market- intended to improve the utility and physical processes; its three prominent characteristics design of buildings and/or areas and, hence, being: privatisation, deregulation and the local economy. austerity measures. Registered Social Landlords – RSLs, usually Positive gentrification – refers to any social housing associations, are private, non-profit- policies that aim to diversify working-class making organisations that provide low-cost neighbourhoods by introducing wealthier social housing. residents, and thereby supposedly improving the material and social quality of life for Social cleansing – the largescale removal of poorer people. the ‘lower classes’ from an area where they are seen as undesirable and as having no Privatisation – the selling-off of state-owned financial value. (or publically owned) assets and resources to private companies. Vernacular landscape – term used here to describe the features of young, working-class people’s material environment that shape their urban experience.

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I. LONDON’S HOUSING CRISIS IN A NEOLIBERAL CONTEXT

No Londoner can remain unaware of the policies for accelerating processes of ‘social acute shortage of social and actual affordable cleansing’, which is defined as the large- housing in the capital. As land in London scale removal of the lower classes from an is scarce and in demand, the land that area where they are seen as undesirable and local authority estates sit on has become without financial value in society. Current increasingly valuable to central government literature on the subject indicates this is which has identified this terrain as a a class issue.6 Yet the kind of racialised potential space for new housing that will language to describe London’s post-war fix London’s ‘housing crisis’. But despite the housing estates in the aftermath of the 2011 government’s promise that this ‘valuable riots, would strongly suggest that it is also a land’ would be used to build more ‘affordable race issue. Exploring issues of race and class housing’, the reality is that the few dozen or simultaneously is made more difficult by the so estates that have to date been demolished fact that there currently exists no complete and regenerated have not been developed in demographic analysis of the residents that a way that either re-houses all prior existing have been evicted from council housing as a residents or houses the hundreds of thousands result of estate regeneration. Furthermore, of people waiting on council housing little research has looked into the ways in registers. Instead, this land is being used which regeneration is shaping policing. In to create profitable housing developments fact, as this background paper demonstrates, and luxury residential apartments owned by housing regeneration and area gentrification private companies and used to accommodate are concomitant with the targeted policing wealthy and middle-class ‘gentrifiers’. operations deployed not only by the Metropolitan Police but also local authorities In the United States there are many academic and other social agencies, thereby erasing studies (as well as grassroots initiatives) the boundaries between the police and other that suggest a link between state housing public services. policies and policing strategies in poor, urban black communities. Mustafa Dikeç’s case study of policing in Cincinnati, for The centrality of instance, links policing strategies with neoliberalism expanding, and increasingly financialised city centres, confining the poor to the suburbs.5 What follows is an expansive investigation Meanwhile, in the UK, the discussion, to date, into a London-wide phenomenon, but it is has tended to treat as one that cannot be understood outside the completely separate the neoliberal economic framework and related- "In the UK, the discussion, to issues of housing, policing austerity measures that shape London’s date, has tended to treat and racism. Urbanisation approach to housing. Neoliberalism is both as completely separate the academics in the UK a theory and project that conceives ‘the issues of housing, policing have been critical of best of all possible worlds’ as realisable and racism." government regeneration when the market and market-processes are

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left unregulated by the state. This suggests has been dispossessing of the poor of public that markets have a teleological tendency services. to self-correct and that the role of the state, therefore, should be to provide an David Harvey analyses this by utilising the environment for neoliberalism to thrive concept of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ without political interference. According to which he argues has always been central David Harvey, ‘the ground-rules for market to the economics of capitalism, but today competition must be properly observed is accelerated by the neoliberal logic of (by the state)’and ‘in deregulation and privatisation. For Harvey, situations where such the tendency of the capitalist system to “Neoliberalisation of state rules are not clearly laid ‘overaccumulate’ surplus capital is largely and society has been out, the state must use overcome through state seizures and dispossessing the poor of its power to impose or investment in (potentially profitable) 9 public services.” invent market systems’.7 assets, such as land and housing. But At least since the 1980s, when such assets are unavailable, ‘then these ground-rules in capitalism must somehow produce them’.10 the UK (and elsewhere in the Global North) Crucial to the process of producing new have included two main features. These terrains for accumulating surplus capital, are: first, deregulation policies that remove has been though privatising state-owned or reduce governmental regulations in the assets. This has involved continuously economic and social sectors, and second, the opening up ‘the commons’ – both natural privatisation or the sell-off of public assets, and cultural resources available to everyone, services and state companies to private i.e. water supplies, healthcare and corporate investors. More recently, these education – to capital investment, which neoliberal ground rules have been linked has across the Global North resulted in to austerity measures. While it is a moot the ruthless expansion of capitalism into point as to when austerity actually began largely egalitarian sectors of the economy (reductions in public spending on housing and society. One of the ways over the past date back to the 1970s8) austerity is linked, forty years the British state has been able in the public mind at least, to a series of to accumulate by dispossessing has been measures introduced from 2010 onwards, through the appropriation of public housing. first under the Conservative-Liberal coalition Privatisation and financialisation have been government and now the current Conservative the main mechanisms through which the government. Since 2009, fiscal policy is working classes have been dispossessed of openly aligned with austerity measures social housing. And simultaneously policing aimed at reducing government expenditure is looked to, not to counter crime and protect in public services and on public sector wages, communities, but, rather, to police inequality in the context of dismantling the welfare when austerity has destroyed community state. Not surprisingly, the end result of the bonds and to preserve an unfettered space for neoliberalisation of state and society the market.

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II. SOCIAL HOUSING, GENTRIFICATION AND ESTATE REGENERATION

Since 1979, successive governments, across lack of new affordable homes,11 an acute the political spectrum, have systematically lack of social rented housing, and rising reduced social housing stock in London , with a 50 per cent increase in through the processes of privatisation and the number of homeless households being financialisation. These neoliberal policies moved out of London by councils in the first have transformed the housing sector. Once six months of 2018 alone.12 Below we outline seen in the post-war era as a social good, some of the legislative milestones and policy housing is now treated as a commodity. developments that comprise the backdrop Longstanding social networks in BAME and to what has been described as the ‘London multicultural working-class areas of London clearances’, a term that resonates with the have been slowly eroded, dispossessing entire ‘Highland clearances’13 and has come to be neighbourhoods of community and culture. read as synonymous with social cleansing.14

First, in 1979, under a Conservative government, Margaret Thatcher introduced Privatisation, financialisation, the ‘Right-to-Buy’ scheme and initiated the dispossession transfer (privatisation) of local authority housing stock to housing associations and Privatisation involves the selling off of public Registered Social Landlords (RSLs). Second, assets to private ownership and has been from 1997 onwards, under the New Labour a central component of neoliberal policies government’s urban renaissance strategy, that place a premium on the market and private housing developments with mixed market processes to regulate the economy. tenures were fostered to bring about Following her election in 1979, Thatcher ‘positive gentrification’. Third, housing sought to shrink the role of the state and policy under the Conservative-Liberal open up state-owned industries, such as gas, coalition government of 2010-2016 was, in electricity and water to the private sector turn, marked by the growing influence of where they could be treated as businesses the financial sector in for investment, speculation and profit. For public housing, while David Harvey, ‘it is the corporatization, “Once seen in the post-war the current Conservative commodification, and privatization of era as a social good, government has launched hitherto public assets that have been housing is now treated as a its Estates Regeneration signal features of the neoliberal project. commodity.” Programme which Its primary aim has been to open up new involves the selling off fields for capital accumulation in domains of local authority-owned formerly regarded off-limits to the calculus of housing estates to private companies and the profitability.’15 decanting of social housing tenants outside the capital. This four-decade long policy and It was in the Housing Act 1989 that ‘Right- legislative change that has led to London’s to-Buy’ legislation was first introduced. ‘housing crisis’, characterised by a chronic Although it was presented as a social

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mobility opportunity for council tenants, unlocking state housing, finance and land to be able to buy their own home at to private and commercial interests, neither significantly discounted prices, the policy the Right-to-Buy nor the transfer of council- actually had the effect of minimising housing owned housing to housing associations opportunities for working-class and low- usually entailed losing one’s home.’19 income households. The real aim was to Rather, it was the New Labour government’s transform council housing from a source of privatisation of council housing which was social good to a private enterprise, while instrumental in displacing individuals from also providing the cash-strapped Treasury their families and communities. with money from the sale of state assets. The overall impact was to increase rents and In 1999, New Labour implemented its diminish housing opportunities for working- ‘urban renaissance’ strategy, proposing to class and low-income families in particular, regenerate and repopulate many British as little or no funding was made available cities, including London. The initiative to build new council housing for rent.16 highlighted the need to tackle ‘sinking’ Furthermore, under the Housing Acts of 1985 estates by ‘creating neighbourhoods with and 1988, local authority housing stock was a mix of tenures and incomes’.20 As human transferred (privatised) to RSLs. The 1988 geographer Loretta Lees explained at the Act, in particular, which redefined housing time, the term ‘urban renaissance’ was a associations as non-public bodies, has had code-word for gentrification.21 In fact, New an enduring impact on subsequent housing Labour explicitly acknowledged this through policy as it effectively granted access to the use of the term ‘positive gentrification’. private finance, which local authorities The idea behind it was that the working regarded as an opportunity to carry out long- classes could be re-socialised through contact neglected housing repairs and improvement with gentrifiers with more social capital. works.17 (Such repairs and renovations However, this was idealistic, as London’s were often poorly and cheaply done, as poor communities have increasingly been exemplified by Grenfell.) As a result, central marginalised through state-led gentrification government funding for building new local projects. As Hodkinson and Essen, point authority housing was reduced as housing out, urban renaissance ‘was predicated on associations and RSLs acquired funding direct exploiting large rent gaps in urban areas’,22 from private investors. In this way, by the which could be taken advantage of by the end of the 1980s, low-income families had middle classes who were to be lured back again been significantly disadvantaged by the to the city by the potential rising value of depletion of local authority housing stock.18 properties created through gentrification.

