Housing benefits to be capped – good idea.

London City Mayor Boris Johnson launched an extraordinary attack on David Cameron today as he warned the Government’s housing benefit cuts could lead to ‘Kosovo-style’ emigration of the poor from the capital. The Mayor insisted he would not allow any ‘Kosovo-style social cleansing of London’ on his watch and said he was in detailed negotiations with Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith. But Mr Johnson himself was roundly condemned for his ‘inflammatory language’ this afternoon and slapped-down by Downing Street  over his ‘choice of words’.

The Mayor’s intervention came amid increasing anger among urban MPs in particular that reducing housing benefit payments as planned will force many poor people to leave major cities. The thing is these people are not ‘poor’ – they are living off taxpayers money in properties that the average working person could never afford to even dream about being able to afford to buy. Why should people who choose not to work be given London properties – which count among the most expensive in the world – while young couples, both working, struggle to buy even the most basic of houses elsewhere…?Labour has seized on claims that a new £20,000-a-year cap on the handout could drive 200,000 poor people out of expensive city centres. Mr Johnson’s comments ratchet up the pressure significantly on the Prime Minister, who is already facing opposition from Tory and Liberal Democrat backbenchers as well as the Labour leader Ed Miliband. Labour has also described housing benefit cuts as a form of social ‘cleansing’ – a charge dismissed by ministers as deeply offensive to victims of genocide, about which the term is usually used. Mr Cameron yesterday refused to budge over cuts to housing benefit . He insisted it was simply ‘not fair’ for claimants to live in taxpayer-funded properties that many who work for a living could only ‘dream of’.