April 30, 2008
Rosemary Bennett, Social Affairs Correspondent


The alarm clock rings at 4am in Martha Hunter's North London flat, as it has every morning for 13 years. The single mother gets up, dresses and heads into Central London to start her cleaning job at 6am. Mrs Hunter, 38, and her daughters, Karen, 14, and four-year-old Julianna, have been living in “temporary accommodation” for three years — a tiny flat in Haringey where the girls have to share bunk beds. The cooker doesn't work properly and the shower is broken. “I hate it. I have been fighting, fighting with the council to get a better place,” says Mrs Hunter.

This is the day-to-day reality of life for hundreds of thousands of Londoners struggling to make a living in one of the world's richest cities. As Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson trade blows over transport, property prices and the environment, entire communities feel unable to connect with the campaign issues.

While the billions of pounds spent to help families out of poverty have been a success in the rest of Britain, lifting almost 600,000 above the breadline, London has been left behind. There are 650,000 children still in poverty, 41 per cent of all the capital's children and down by just one per cent since 1998. The numbers in poverty have not fallen at all since 2000.

Carey Oppenheim, who chairs the London Child Poverty Commission, said the great raft of government initiatives that have helped to reduce poverty elsewhere by “making work pay” have had barely any impact at all in London. The national minimum wage of £5.52 an hour is simply not enough to live on in the capital. “The incentives to work in London are far weaker than anywhere else,” she says. “In London the costs of housing and child care, on top of the hassle factor of getting into Central London where the jobs are and home again in time to pick up from school or nursery, mean it is just not worth it for many people to get a job,” she adds.

Jane Wills, Professor of Human Geography at Queen Mary, London University , says London's low-waged have been hit badly by the rapid spread of “contracting out”, the cost-saving scheme pioneered by the Tories in the 1980s and embraced by Labour, which has prevented wages from rising as the economy boomed. “Sub-contracting in cleaning, catering and security and so on is being used by hospitals, local government and across the private sector. That means there is in-built pressure on keeping wages low across the service industry. These companies have to tender every four or five years so there is no room to push up wages even if they wanted to.”

Mrs Hunter is among the more fortunate cleaners in the capital. She works for the London School of Economics, which pays contracted-out staff the “living wage” of £7.20 an hour. Esasa Erhunse is not so lucky. She has cleaned rooms at one of the best-known hotels in London for 13 years. She has not had a pay rise since 2003. “We were paid £6 an hour when a new company took over our contracts. They said we were being paid too much and would be kept on this rate until the minimum wage catches up,” she says. She lives with her daughter, now 18, in a tower block in the Old Kent Road and has struggled to make ends meet as the cost of living has escalated while her wages stayed the same.

"These have been very bad years. It has been very stressful because the electricity bills have gone up, our rent has gone up but my money has stayed the same so we have to make it back somewhere else,” she says. “People say I should get a new job but I am 50 and I think it is safer to stay where they know me. I cannot remember when I last bought new clothes. If we get the chance to go without a meal, we do it.”

In the East End it is unemployment rather than low wages that is the problem. Tower Hamlets, the borough that borders the City of London, has the highest unemployment rate in the country at 14 per cent.

Farage Mahmood, 22, has been out of work for a year. He speaks good English and has “a few GCSEs”. But since leaving school he has had only two short stints in work. Now that he wants to get a job he can't find one.

He lives in a three-bedroom council flat in Shadwell with his parents, four brothers and three sisters. One brother and two sisters have jobs and support the household. “My parents don't speak English so we don't really talk much. My brother is rich. He helps me out. He's a bus driver. But I want to get on now and get a place of my own. But there are just not that many jobs around and the ones I want have gone by the time I ring.”

Chris Henry, a play leader with Coram , the children's charity, says: “People want to work but the cost of childcare stops them. It doesn't get much better when the children are older because there is chronic shortage of after-school provision round here. People do the sums and work out that they are better off on benefits.”



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