Although it was the New Labour was also instrumental in “London’s poor communities Conservatives who accelerating ‘public-private partnerships’ have increasingly been provided the legal such as the Private Finance Initiative (PFI). marginalised through state- framework for selling In the main, PFI was used by New Labour led gentrification projects.” off state-owned council governments to address ‘longstanding housing, it was under underinvestment in state infrastructure successive New Labour without officially increasing public sector administrations between 1997 and 2010, that borrowing and debt’, including addressing the deeper erosion of working-class council a backlog of housing repairs that was estates and communities took place. Stuart a part of New Labour’s Decent Homes Hodkinson and Chris Essen have argued, while Standard. However, between 1998 and ‘capital accumulation was boosted through 2010, PFI was also made available to a

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number of local authorities to complete investment for international and domestic large-scale regeneration projects including capital accumulation.25 Due to the central the demolition of particular housing importance of the property market for the estates.23 Indeed, first privatisation and British economy, London’s social housing then financialisation, have been the main estates were now exposed to increasing mechanisms through which working-class financialisation through private investment communities have been dispossessed of the and capital speculation, a process that right to housing and community. has intensified under the Conservative government elected in 2015. The The gentrification of inner-city areas of Conservatives’ highly permissive attitude to London also coincided with New Labour’s housing and planning regulation has further electoral promise to put ‘anti-social encouraged capital speculation. In 2016 behaviour’ at the top of its policy agenda, it was reported that land for over 600,000 with specific measures criminalising such homes was being ‘banked’ by the nine largest behaviour. Under the Crime and Disorder Act house builders in the UK.26(Land banking 1998, behaviour which had previously been refers to the practice of aggregating sectors seen as a social problem was criminalised. of land for future sale or development.) It should not be forgotten that New Labour was the architect of ‘ASBO [anti-social Michael Edwards has argued that behaviour order] Britain’, a top-down process financialisation is also transforming the without national oversight which allowed way that non-financial sectors operate.27 In for the penalisation of various forms of particular, the influence of neoliberalism on ‘undesirable’ (read working-class) activities, local authorities and RSLs is noteworthy, with such as adolescent street loitering, and both now encouraged to re-imagine publicly the criminalisation of anyone over the owned land – and therefore social housing – age of 14 who failed to adhere to this new not according to its human use value, but its punitive regime. This Anti-Social Behaviour capital potential generated from partnerships (ASB) framework, which contributed to the with private investors who in turn, are able to expansion of the youth justice system under dictate ‘the rent policies and the allocation of New Labour, was to be completely overhauled tenancies to meet the imperatives of securing by the Conservative-led coalition government (future) finance’. Today, hard-pressed or which ‘created new mechanisms for the – even bankrupt councils – made financially potentially much more extensive – use of vulnerable by central government austerity ASB responses by councils, housing providers measures – are increasingly capitulating to and the police.’24 This will be discussed private companies as the land and housing further in section IV. estates they own become ever more valuable, and the prospect of attracting middle-class With the election of the coalition residents with higher incomes, notionally government in 2010, Britain’s working-class expands the council tax base and reduces communities witnessed yet another variant charges on services. It is this political terrain of housing dispossession, this time, arguably that has allowed private investors, with an the most virulent. After the 2008 global interest in maximising profits and not in financial crisis, Britain’s housing market providing homes for the poor, to determine was the only sector left unaffected, which London housing policy. This is a development added to its appeal as a global financial made easier by changes to welfare and centre for capital investment. In particular, housing legislation which enable London as Danny Dorling has shown, the London councils to decant social housing tenants property market was seen as a safe financial residing on the land they want to redevelop.

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Under the Housing and Planning Act 2016, brownfield sites identified by local authorities. secure and assured tenancies for new social Putting it frankly, academic and housing housing tenants have been abolished, expert Anna Minton has argued ‘automatic making it easier for local authorities to evict planning permission for brown field sites, individuals and families from properties including housing estates, [is] paving the way after two or three years. Between 2012 and for widespread demolitions’.32 2015 over 50,000 families – that is upwards of 150,000 people – have been evicted from London boroughs28 and these figures are Manipulating concerns about set to rise. A recent FOI request made to affordable housing the Ministry of Justice found that in just three months, between January and March What is the basis of the ‘housing crisis’ that 2018, social landlords in London made the London faces? For the Conservatives, London’s highest number of both possession claims and housing crisis is seldom linked to a lack of landlord repossessions.29 This has partly been genuinely affordable housing in line with low achieved by social security reforms that have incomes, or the failure to build new council reduced housing benefit payments made to homes. Instead, the government claims that councils (and the private rented sector) for the real problem is the lack of land to build social housing tenants. new housing on, hence its preoccupation with building on ‘brownfield land’, a term used in The Equality and Human Rights Commission urban planning to describe any land where has drawn attention to the highly racialised there has been previous development, but impact of welfare reforms, with the reduction is currently not in use. Architects for Social in housing benefit for social housing tenants Housing (ASH) has drawn attention to the with ‘spare’ bedrooms, known as the ‘bedroom government’s discovery of so-called ‘new land’ tax’ and the ‘two-child limit’ for housing on social housing estates, and its interest benefit recipients, implemented in 2012 and with estate regeneration initiatives as a 2017 respectively, having a ‘particularly large means of manipulating the housing crisis.33 impact for Black and Asian households’. And Indeed, the shortage of housing in London is the government’s most recent overhaul of being used by the Conservative government state welfare, known as Universal Credit, has to justify a housing redevelopment model also had a disproportionate effect on BAME that benefits all those who have a vested households.30 The fact that Universal Credit interest in the financialisation of housing, is paid a month in arrears, and housing rent whether it be businesses, private investors or is now paid a month in advance, has left the government itself. Currently, at least 170 London’s social housing tenants at risk of estates in London are either undergoing or eviction. Information obtained from a recent are subject to consultations over demolition, FOI request reveals an average of 73 per cent of ASH have shown.34 Virtuous arguments about council tenants in London on Universal Credit creating ‘affordable housing’, it would seem, are in rent arrears. Currently, Universal Credit provide a useful means of obscuring what has only been piloted in eight of London’s is really happening on the ground, i.e. the thirty-three boroughs, so this figure is set government is actively enabling the further to rise.31 Other measures that facilitate the transfer of public land (local authority- privatisation and commodification of social owned estates) into private ownership, housing include the extension of Right-to-Buy therefore making it available for demolitions to include housing association properties. But and redevelopment under the guise of the most telling of all, is the presumption in ‘regeneration’. London’s housing crisis is being favour of granting planning permission to new turned into ‘London clearances’.35

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III. ‘SINK ESTATES’ AND ‘MANAGED DECLINE’

Over the past forty years, successive the number of people living in inner-London governments from Thatcher to Blair to is ‘insufficiently dense’, as compared to the May, have re-packaged and sold estate pre-war period when the population was at regeneration as something that benefits the its peak. whole of society – a moral crusade, necessary for civic pride and the revitalisation of the What the report failed to mention was urban landscape. Indeed, when the Housing that this form of regeneration is not an and Planning Bill 2015-16 was introduced inclusive policy designed to provide housing in October 2015, the government spoke for all. On the contrary, it is built on the in explicit terms of its ‘crusade’ to get dispossession of ‘upwards of a million more homes built.36 The publication from people’ who would be displaced from their the centre-left think-tank, the Institute homes, families, friends and communities of Public Policy Research (IPPR), City residing on social housing estates. Instead, Villages: More Homes, Better Communities, the IPPR report tells us that of the ‘few which had been published several months dozen estate regeneration schemes’ which earlier, in March 2015, should, as Elmer have been initiated in recent years in and Dening have pointed out, be seen as London, they ‘have focused particularly on the blueprint for this notorious “sink” estates’. In 2016, there piece of legislation.37 were, according to Anna Minton, around “This form of regeneration The IPPR announced in ‘3,500 estates in London’, home to hundreds is not an inclusive policy the report its intention of thousands of people. At that point, very designed to provide housing to ‘rediscover’ just few, as the IPPR also recognise, had been for all. On the contrary, it is half of inner-London’s earmarked for regeneration. built on the dispossession of housing capacity for the ‘upwards of a million people’ next seventeen years, One must consider the political expediency who would be displaced from recommending that all involved in re-categorising brownfield land to their homes, families, friends existing council estates include council estates. In urban planning, and communities residing on be re-categorised as ‘brownfield land’ is a term used ‘to describe social housing estates.” brownfield land. For former commercial or industrial land that London’s ‘urban potential’ has become contaminated by chemical and to be realised, the industrial waste’, and requires ‘cleaning up’ IPPR stated, ‘brownfield land needs to be before being redeveloped. The very fact that mobilised for housing far more ambitiously’. this term is now applied to London’s council This would involve reframing public estates implies an intention to ‘clear up’ land discourse about what is currently classed that has been contaminated. Ben Campkin as suitable brownfield land and redefining argues that the idea that council estates are the term to encompass the largest source filled with polluting people has been central of publicly owned land, council estates to the ‘symbolic and physical “sanitization” – ‘some of the most valuable land in the process associated with urban redevelopment world’.38 The premise of the report is that and gentrification’.39

