Flickr/Darren Johnson. Some rights reserved.
Reinforcing each other, housing and immigration policies facilitate the removal of the poor. Writing in the Sunday Times in January 2016, Prime Minister David Cameron set out proposals to "radically transform" over 100 "sink estates" across the country, pump-priming the planning process through a £140 million fund to support "reconstruction" and in some cases "knock them down and start again". These plans were accompanied by the creation of a new Advisory Panel tasked with "building a list of post-war estates across the country that are ripe for re-development". An Estates Regeneration Strategy promised that it would "sweep away the planning blockages and take new steps to reduce political and reputational risk for projects' key decision-makers and investors". And this presaged a "critical by-product" of the strategy: a report from a property company showing, according to the prime minister, that "regeneration will work best in areas where land values are high".
Around 100,000 people are to be ‘worked with’ under these proposals: from communities depicted by the prime minister as "cut-off, self-governing and divorced from the mainstream", and from areas depicted by him as experiencing the "severe social segregation" which allows "social problems to fester and grow unseen". "Decades of neglect have led to gangs, ghettos and anti-social behaviour", Cameron suggested, and "poverty has become entrenched". Under the government’s self-styled strategy to wage an "all-out assault on poverty and disadvantage" – of which its estates plan is only one part – these are some of the people to be identified, managed and despite assurances to the contrary, if history is a guide, potentially relocated. According to the prime minister, "I believe that together we can tear down anything that stands in our way".
