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Top-up loans offer to aid struggling homeowners
£100m ‘rescue package’ to help businesses and local people
UNEMPLOYMENT is rising and the courts are filling with repossession hearings but the council’s recession-busting measures cannot make up years of cutting services “to the bone”, critics claim.
Worklessness in Westminster, measured by the number of people claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance, jumped in September by its highest proportion since records began in 1996.
At London County Court, which handles cases for Westminster and Camden, repossessions are up 17 per cent compared with this time last year, as the credit crunch bites.
Last week, Conservative council leader Colin Barrow launched a £100 million rescue package to aid businesses and residents in what he called a “fundamentally different approach” from 1990s Westminster councils which cut jobs and increased charges.
He brushed off the council’s £17million losses in Icelandic banks and pledged to aid small business by paying invoices within 10 days and creating another car-free day in the West End.
Residents could benefit from loans if they are struggling with mortgage payments or a newly created pool of subsidised rental properties under the plans. Cllr Barrow said: “We have chosen a different path, not just business as usual, but better business and improved services at lower costs to meet the challenges that lie ahead.”
But Labour housing spokesman Guthrie McKie said recent grant cuts to the Citizens Advice Bureau and pro bono legal advice service the Paddington Law Centre meant residents struggling with debt would have nowhere to turn.
Cllr McKie said: “We can’t stop the recession hitting Westminster, but Westminster is in a very precarious position because it builds so few social housing units in comparison to other boroughs and two years of cuts to advice services like the Paddington Law Centre mean they are down to the bone.”
Rather than issue loans to struggling homeowners, which could only add to their debt, Cllr McKie said, the city council should “buy them out permanently and make them council tenants… at least they’d have a roof over their heads’.
Small businesses saw the Westminster proposals as a mixed blessing and will be wary about the broken promises of the past, according to Sue Terpilowski, chairwoman of the Central London branch of the Federation of Small Businesses.
She said yesterday: “A car-free day doesn’t necessarily benefit small businesses, which rely on daily deliveries because they do not hold the amount of stock that the larger businesses do. The FSB would welcome a pledge to pay invoices within 10 days, as long as that is really 10 days from the time that the invoice is sent, not just from the time that the person who receives it signs it off.”
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