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From ‘sink estates’ to gangs that started under New Labour.42 It is now and ghettos firmly associated with the urban poor, often speciously referred to as an ‘underclass’ There is a clear continuity between New and perceived as socially deviant with a Labour’s ‘urban renaissance’ strategy and propensity for criminality. The choice of David Cameron’s Estate Regeneration words like ‘sinking’ and ‘sink’ are indeed Programme, both of which deployed a highly interesting. The verb, ‘to sink’, means ‘to pass stigmatising vocabulary about the quality or fall into some lower state, as of fortune, of life on council estates. A racialised estimation; degenerate’. While the noun ‘sink’ discourse has been adopted since the riots means ‘a drain or sewer’, ‘any pond or pit of of August 2011, with terms like ‘gangs’, sewage or waste, as a cesspool or a pool for ‘ghettos’ and ‘underclass’ often used as a industrial wastes’ and ‘a place of vice and code for race. In 1998, Tony Blair launched corruption’. All of these definitions evoke an his urban renaissance strategy on the Holly imaginary of dirt, degeneration and deviance. Street estate in Hackney, and declared in an interview with the Express shortly afterwards, that ‘some housing estates were beyond The deliberate neglect of rescue’; they were ‘sinking ships’.40 Almost housing estates twenty years later, David Cameron, writing in the Sunday Times, talked in quasi-missionary What is largely left unexplored in academic terms about the government’s obligation to critiques of urban regeneration is the way tackle London’s ‘sink estates’. Drawing on the estates are actively made into sinks before recommendations set out in the IPPR report, they are redeveloped. Film director Paul Sng he proposed to demolish ‘sink estates’ and has captured this process, which he identified thus increase the housing and population as the ‘managed decline’ or deliberate density of London: neglect of housing estates, where local authorities allow the exterior and interior of There is one issue that … for me, estate buildings to go into disrepair, often epitomises both the scale of the challenge producing uninhabitable living conditions.43 we face and the nature of the state failure In an interview with the Guardian, a former over decades. It’s our housing estates … resident on Haringey’s Woodberry Down step outside in the worst estates, and you’re estate, Maxwell O’Hajah, describes how the confronted by concrete slabs dropped from estate was ‘managed into dilapidation’ by on high, brutal high-rise towers and dark Hackney council. ‘What they did’, O’Hajah alleyways that are a gift to criminals and argues, ‘was run down the estate so badly, drug dealers. The police often talk about rundown the facilities, close the facilities the importance of designing out crime, [and] allow the buildings to dilapidate to but these estates actually designed it in. such a degree’, that the council was able to Decades of neglect have led to gangs, adopt, what residents have called, a policy of ghettos and anti-social behaviour.41 ‘constructive eviction’.44 Thus we might say, the evolution of a sink(ing) estate is slow These so-called ‘sink estates’ are usually and delayed. It is, as academic Rob Nixon found within inner-city areas characterised describes, ‘destruction that is dispersed across by high levels of economic and social time’ an ‘attritional violence that is typically deprivation. ‘The use of the word “sink” not viewed as violence at all’.45 But it is a to describe an estate or an economically destruction that, I have argued here, should deprived area’, argues Campkin, ‘is a relatively also be located in the slow violence of council recent etymological development’, and one negligence that does not ‘erupt into instant

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sensational visibility’. The exception to this the UK; with 18.5 per cent of Asian origin; is of course, Grenfell Tower, which Andrea 13.3 per cent of Afro-Caribbean, 5 per cent Gibbons, drawing on Nixon’s work, says, of mixed ethnicity and 3.4 per cent ‘minority represents spectacular violence ‘a flaming ethnic’.48 Adding to this, analysis undertaken inferno brought about by this worldview with by the University of Middlesex in 2013 its austerity, deregulation and crisis’.46 shows BAME populations are predominantly concentrated in social housing in the capital, * * * with almost half of all black households (47.6 per cent) living in social rented If Grenfell showed us anything, it was that accommodation; those of mixed ethnicity the issues of social housing in London are comprising over a third (35.2 per cent); deeply racialised as well as classed.47 And ‘other ethnic groups’ constituting 29. 2 per yet, to date, we have seen nothing published cent, and Asian households making up 17.4 that examines the impact that regeneration per cent.49 Though this analysis was based and gentrification is on the 2011 UK census, a report released by having on working-class the Ministry of Housing in 2018 has stated BAME communities. This that black people continue to be ‘over- “We cannot continue talking is despite the fact that represented in new social housing lettings’ in about the regeneration of London, according to the capital.50 London’s council estates as a BMENational – a collective colour-blind social cleansing of over sixty BAME With this in mind, we cannot continue project. The London housing associations in talking about the regeneration of London’s clearances are as much England – has the largest council estates as a colour-blind social about race as they are about overall BAME population cleansing project. The London clearances are class.” (40.2 per cent) across as much about race as they are about class.

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IV. LOCALISED HOSTILE ENVIRONMENTS AND POLICING INEQUALITY

Before the riots of August 2011, ‘sink estates’ interpretation, needless to say, ignored were largely portrayed in the media in class repressive police regimes and economic terms, with no obvious attempts at racial conditions that had led to youth discontent, stigmatisation. After the riots, however, this like the impact of austerity-driven cuts would all change. Initially, the Home Office to local authority youth budgets that had commissioned a review into the ‘growing affected all young people. In addition, youth problem of gangs and gang violence’ and unemployment in the capital was high, but subsequently adopted policies based on black youth unemployment was running Ending Gangs and Youth Violence (EGYV). And at around 50 per cent, while the abolition then, five years later in 2016, prime minister of the Educational Maintenance Allowance David Cameron writing in the Sunday Times, (EMA), a financial scheme available to young argued that the government had an obligation people from low-income families in higher to demolish housing estates that had been education, was to disproportionately affect associated with the uprisings. He said, the BAME students. Nevertheless, the government riots did not ‘emerge from within terraced did not pursue any meaningful enquiry into streets or low-rise apartment buildings’ but the uprisings. Instead, the riots were used by from ‘post-war estates’ where three quarters of political to compound their positions the convicted ‘rioters’ lived. Such ‘sink estates’ on social disaffection and embolden the he claimed were the result of decades of government’s response to the policing of neglect that, in turn, spawned ‘gangs, ghettos inequality in London. and anti-social behaviour’.51 With sleight of hand, Cameron was able to fuse the issue of In a press conference shortly after the riots gangs with the issue of ‘sink estates’, rewriting began, Cameron announced ‘a concerted the public narrative around estate regeneration all-out war on gangs and gang culture’, which that has become increasingly racialised. he described as a ‘major criminal disease that has infected streets and estates’.52 Similarly, In much more explicit terms, historian and TV Work and Pensions Secretary, Iain Duncan pundit David Starkey commented about the Smith, would set the precedent for future lack of morality exhibited by the rioters when slanderous comments made by US President he claimed that society Donald Trump, when he insisted that had been corrupted by a ‘gangs had created no-go areas’, which were “With sleight of hand, ‘gangster culture’, adding preventing neighbourhood ‘rejuvenation’ and Cameron was able to that ‘whites had become ‘business development’.53 One must consider fuse the issue of gangs black’ and had been how reactionary statements like these, with the issue of ‘sink assimilated in a ‘Jamaican which verge on describing young people as estates’, rewriting the patois’ that had ‘intruded contagions, have influenced the Home Office’s public narrative around England’ making it feel as approach to its EGYV strategies. In particular, estate regeneration that though England was an local authorities that could demonstrate the has become increasingly entirely ‘foreign’ country. existence of ‘street gangs’ within London racialised.” Such an elitist and racist boroughs were ‘funded and commissioned to

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undertake secondary data analysis’ to provide communities live as lawless zones, terms like a ‘problem profile’ of young people who had ‘social malaise’, ‘anti-social behaviour’, ‘gangs’ been convicted of a serious youth violence and ‘ghettos’ continue to conjure up images offence or who were identified as being at of dangerous council estates, over-run with risk of gang involvement.54 young black men engaged in criminal activity. In the seminal text, Policing the Crisis: By raising the spectre of violence (read Mugging, the State, and Law and Order, Stuart gangs) and depravity (read ‘sink estates’) Hall explained how the word ‘ghetto’ was seeping into the public domain (read polite imported from the US where it was used as a white society) and preventing ‘progress’ (read metonym for poor black communities. He went gentrification), successive governments have on to describe how the term was routinely been able to advance the idea that there is deployed by the British media via the state, a ‘problem population’ dwelling in ‘gangs’ in ways that stigmatised black working- on London’s social housing estates. Is it any class neighbourhoods, laying the ground for wonder then that 62 per cent of the British the criminalisation of largely young black public in 2011 thought that those involved men.57 The ‘public image of the ghetto’ that in the riots and who lived in council housing Hall was writing about in the late-1970s should be evicted from their homes?55 is being redeployed today and continues to be comprised of a nebulous ‘cluster of impressions, themes and quasi-explanations Race, ghettos and gangs [that are] gathered and fused together’, When David Cameron incorporated the terms creating an association between race, crime, ‘gangs’ and ‘ghettos’ into his 2016 Estate and housing, which in turn fosters Regeneration strategy, he was drawing on a popular consensus around the need to the findings of Space Syntax, a London-based demolish ‘sink estates’ where young black private consultancy company with a vested men, congregating in ‘gangs’ pose a threat to interest in the (socio-)spatial reconstruction urban safety.58 Despite the Metropolitan Police of London and a stated mission to ‘enhance announcing in November 2018 that it was the social, economic and environmental considering using armed police foot patrols performance of buildings and urban places’. in areas ‘where gang activity was likely’,59 in In a project Space Syntax conducted in the reality, this was already happening. Video aftermath of the 2011 riots, it found 84 per footage obtained by the BBC in July 2018 cent of ‘verified incidents’ of social disorder showed a group of young black teenagers, in north London and 96 per cent in south aged 16-19, being stopped and searched in London took place within a five-minute walk Hackney, east London, by police officers of a large post-war housing estate. Founder holding machine guns. Their only crime: of Space Syntax, Bill Hillier, remarked ‘the filming a Drill music video – no arrests were spatial layout of these housing estates has made.60 an effect on social patterns, often leading to social malaise and anti-social behaviour’.56 The reality in London today, according to Home Office figures, is that black people Cameron, with his use of terms such as are over nine times more likely than white ‘gangs’ and ‘ghettos’, may have chosen a people to be stopped and searched; over more explicit vocabulary than Space Syntax three times more likely to be arrested, and, but essentially both were speaking to the four times more likely to have force used same (white, middle-class) audience with against them by the police.61 Indeed, the use the same set of fears. Given the long history of force on young black men, in particular, of the racialisation of areas where BAME is fast turning into a national scandal with

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the Guardian analysis of police data revealing and those introduced in the wake of the 2011 that the Metropolitan Police’s use of force riots, both in terms of racial profiling and (handcuffing, stun guns, CS spray, batons targeting symbolic locations. Having said and guns) has risen 79 per cent in the last that, it would be a mistake to suggest that year, with 39 per cent of the 41,329 incidents everything is the same. It is not. Policing that occurred between April to August 2018 in London today is being organised around directed at black people.62 the project of regenerating London and in turn, gentrifying it. Policing twenty or Furthermore, there has been a long history thirty years ago sought, through ‘community of the police adopting an intensive, more policing’ initiatives, to enhance police militaristic style of policing in black intelligence-gathering and to expand their communities, often underpinned by role from enforcing the criminal law to questionable intelligence-gathering and embrace wider political and social control intrusive surveillance. This history has of ‘suspect communities’ and what were been charted by IRR in its seminal accounts perceived as problem populations. Policing (1979 and 1987) of police-BAME relations, today goes much further in seeking to co-opt subsequently published as Policing Against or incorporate non-police institutions – local Black People.63 It is interesting to note that authorities, schools, housing associations and after the England riots of 1981, the result of social services – directly in the ‘fight against inner-city deprivation and police brutality, a crime’ through the use of their civil and new policing model was introduced in London administrative law powers as additional means which focused on restoring law and order of punishing individuals, their families and through ‘targeting’ populations thought to be communities, as well as targeting symbolic ‘at risk’ of participating in future uprisings.64 locations and buildings earmarked for Targeting involved police resources – often redevelopment. in the form of specialist units – being concentrated in ‘high- crime’ areas where BAME Location-specific targeting “Policing in London today communities lived, such Urban geographer Adam Elliot-Cooper has is being organised around as Brixton, Notting Hill, commented, ‘for many young people’, living the project of regenerating Tottenham and Dalston in in targeted areas, ‘police searches and other London and in turn, London.65 The IRR wrote misuses of power are considered a part of gentrifying it.” then: everyday life and the articulation of police violence is often location-specific’.66 That Within these areas, police operations location-specific experience of policing are supposedly sharply focused, through combines with the spatial-displacement of the use of increased surveillance and poor black populations through gentrification intelligence-gathering, on selected policies to create what I would describe as individuals and groups and on what are localised hostile environments. This policing termed as ‘symbolic locations’ – particular outcome is the result of the wider government estates, clubs and meeting places of special project to restructure the socio-spatial and political and cultural significance to the topographic landscape of London’s working- community. class neighbourhoods by introducing wealthier people (gentrifiers). The concept of the If this targeting of ‘symbolic locations’ sounds localised hostile environment seeks to capture familiar, it is not surprising. There is a clear a diverse set of punitive and disciplinary continuum between the discriminatory measures, including, inter alia, racial profiling policing tactics that emerged in the 1980s and policing, territory-targeted stop and

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searches and residential evictions. It refers study, occur implicitly or more insidiously to the places and spaces in which the state, and also treat BAME residents and others via the police, councils and other agencies, in specific neighbourhoods as ‘undesirable’ discipline and displace populations deemed and encourages them to ‘voluntarily’ leave ‘problematic’. Academics within the field of an area or withdraw from gentrified public urbanisation studies view the advancement spaces. There are already intimations of of aggressive policing tactics, both overt and this happening, which I will briefly outline covert, as an essential and active force in the here. Regeneration projects that physically gentrification of cities.67 transform working-class neighbourhoods change the character of what Sharon Zukin It was the government calls the ‘soul’ of a place.69 Richer newcomers “Location-specific policing that coined the term want to enjoy the space’s provincial history, combines with the spatial ‘hostile environment’ which still exudes cosmopolitanism. But this displacement of poor to describe a set of then necessitate specific policing regimes black populations through administrative and aimed at regulating working-class life or gentrification policies to legislative measures, behaviours, as they are deemed incongruent create localised hostile including aggressive and intolerable among wealthier groups who environments.” immigration policing, uphold bourgeois lifestyles. In the localised designed to make staying hostile environment, the ‘gang’ trope serves as in the United Kingdom ‘a resource to criminalise racialised groups’.70 as difficult as possible for people without But this isn’t the entire story. What the state leave to remain in the hope that they would is doing, via the police, local authorities ‘voluntarily leave’.68 Even though the context and other social agencies, is using the idea here is different, I feel that the term localised of ‘gangs’, ‘gang culture’ and more generally hostile environments is appropriate, because ‘anti-social’ behaviour as vehicles to drive of the clear similarities between the policing forward its agenda of regenerating, and in of BAME communities and migrants occurring turn, repopulating the city with wealthier at a micro level, to the government’s macro residents and consumers. level ‘hostile environment’ policies. The government’s cruel approach to ‘irregular migrants’ was epitomised not only by Gentrification, ASB and Operation Vaken, which involved the Home managing urban marginality Office hiring a billboard van to broadcast the message ‘Go Home! Or face arrest’ but by the The link between gentrification and ‘Windrush scandal’ which involved hundreds social engineering is implicit in the IPPR’s of Commonwealth citizens from the Caribbean document analysed earlier. In City Villages: being denied access to the welfare state, More Homes, Better Communities it argued including urgent medical care, and in some that while ‘city villages are about unlocking cases wrongfully deported. These British land and estates to help tackle London’s citizens from the former Caribbean colonies housing crisis’, they also deliver ‘mixed are amongst thousands of people, who may communities’ with ‘new developments around not have been born in the country but have shared amenities – open space, education, lived here from their formative years, who are cultural and commercial facilities – and now routinely treated as ‘undeserving’ and creating homes and neighbourhoods where ‘undesirable’ people. aspiration and opportunity thrive’. The question is, who benefits from these new The kind of localised hostile environments amenities, and who loses out? In terms of we see developing in the context of this urban planning, what this policy-speak boils

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down to is providing wealthier residents as new partnerships in the co-production (gentrifiers) with high streets and designated of ‘urban safety’ are created in line with spaces for unhindered consumerism, as deregulation and privatisation, the hallmarks gentrification denotes the material process of any neoliberal government.75 This results of renovating and improving deprived in the over-policing of poorer populations economic areas, so who are increasingly disenfranchised from they become more these newly gentrified spaces and are “The independent regulatory appealing to in-migrating actively displaced and dispossessed through 71 frameworks or boundaries wealthier residents. a combination of police and other regulatory between the police and In fact, in order to measures. other public services are appease the desires of increasingly erased, as wealthy homebuyers Although one might argue that this process new partnerships in the in the capital, private has its geneses in the Crime and Disorder co-production of ‘urban housing developers are Act 1998 and later the Anti-social Behaviour safety’ are created in often required to design Act 2003, the Centre for Crime and Justice line with deregulation separate entrances, Studies (CCJS) has recently argued the and privatisation, the known as ‘poor doors’, overhaul of anti-social frameworks under the hallmarks of any neoliberal for social housing Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing 72 government.” tenants. Elmer and Act 2014 ‘created new mechanisms for the Dening in their critique potentially much more extensive use of ASB of the gentrification responses by councils, housing providers and of previously working- the police’.76 What preceded these changes class neighbourhoods have accused London was not only Cameron’s promise to ‘get councils of ‘doing the dirty work of Tory tough’ on delinquency after the riots, but housing policy’ through policies that target also, the Government Response to the Riots, the residents of urban spaces that the state Communities and Victims Panel’s final report would like to privatise and financialise.73 published in 2013. This stated that new For councils, under attack from a central provisions were to be made in the Anti-social government which is slashing their budgets, Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill including gentrification brings obvious benefits in the enabling ‘landlords to seek to evict tenants form of increased revenues from wealthier where they or members of their households residents through council taxes. But the are convicted of riot related offences construction of urban spaces, as literal committed anywhere in the UK’.77 The new ‘playgrounds for the rich’, excludes the ASB Act replaced nineteen separate powers existing local community, while engendering for tackling anti-social behaviour with six a standardised, consumer-centred local new ones, including: culture, which necessitates the expulsion of »» Dispersal orders/powers; the young whose ‘presence is undesirable and »» Civil injunctions; their doings intolerable’.74 »» Community Protection Notices (CPNs); »» Public Space Protection Orders (PSPOs); The task of providing amenities for »» Closure orders; gentrifiers while regulating the activities and »» Criminal Behaviour Orders (CBOs). behaviour of poor young people in urban spaces, fuses the interests and resources of The CCJS has shown how three of these local authority and policing initiatives. Hence key anti-social behaviour order powers the independent regulatory frameworks or (Dispersal powers, CPNs and PSPOs) have led boundaries between the police and other to increasing sanctions against young people, public services are increasingly erased, with housing associations and councils now

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bestowed with the power to issue Community a rapid increase in prosecutions of young Protection Notices to individuals, businesses people for ‘street loitering’ or ‘congregating or organisations affecting a community’s in large groups’. The question is, what is quality of life. But which ‘community’ is this happening to our young people on the streets legislation protecting? of London? Further, where exactly are they meant to go? Interestingly, CCJS have reported that in London, over 30 per cent of the young Another specialist anti-crime initiative that adults prosecuted for breach of a dispersal had the potential to collectively punish power were black in 2018, despite the young people and limit their ability to fact that black people make up 9 per cent assemble and move freely around London of the 18-25-year-old group living in the was Operation Shield, an anti-gang initiative, capital.78 Dispersal powers are available to funded by the Mayor’s Office for Policing uniformed police officers and community and Crime (MOPAC) and trialled in three police community support officers and are London boroughs (Haringey, Lambeth and issued to individuals and groups engaging Westminster) in 2015. This initiative, which in ASB crime and disorder. They involve is still operational in Westminster, was the the creation of designated ‘dispersal zones’ brainchild of the then Conservative Mayor (anything from a few named streets to Boris Johnson who sought to bring the a shopping centre to an entire London MOPAC, local authorities and government borough) where anyone aged over 10 years departments into a partnership to pursue old can be excluded by the police, potentially communities ‘at risk’ of gang activity or on the instruction of a local authority, for up association. This was to be done by utilising to 48 hours (though the power can be used a variety of criminal, civil and administrative in the same area repeatedly). Penalties for sanctions, including gang injunctions breach of a dispersal power range from a fine banning young people from parts of London, to a prison sentence. In 2016 around 13,350 preventing suspected gang members from dispersal zones were declared in England and socialising with associates and even evicting Wales according to the annual report of the the families of suspected gang members from British police service, which also stated that social housing.79 The residents of Haringey London was amongst the three highest users and Lambeth rejected Operation Shield on of such zones. the grounds that it racially profiled young BAME people by attempting to predict their Given such high numbers it would be behaviours and activities and incapacitate interesting to see how many dispersal them even before a crime was committed. zones have been declared in 2017 and While pre-empting the future criminality of 2018. However, in just two two years, the people is problematic in itself, what interests Metropolitan Police Service appears to have us here, is first, the coming together of abandoned its duty to hold a public record separate institutions – the Metropolitan on such important Police, local authorities and government information about the departments – to deliver a particular spatial displacement of model of hybrid policing, and second, the “This hybrid criminal justice individuals and groups. types of penalties that can be imposed on system, which merges This comes at a time when young people based on this arrangement. together civil and criminal eighty-one youth centres This hybrid criminal justice system, which law, is an exceptional and have been closed across merges together civil and criminal law is an expanded use of policing the capital since 2012 exceptional and expanded use of policing powers.” and at the same time as powers.

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Pseudo-ASB initiatives, the via a request, presumably through the Gangs Matrix and targeting council, to the MPP scheme. Information on how the MPP scheme operates is hard black youth to come by, with MOPAC redirecting a Below we attempt to describe some of the freedom of information request for ‘details other ways in which the government, local for every single Met Patrol Plus contract authorities and the police have created the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime pseudo-ASB initiatives, and make the case has set up since the scheme was created’, that these are aimed at protecting the to the Metropolitan Police.81 An article in interests and meeting the needs of new The Economist in 2016 outlines the process, businesses and new residents (gentrifiers). stating that ‘local authorities and business improvement districts pay for police officers First, we have Business Improvement and the Met then matches their funding, Districts (BIDs) – a conceptual export from meaning areas get two cops for the price of the US, where businesses are required to one’.82 As evidence to the wide permissiveness pay additional taxes in order to ‘improve of the policy, in 2015 the Chair of Safer services’ through ‘extra safety and cleaning’ Neighbourhood Policing in Camden, north in geographically designed areas. While London, boasted of non-business affiliated spatial analysis provided by the Mayor’s residents being granted access to the ‘buy- Office suggests that BIDs are mainly one-get-one-free’ scheme by the Mayor’s concentrated in the City of London, over Office, something it supposedly knows the past few years they have also been nothing about.83 applied to typically non-business areas, with 80 large working-class black populations. Policing black subcultures For example, in south London there are the Clapham and Brixton BIDs, in north London The anti-social behaviour powers and the Haringey BID and in west London the policing initiatives currently operational Hammersmith BID, to name just a few newly in London not only serve the interests and gentrified areas. In fact, these are located desires of new businesses and gentrifiers by within the very boroughs in which some of managing ‘problem populations’, but they also the most destructive 2011 rioting occurred, entrench inequality by marginalising young and in the case of Haringey, where the riots communities who have carved out distinct originated (in Tottenham). In addition, these cultures amongst the ruins of economic are the same boroughs that the government’s impoverishment. Notwithstanding the barrage ‘flagship’ regeneration sites (housing of cuts to public services, including education estates) are located. For instance, the and youth services over the past ten years, Aylesbury and Heygate in south London and young BAME communities in London have Northumberland Park and Broadwater Farm in responded to this socio-economic exclusion north London – all of which have also been from mainstream society by creating strong labelled ‘sink estates’, ‘ghettos’ and ‘gang subcultures, which have provided meaning territories’ by the government – are within to their lives, and also firmly established the south London and north London BIDs. their right to live in the city which they have helped, quite literally, to fashion. Another scheme is Met Patrol Plus (MPP) These young people are often associated under which new businesses, owned by with music genres Grime, Road Rap and Drill, gentrifiers and operating within the BID which, though sonically distinct, have come model, are able to dictate the number of to collectively encapsulate a way of life for police officers an area ostensibly requires, disadvantaged young black people, trying

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to navigate their way through intersecting also applies to Drill and Road Rap videos. forms of oppression, such as poverty, social Visual depictions of ‘the ends’ portray exclusion and state racism. profound feelings of struggle and survival – ‘the ends’ are a home, created even in In fact, let us consider the most difficult of circumstances. Black “The vernacular landscape the etymological origin subcultures in London represent a distinctive signifies all the urban spaces of ‘Grime’ which is generational identity of working-class youth, and places where young sometimes contested. and the vernacular landscape is very much working-class Londoners The subculture’s genesis a part of their cultural identity. This is either live or frequent, can be traced back to revealed in the many colloquialisms of the including council estates, London’s inner-city street, such as ‘the ends’, ‘the bits’ and ‘the youth clubs, chicken shops council estates, an hood’, but also the use of seemingly unusual and ‘the streets’.” architectural landscape urban spaces. which would have been a significant factor in One of these places is the chicken shop; naming the genre. The noun ‘grime’ means fast-food restaurants that serve inexpensive ‘dirt, soot, or other filthy matter, especially ‘chicken ‘n’ chips’ with late opening hours. adhering to or embedded in a surface’. At the Chicken shops are more than just places to time of Grime’s birth, New Labour was rolling eat, they are an iconic part of the vernacular out its anti-social behaviour order policies landscape for young people forming spaces and installing surveillance cameras across which symbolise your ends and your the city. Against this backdrop, Grime’s local community. These are the cultural progenitors, young black boys, were seen as forums where inner-city youths are able to a nuisance to the state, which was intent congregate without harassment from the on regulating working-class behaviour and council, ‘sodcast’ (play music loudly from gentrifying inner-city London. But Grime’s a phone) and cause a youthful ruckus over success was dependent on free movement, the trivialities of everyday life. Journalist particularly to different pirate radios that Bridget Minamore has emphatically stated, were dotted across the city. Like grime, ‘chicken shops are more than a part of embedded in a surface and hard to remove, London – they are London. Or at least, these young boys would have embedded they’re London for the people who never themselves in the vernacular landscape have and never will identify with the glossy in order to maintain the scene and their new-build flats and overpriced themed cafes collective aspirations. I use the term that the city seems to be drowning in at vernacular landscape to signify all the urban the moment’.84 Chicken shops are the places spaces and places where young working- in which working-class adolescents, but class Londoners either live or frequent, especially young black men, are able to ‘take including, amongst others things, council up public space and have fun’, where, along estates, youth clubs, chicken shops and with their homes, they can find shelter from ‘the streets’. These communal spaces, I have the arbiters of state violence: the police. argued elsewhere, help to develop ethics of In fact, since youth clubs have been closed trust, communication and cooperation among down, Minamore alludes that chicken shops young black people, which, in turn, has led have increasingly been used as refuges for to the development of a sense of community, young people, who are often banned from solidarity and collective resistance. public spaces. But these unlikely sanctuaries have recently caught the attention of the Almost all Grime music videos are filmed police. in council estates or ‘the ends’, and this

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Surveillance of meeting Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) and local places and social media authorities routinely monitor the social media accounts of young black men who In 2017, MOPAC released its Knife Crime listen to Grime or appear in Grime music Strategy in which it stated that it was working videos, as this is seen as an efficient way closely with fast-food restaurants to ‘provide to identify potential ‘gang associated measures to control Wi-Fi and phone charging individuals’. As AI points out, ‘there are facilities’ and, in what can only be described many young people who are not involved as the most bourgeois policing tactic to date, in criminal wrongdoing but are at risk of to ‘play classical music to create a calming being profiled and monitored by the police environment’ for adolescents.85 While this simply because of the subculture to which might appear strange or even unbelievable they belong’.86 Indeed, amongst the criteria that the police would infiltrate chicken shops for inclusion on the MPS Gangs Matrix (see as a way to monitor working-class youths, as below) is the monitoring of social media explained earlier, we should think of policing activity on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and regimes in urban neighbourhoods as part of a YouTube videos, with gang names, certain wider project to restructure the socio-spatial colours, flags, signs and clothing used as landscape and this is just another instance potential signifiers for gang involvement. If where the state seeks out innovative ways to that were not enough, the police have also co-produce urban safety. made it a ‘legitimate business need’ to both overtly and covertly monitor various social Furthermore, there is media sites, often adopting fake online “We should think of an obvious argument personas and befriending young people they policing regimes in urban to be made here that suspect of gang activity. This all occurs in neighbourhoods as part of a the playing of classical the absence of a warrant. wider project to restructure music in chicken shops the socio-spatial landscape is condescending, given and this is just another that the majority of Problem venues and instance where the state chicken shop diners are Form 696 seeks out innovative ways impoverished, working- to co-produce urban safety.” class teenagers who have Since the inception of the Promotion Event likely never listened Risk Assessment Form 696 in 2005 with the to this genre of music ostensible aim of minimising ‘any risks of before. It is also interesting to observe the most serious violent crime happening at state’s general preoccupation with music, the proposed event’, the police have made particularly at a time when it is criminalising it difficult for black artists, such as MCs, young black men for listening to and rappers and the like, from performing in performing various types of black music. the capital by often arbitrarily cancelling Today, the earlier policing tactics based on events. According to cultural criminologist, the targeting of ‘symbolic locations’, such as Lambros Fatsis, while the original version of clubs, estates and meeting-places, have been Form 696 contained leading questions about revived by the Metropolitan Police as they other black music forms, such as Bashment, target the grandchildren of the Windrush RnB and Garage, it was Grime – though one generation, though now in chicken shops. might now argue this should also include Drill – that has been hardest hit.87 This has In their recent report on the Gangs Matrix had a particularly negative impact on both (see below), Amnesty International (AI) the financial incomes and creativity of black highlighted the fact that both the artists, as many have been forced to change

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the type of music they make in order to avoid today, this ‘moral panic’ is over ‘knife crime’, being discriminated against by venues vis- which is often seen as ‘gang-related behaviour’ à-vis Form 696. Although the document was that can happen anywhere, at any time of revised in 2008 and then officially scrapped day, but is perceived more likely to occur at in 2017, the BBC has reported that similar black music events in London. In fact, black forms are still in use.88 Moreover, it is very subcultures are ‘frequently associated in the likely that these venues have already been media as a cause of rising knife crime in the classified by the MPS as so-called ‘problem capital and other gang related behaviour (i.e. venues’, which the 2017 Knife Crime Strategy the informal drugs economy), within inner- (2017) suggests will be tackled ‘with licensing city boroughs of London.’92 Fatsis, looking planning enforcement’, or in other words the into why Grime has been viewed by the continuation of a policy that involves the MPS as a ‘criminal subculture’, has argued revocation of licenses to venues that put on that black British culture is frequently seen events with DJs and MCs. When venues are as incompatible with ‘mainstream norms discouraged from showcasing urban music, and values; often constructing the “black young people are actively dispossessed of presence” as a “threat” to the “homogenous, spaces where their sense of community can white, national “we”’. This ‘cultural racism’ be fostered. These policing strategies have towards Grime ‘has its roots in the belief that the affect of depriving black, working-class Black cultural values should be suspected of populations of their creative social and promoting violent or criminal lifestyles, and cultural capital that they have ‘carved out should therefore be responded to by tactics from the stone of their lives’89 not only to that have been described as “policing against compensate for a lack of economic prosperity black people”.’93 but to make city life a little more bearable and a lot more pleasurable. Topographic mapping and In the documentary ‘The Police vs Grime risk-assessment tools Music’, Grime MC, JME, investigated the now defunct risk-assessment document, Form Back in 1986, it was revealed that the MPS 696 and how it was being used by the MPS had drawn up a list of twenty housing estates to target venues holding Grime events in the in London, including Broadwater Farm (now capital. Just some of the requirements on the subject to a regeneration plan) and the Ferry form included: names, stage names, private Lane Estate in Tottenham, the Clapton Park addresses and phone numbers of all promoters Estate in Hackney, and the East Dulwich and performers listed, as well as, a description Housing Estate in Southwark, classifying of the style of music to be performed and them as areas of ‘high’, ‘medium’ and ‘lower’ the target audience including their ethnicity. risk in terms of the potential for outbreaks Grime artist Jammer describes how ‘the image of public disorder, with contingency plans of black guys, in a dark place, shouting’ is for the police to take control of the estates seen by the police as ‘threatening’, but argues in the case of any disturbances. Amongst ‘I do strongly believe it’s [Form 696] racist’ the criteria employed by police planners in as it discriminates against cultural events selecting these ‘target’ estates were: a high hosted by black men.90 This echoes Stuart density of population of ethnic minorities; Hall’s argument that black youth are often frequent trouble between gangs; hostility viewed as ‘agents of trouble’ and carry with towards police as manifested by the incidence them the threat of ‘what could go wrong’, of complaints and difficulties in making which often leads to social anxiety over the arrests.94 activities of young people.91 For young people

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Today, the police have far more sophisticated The Gangs Matrix technology at their disposal with which Under the leadership of the Home Office, to target problem housing estates and as various government departments, such as part of this investigation I discovered the the Department of Health and Social Care Metropolitan Police have been cataloguing and the Department of Work and Pensions, space in London as ‘gang territories’ through are implementing the EYGV strategy, a core topographic mapping.95 strand of which is improving methods of information sharing. As the Monitoring There is reason to be concerned with the Group points out, every government MPS’s mapping of London’s ‘gang territories’ department is ‘now involved in the sharing as this type of surveillance is built on the of personal and detailed information, despite assumption that cities can be understood the restrictions placed upon them by the as systems, where neighbourhoods and lives Data Protection Act 1998 and Article 8 of ‘can be managed and transformed through the Human Rights Act’.99 Another multi- scientific methods of data analysis’.96 This agency data mining tool is the MPS Trident method is of course, inherently problematic, Gang Matrix. Established in 2012 after the since it seeks to simplify the behaviours of riots, the Gangs Matrix is a London-wide people and places assembled to fit within a police intelligence system and database that pre-determined grid. Urban studies scholars, operates on a multi-agency basis to share Seth Schindler and Simon Marvin, have data across a range of local authority and warned that the rise of the ‘science of cities’ other agencies about individuals considered amounts to a linked to gangs. Its stated purpose is to assess and rank London’s suspected gang regime of urban control that rests on members according to their ‘propensity for an epistemology that understands cities violence’. Criteria for inclusion is ostensibly as a multitude of people and things based on violent offending and violence with comprehensible and instrumental related intelligence, with each individual relationships that can be known and (‘gang nominal’) listed, assigned a colour mapped. Once a city’s complexity is coded category (red, amber, green) based on simplified and its constituent components propensity to violence. are rendered legible, abnormal and deviant relationships among people and things can In 2014, a response by the police to an FoI be identified.97 request established that 87 per cent of those on the Gangs Matrix were black, Asian or In the context of this research, we find that minority ethnic. Professor Bridges concluded: mapping ‘gang territories’ on council estates, considerably bolsters the MPS’s capacity The ethnic composition of the Gangs Matrix to target young black men. It appears the and similar databases is not simply an police are able to disguise what is essentially issue of bias in the way such instruments racial profiling by instead policing specific are compiled. As the police themselves turn locations, otherwise known as ‘hotspots’ increasingly to so-called ‘intelligence-led’ – small, ‘crime-ridden’ urban areas.98 But operations at a time of reduced as Amnesty Intentional has shown, young manpower and resources, these databases people are frequently misrepresented by the feed directly into the ways that policing police as being involved in gangs for simply policies and priorities are being targeted living in a certain area or hanging around on particular groups. In other words, with certain friends. the racial bias in the databases becomes institutionalised in police practice.100

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Amnesty International (AI), has managed and retaining tenancies. Williams and Clarke to break down this 87 per cent figure still carried out FoI requests that revealed that further, establishing that 78 per cent are Job Centres across London have registered black, and 80 per cent between the ages of almost 4,000 of their clients with a ‘gang’ 12 and 24. Fifteen per cent are minors, the flag, as being either in a gang or at risk of youngest being just 12 years old. gang involvement.104

The Gangs Matrix should be seen in the Furthermore, anecdotal evidence provided context of police operational powers to by AI suggests that landlords actively conduct so-called ‘intelligence-led’ stop and discriminate against tenants that are searches on council estates that the police registered on the Gangs Matrix, and, even identify as gang territories. For Stafford more worryingly, that the police issue Scott, this is a Catch 22 situation; if ‘you’re housing eviction threats to the families of black and born on an estate, nowadays the ‘gang members’. This anecdotal evidence was system automatically sees you as being in supported in June 2018, when Home Office a gang’.101 AI’s 2018 report highlighted the minister Victoria Atkins proclaimed, families fact that out of the 3,806 people registered of gang members who are living in council on the Gangs Matrix, 78 per cent were black, housing should have their homes taken away and yet only 27 per cent of serious youth from them.105 Atkins’ policy is currently violence in London is committed by black being piloted in an undisclosed north London people.102 In his analysis of the Haringey borough and could soon be ratified by an Gangs Matrix, Scott established that 99 of amendment to the Anti-social Behaviour, the 100 young people on it are black. Of Crime and Policing Act 2014 and rolled out these, thirty-five are listed under the Green across other social housing estates in London. category score with a zero score, meaning If this comes as a surprise, it should not. that that individual has never been convicted After all it was David Cameron who first of a violent offence. He concludes that these thought up the idea as a response to the young people are merely ‘the peers of those 2011 riots, when he proclaimed in Parliament on the Gang Matrix who are in the RED & that, ‘part of solving the problem is saying to AMBER categories. They live on the same people in social housing: if you misbehave, estates or went to the same schools or youth you can be thrown out of your house’, clubs together.’103 adding, ‘I think there may be opportunities, possibly through the new criminal justice In terms of the IRR’s research on the links and sentencing legislation, to make sure we between housing dispossession and policing, are better at confiscating things from people what is telling is that non-police agencies are when they commit crimes’.106 able to contribute ‘intelligence’ on suspected gang members, and are permitted access As the IRR pointed out in May 2018: to its data. AI points out that each of the thirty-two London boroughs, holds a regular at every stage – from the use of secret ‘Gangs Multi Agency Partnership’ (GMAP) algorithms to calculate risk, to the meeting, which ‘brings together the police disproportionate and discriminatory and partners from the council, social workers, inclusion of so many young black men and representatives from housing and other boys on the Gang Matrix, to the absence of agencies’. It further argues that information- any clear protocol for the review or removal sharing between the police and housing of the names of those listed – processes representatives has a detrimental effect on of demonisation (of black urban youth young black men’s access to social housing culture) and racial stigmatisation (of

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specific estates) affect not just individuals, The Home Office’s EGYV policy is based on but whole communities. This racialised financial incentives for local authorities to labelling creates ‘suspect communities’ accumulate data on young people in gangs and leaves many young black people or at risk of gang involvement. But postcode dispossessed, ostracised, and excluded mapping revealed that the ‘communities from society as the stigma of being a with higher concentrations of BAME people ‘gang nominal’ is reflected back at him were more likely to be the areas identified as he goes about his daily life and tries by the police and criminal justice partners to access services. Most telling is the as having a “gang problem”’. What the IRR unthinking ease with which a multitude of has sought to identify in this research is a agencies – from the probation service to further, hitherto unexplored, pattern that youth offending teams, from job centres to suggests a connection between urban policy housing associations, from local authority and policing, with locations targeted by the to voluntary sector partner agencies, appear police as ‘gang infested’, being precisely the to have colluded in the racialised logic that areas targeted for regeneration, leading to the underpins the Gangs Matrix.107 race and class-based social cleansing of the capital. * * *

32 Institute of Race Relations | Background Paper No. 12 The London Clearances: Race, Housing and Policing

REFERENCES

1 See Lee Bridges, ‘Keeping the lid on: British urban ordinary working-class people and those on low social policy, 1975-81’, Race & Class, Vol. 23, Nos incomes, 80% of local market rent, particularly 2/3 (Autumn/Winter 1981) and ‘Policing the urban in London, is astronomical. Affordable housing, wastelands’ Race & Class, Vol 25, No 2 (Autumn thus, is not actually affordable. https://www. 1983). london.gov.uk/what-we-do/planning/london- 2 As demonstrated by Frances Webber, the ‘hostile plan/current-london-plan/london-plan-chapter-3/ environment’ toward immigrants and asylum policy-310-definition seekers itself dates back more than thirty years. 12 Local authority data reveals that more than See The Embedding of State Hostility: A Background 1,200 households were sent out of the capital in Paper on the Windrush Scandal (IRR, 2018). the first six months of 2018, to Kent, Essex, the 3 Housing campaigners Elmer and Dening first West Midlands and Surrey but also as far afield used the term to describe the ways in which as Glasgow, Newcastle and Cardiff (Guardian, 29 regeneration was becoming the key mechanism October 2018). whereby London’s land was made available for 13 A reference to the forced evictions of agricultural private investment and development. See ‘The tenants in the Highlands and western islands of London clearances’, City (Vol. 20, No. 2, 2016). Scotland during the eighteenth and nineteenth 4 This background paper is based on Jessica Perera’s centuries resulting in the destruction of traditional MA dissertation ‘The Racialised Regeneration of clan society and the beginnings of a pattern of London’s Council Estates: Housing, Policing and rural depopulation and emigration from Scotland. Grime Youth Culture’. 14 Simon Elmer and Geraldine Dening, ‘The London 5 Mustafa Dikeç, Urban Rage: The Revolt of the clearances’, City (Vol. 20, No. 2, 2016), pp. 271- Excluded (United States: Yale University Press, 277. 2017). 15 David Harvey, ‘Neoliberalism as Creative 6 See Anna Minton, Big capital: who is London for? Destruction’, Human Geography (Vol. 88, No. 2, (Great Britain: Penguin Random House, 2017); 2006), pp. 145-158. Simon Elmer and Geraldine Dening, ‘The London 16 See Andy Beckett, ‘The right to buy: the housing clearances’, City (Vol. 20, No. 2, 2016), pp. 271- crisis that Thatcher built’, The Guardian (26 277. August 2018). https://www.theguardian.com/ 7 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New society/2015/aug/26/right-to-buy-margaret- York: Oxford University Press, 2005). thatcher-david-cameron-housing-crisis 8 In 1976, the IMF, following monetarist policy, 17 Hal Pawson and Cathie Fancy, Maturing assets: the imposed budget reductions on the Callaghan evolution of stock transfer housing associations Labour government. There has therefore been (Bristol: The Policy Press, 2003). a history, over forty years, of austerity-driven 18 The privatisation of council housing to RSLs reductions in investment in public housing, would also continue under New Labour, but to a resulting in very few new council houses being much greater degree. In 1997, government policy built and a criminal neglect of maintenance and prompted local authorities to privatise, with the repair of existing council and other public housing. advice ‘that unreasonable resistance to transfer 9 David Harvey, ‘Neoliberalism as Creative would incur financial penalties’. This culminated Destruction’, Human Geography (Vol. 88, No. 2, in April 2000 in the publication of the Department 2006), pp. 145-158. of the Environment, Transport and the Regions 10 David Harvey, The New Imperialism (New York: Housing Green Paper (‘Quality and Choice: a decent Oxford University Press, 2003). home for all’) stipulating an annual transfer target 11 ‘Affordable housing’ is a contested term. The of 200,000 homes (Pawson and Fancy, 2003, p. 6). Greater London Authority has defined it according 19 Stuart Hodkinson and Chris Essen, ‘Grounding to ‘rent controls that require a rent of no more accumulation by dispossession in everyday life: than 80% of the local market rent’. However, for the unjust geographies of urban regeneration

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under the private finance initiative’, International com/2017/09/10/mapping--estate- Journal of Law in the Built Environment (Vol. 7, No. regeneration-programme/ 1, 2006), pp. 1-20. 35 Simon Elmer and Geraldine Dening, ‘The London 20 While also simultaneously fast-tracking Compulsory clearances’, pp. 271-277. Purchase Orders and easing planning regulations. 36 ‘David Cameron vows to scrap requirement to build 21 Loretta Lees, ‘Gentrification and social mixing: affordable homes for rent’, Guardian (7 October towards an inclusive urban renaissance’, Urban 2015). Studies (Vol. 45, No. 12, 2008), pp. 2449-2470. 37 This eventually culminated in the Housing and 22 Hodkinson and Essen were utilising the ‘rent Planning Act 2016. See, the ‘Overview of the Act’, gap theory’ of Neil Smith who used it to explain which states: ‘Permission in principle and local the disparity between underdeveloped land and/ registers of land – enables the Secretary of State or the low rental income of a property and the to require local authorities to hold a register potential for a higher rental income generated by of various types of land, with the intention of gentrification. creating a register of brownfield land to facilitate 23 Stuart Hodkinson and Chris Essen, ‘Grounding unlocking land to build new homes’. http:// accumulation’. www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2016/22/notes/ 24 Helen Mills and Matt Ford, ‘Anti-social behaviour division/2/index.htm powers and young adults’, Centre for Crime and 38 IPPR, ‘City Villages: More Homes, Better Justice Studies, 2018. Communities’, The Institute for Public Policy 25 Danny Dorling, All that is Solid: The Great Housing Research, 2015. Disaster (London: Allen Lane, 2014). 39 Ben Campkin, ‘Placing “matter out of place”: 26 Graham Ruddick, ‘Revealed: housebuilders purity and danger as evidence for architecture and sitting on 600,000 Plots of Land’, Guardian (30 urbanism’, Architectural Theory Review (Vol. 18, No. December 2015). https://www.theguardian.com/ 1, 2013) pp. 1-23. society/2015/dec/30/revealed-housebuilders- 40 ‘£800 million pound for “no-go” estates’, BBC (15 sitting-on-450000-plots-of-undeveloped-land September 1998). http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/ 27 Michael Edwards, ‘The housing crisis and London’, uk/171530.stm City (Vol. 20, No. 2, 2016), pp. 222-237. 41 ‘Estate Regeneration: article by David Cameron’, 28 Simon Elmer and Geraldine Dening, ‘The London HM Government (10 January 2016). https://www. clearances’, City (Vol. 20, No. 2, 2016), pp. 271- gov.uk/government/speeches/estate-regeneration- 277. article-by-david-cameron 29 Mortgage and Landlord Possession Statistics 42 Ben Campkin, Remaking London: Decline and in England and Wales, January to March 2018 Regeneration in Urban Culture (New York: Palgrave (Provisional)’, Ministry of Justice (May 2018). Macmillan, 2013). https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/ 43 Paul Sng, ‘Regeneration means demolishing government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_ people’s homes not making them better’, Guardian data/file/705598/mortgage-landlord-possession- (7 June 2017). https://www.theguardian.com/ statistics-jan-mar-2018.pdf housing-network/2017/jun/07/regeneration- 30 See Runnymede Trust press release (16 November demolishing-homes-council-estates 2017) , ‘New research shows Universal Credit 44 Aditya Chakrabortty and Sophie Robinson-Tillett, failing the “just about managing”: with women ‘The truth about gentrification: regeneration or and BME households hardest hit’. https://www. con trick?’, Guardian (18 May 2014). https://www. runnymedetrust.org/uploads/WBG%20pre%20 theguardian.com/society/2014/may/18/-sp-truth- budget%20press%20release%20nov%202017%20 about-gentrification-how-woodberry-down-became- 15%2011.pdf woodberry-park 31 ‘Universal Credit leaves thousands of Londoners 45 Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism in rent arrears’, BBC, (28 February 2018), of the Poor (London: Harvard University Press, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england- 2011). london-43226487 46 Andrea Gibbons, ‘A place to call home’, in Verso 32 Anna Minton, Big capital: who is London for? Books (ed), The Right to the City: A Verso Report (Great Britain: Penguin Random House, 2017). (London: Verso, 2017). 33 Simon Elmer and Geraldine Dening, ‘The London 47 Out of the seventy-two people who died in the clearances’, pp. 271-277. Grenfell Tower fire, sixty-five were from ethnic 34 ‘Mapping London’s estate regeneration programme’, minorities. Mark Rice-Oxley, ‘Grenfell: The 72 Architects for Social Housing (10 September 2017). victims, their lives, loves and losses’, Guardian (14 https://architectsforsocialhousing.wordpress. May 2018). https://www.theguardian.com/uk-

34 Institute of Race Relations | Background Paper No. 12 The London Clearances: Race, Housing and Policing

news/2018/may/14/grenfell-the-71-victims-their- statistics-uk lives-loves-and-losses 58 Stuart Hall, et al., Policing the Crisis: mugging, 48 Kevin Guliver, ‘Forty years of Struggle: A window the state, and law and order (New York: Palgrave on Race and Housing, Disadvantage and Exclusion’, Macmillan, 1978), pp. 7-32. BMENational, 2018. 59 ‘London’s Metropolitan Police force considers armed 49 Neil Kaye, ‘BME populations in London: Statistical foot patrols’, BBC, 2018. https://www.bbc.co.uk/ analysis of the latest UK census’, Social Policy news/uk-england-london-46385822 Research Centre, Middlesex University, 2013. 60 Watch the footage here, ‘Drill music video stop and http://sprc.info/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/ search by armed police “embarrassing”’, BBC, 2018. BME-communities-statistical-profile1.pdf https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-44982560 50 Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local 61 ‘Police Powers and Procedures, England and Wales, Government, ‘New Social Housing Lettings: year ending 31 March 2018’, Home Office (25 Ethnicity Facts and Figures’, 2018. October 2018). https://assets.publishing.service. 51 ‘Estate Regeneration: article by David Cameron’, gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/ HM Government (10 January 2016). https://www. attachment_data/file/751215/police-powers- gov.uk/government/speeches/estate-regeneration- procedures-mar18-hosb2418.pdf article-by-david-cameron 62 Sarah Marsh and Haroon Siddique, ‘Met police 52 ‘England riots: David Cameron declares war on use of force jumps 79% in one year’, Guardian (8 gangs’, The Telegraph (15 August 2011). https:// October 2018). https://www.theguardian.com/ www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/david- uk-news/2018/oct/08/met-polices-use-of-force- cameron/8701853/England-riotsDavid-Cameron- jumps-79-in-one-year declares-war-on-gangs.html 63 Institute of Race Relations, Policing Against 53 Iain Duncan Smith, ‘Together we can beat the Black People, IRR, 1987. The IRR’s 1979 evidence gangs’, Guardian (18 August 2011). https://www. submitted to the Royal Commission on Criminal theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/aug/18/ Procedure is reprinted in the later report. root-causes-riots-gangs-social-breakdown. Prior 64 Sir Kenneth Newman, previously head of the to Smith’s comments, former prime minister Tony Royal Ulster Constabulary in Northern Ireland was Blair, had already discussed in 1998 the alleged drafted in to head up the MPS in 1982, as he was problem with ‘no-go estates’, see ‘£800 million skilled in implementing anti-terrorist policing for “no-go” estates’, BBC, (15 September 1998). operations. As testament to Newman’s hard- http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/171530.stm line approach, in a Scotland Yard press release 54 Patrick Williams and Becky Clarke, ‘Dangerous (24 January 1983) he accused young people, associations: joint enterprise, gangs and racism’, ‘particularly young West Indians’ of ‘obstruction’ Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, January and hostility’ and of ‘deliberately engineering’ 2016, p. 2. confrontations with the police. Law and order 55 YouGov, Unmask the rioters, 2011. https:// policing is based on fighting crime, but Newman yougov.co.uk/topics/lifestyle/articles- explicitly referred to adopting a public order model reports/2011/08/25/unmask-rioters. It is of policing, with his ‘priority’ being ‘to restore important to mention here that only 13 per cent order to such areas’. Cited in Policing Against Black of those convicted of crimes committed during People, IRR, 1987, p. 2. the riots were even alleged to have been gang 65 Across the UK, this also included, Toxteth in members. Liverpool, Moss Side in Manchester, Handsworth in 56 ‘2011 riots location analysis: Proximity to town Birmingham and St. Paul’s in Bristol. centres and large post-war housing estates’, Space 66 Adam Elliott-Cooper ,’The struggle that cannot be Syntax, 2011. named: violence, space and the rearticulation of 57 The social geographer Danny Dorling has anti-racism in post-Duggan Britain’, Ethnic and questioned the current unscientific use of the Racial Studies (Vol.41 issue14, 2018). term ‘ghetto’, pointing out that there are no 67 See Robin Kelley, ‘Mike Brown’s Body: Mediations neighbourhoods in London (or the UK for that on War Race and Democracy’ (Video). http:// matter) that could be classified as a ghetto, aas.princeton.edu/publication/mike-browns- arguing instead that ‘Britain is segregated by bodymeditations-on-war-race-and-democracy/. See inequality, poverty, wealth and opportunity, but also Robin Kelley, ‘Disappearing Acts: Harlem in not by race and area’. Danny Dorling, ‘Inequality Transition’, in Hammett, J. and Hammett, K. (eds) Worse Since Second World War’, Guardian (27 The Suburbanization of New York: Is the World’s June 2012). https://www.theguardian.com/news/ Greatest City Becoming Another Town? (New York: datablog/2012/jun/27/century-income-inequality- Princeton Architectural Press, 2006) pp. 63-75.

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68 The government in September 2018 changed the business-and-economy/supporting-business/about- term ‘hostile’ to ‘compliant’. business-improvement-districts 69 Sharon Zukin, Naked City: The Death and Life 81 ‘Met Patrol Plus Scheme’, . of Authentic Urban Places (New York: Oxford https://www.london.gov.uk/mopac-disclosure-log/ University Press, 2010). met-patrol-plus-scheme 70 Williams and Clarke, ‘Dangerous associations: joint 82 ‘How to hire your own policeman’, The Economist enterprise, gangs and racism’. (15 December 2016). https://www.economist. 71 Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification com/britain/2016/12/15/how-to-hire-your-own- and the Revanchist City (London: Routledge, 1996). london-policeman 72 Hilary Osborne, ‘Poor door: the segregation of 83 Laura Proto, ‘Hampstead residents in London’s inner-city flat dwellers’, Guardian (25 crowdfunding bid to “buy-in” extra police July 2014). https://www.theguardian.com/ officers’, The Evening Standard (7 November society/2014/jul/25/poor-doors-segregation- 2015). https://www.standard.co.uk/news/ london-flats london/hampstead-residents-crowdfund-for- 73 Simon Elmer and Geraldine Dening, ‘The London dedicated-police-officers-and-raise-180000-in-six- clearances’, City (Vol. 20, No. 2, 2016), pp. 271- weeks-a3108711.html 277. 84 Bridget Minamore, ‘The chicken shop is London’, 74 Louis Waquant, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Vice (24 July 2017). https://munchies.vice.com/ State of Insecurity (Michigan: Duke University en_uk/article/vbmn43/the-chicken-shop-is-london Press, 2009). 85 ‘The London Knife Crime Strategy ’, Mayor of 75 Waquant, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal State London (June 2017). https://www.london.gov.uk/ of Insecurity. sites/default/files/mopac_knife_crime_strategy_ 76 Helen Mills and Matt Ford, ‘Anti-social behaviour june_2017.pdf powers and young adults’, Centre for Crime and 86 ‘Trapped in the Matrix: Secrecy, Stigma and Bias in Justice Studies, 2018. the Met’s Gang Database’, Amnesty International, 77 ‘Government Response to the Riots, Communities May 2018. https://www.amnesty.org.uk/files/ and Victims Panel’s final report’, Department reports/Trapped%20in%20the%20Matrix%20 for Communities and Local Government (July Amnesty%20report.pdf 2013). https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/ 87 Lambros Fatsis, ‘Grime: Criminal Subculture or government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_ Public Counterculture? A critical investigation data/file/211617/Govt_Response_to_the_Riots_-_ into the criminalisation of the black musical Final_Report.pdf. The Anti-social Behaviour, Crime subcultures in the UK’, Crime, Media, Culture and Policing Act (2014) states that it is reasonable (2018) pp. 1-15. for the court to order possession of housing if ‘the 88 ‘Form 696: “racist police form” to be scrapped in tenant or adult residing in the dwelling-house London’, BBC (10 November 2017). https://www. has been convicted of an indictable offence which bbc.co.uk/news/uk-41946915 took place during and at the scene of a riot in the 89 The phrase, a reference to the experience of United Kingdom’. young black and Asian men who ‘uprised’ in 1981, 78 The disproportionate use of sanctions against is A. Sivanandan’s. The full quote is, ‘for theirs young black and Asian, particularly Muslim, men is a different hunger – a hunger to retain the is an issue touched upon in reviews of the criminal freedom, the lifestyle, the dignity which they have justice system carried out by both Baroness carved out from the stone of their lives’ in ‘From Young and MP David Lammy. The campaign Joint Resistance to Rebellion: Asian and Afro-Caribbean Enterprise Not Guilty By Association (JENGbA) struggles in Britain’ in Catching History on the has also drawn attention to the disproportionate Wing (London: Pluto, 2008), pp. 90-139. use of the joint enterprise laws against BAME 90 Watch the documentary here, ‘The Police Vs Grime communities. This, in turn, has been the subject Music – A Noisey Film’, 2014. https://youtu.be/ of two inquiries by the House of Commons justice eW_iujPQpys committee. 91 Stuart Hall et al., Resistance Through Rituals: Youth 79 For a thorough analysis of Operation Shield, its Subcultures in Post-War Britain (Oxon: Routledge, racial presumptions and its ineffectiveness in 2006). tackling violence, see Stafford Scott, ‘The war on 92 Jessica Perera, ‘The Politics of Generation Grime’, gangs or the war on black youth’, Race & Class (Vol. 60, No. 2, 2018) pp. 82-93. The Monitoring Group, 2018, pp.28-33. 93 In this quote, Lambros Fatsis refers to the work of 80 ‘About Business Improvement Districts’, Mayor of Paul Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack London. https://www.london.gov.uk/what-we-do/ (London: Routledge, 1987) and the Institute of

36 Institute of Race Relations | Background Paper No. 12 The London Clearances: Race, Housing and Policing

Race Relations, Policing Against Black People, IRR, 101 ‘Trapped in the Matrix: Secrecy, Stigma and Bias in London, 1987. the Met’s Gang Database’, Amnesty International, 94 Policing London, no. 24, November/December May 2018. https://www.amnesty.org.uk/files/ 1986, as cited in Policing Against Black People, IRR, reports/Trapped%20in%20the%20Matrix%20 (London, 1987). Amnesty%20report.pdf 95 See ‘These are London’s gang territories in a single 102 ‘Trapped in the Matrix’. map’, The Independent, (2016). https://www. 103 Stafford Scott, ‘The war on gangs or a war on indy100.com/article/these-are-londons-gang- working class black youth’, The Monitoring Group, territories-in-a-single-map--Z1oinQab_g London, 2018, p. 24 96 Seth Schindler and Simon Marvin, ‘Constructing a 104 Patrick Williams and Becky Clarke, ‘Dangerous universal logic of urban control?’, City (Vol. 22. No. associations: Joint enterprise, gangs and racism’, 2, 2018), pp. 298–307. Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, 2016, p. 97 Schindler and Marvin, ‘Constructing a universal 19. https://www.crimeandjustice.org.uk/sites/ logic of urban control?’. crimeandjustice.org.uk/files/Dangerous%20 98 See, ‘Serious Violence Strategy’ (April 2018) assocations%20Joint%20Enterprise%20gangs%20 https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/ and%20racism government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_ 105 Kevin Rawlinson, ‘Gangs’ families should lose data/file/698009/serious-violence-strategy.pdf council homes – Home Office minister’, Guardian 99 In November 2018, the Information Commissioner’s (22 June 2018). https://www.theguardian.com/ Office issued an enforcement notice against the society/2018/jun/23/gangs-families-should-lose- MPS, finding that the Gangs Matrix breaches council-homes-urges-minister data protection laws, fails to distinguish between 106 ‘Ministers back councils over evicting rioters’, BBC victims of crime and offenders, and potentially (11 August 2011). https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/ causes damage and distress to a disproportionate uk-politics-14489272 number of young black men. 107 Liz Fekete, ‘Police database spreads institutional 100 Lee Bridges, ‘The Met Gangs Matrix – institutional racism’, IRR News, 17 May 2018. http://www. racism in practice’, IRR News (9 April 2015). irr.org.uk/news/police-database-spreads- http://www.irr.org.uk/news/the-met-gangs- institutional-racism/ matrix-institutional-racism-in-action/

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