Two years ago I got round to asking a question which was 'How many people live in Walthamstow?'. We still don't really know the answer, though a lot of people reckon its quite a lot more than are officially supposed to be here. You find people hidden in all sorts of places in this overcrowded borough, like the illegally converted flats tucked behind commercial properties the council never does much about. There are probably plenty of houses still believed by the authorities to be three bedroom family homes but which are now 'houses in multiple occupation', every square inch given the plywood treatment to squeeze in the euphemistic 'studios' so beloved of slum landlords and some of their even slummier agents. There is one place I know of which is almost certainly on the post office and council's radar as a garden shed. One respectable office floor I am also aware of regularly hosts a sleeping bag in the evenings.
I do not suppose we will ever know the truth, but a little insight into the scale of the problem comes from the National Office for Statistics today. For the first time it seems, someone has bothered to include short-term migrants (the legal kind) in estimates for the extra people who have been turning up on local authorities doorsteps and requiring provision to be made for them, (such as in the NHS, or for their childrens schooling). A short-term migrant in this instance is not a fortnight's holidaymaker but someone who comes for from 3 to 12 months and allegedly leaves the UK at the end of that period, though how that is verified is beyond me.
How does Waltham Forest fare? If I tell you that the borough, which is officilly populated by the 2001 census as holding 218,341, had an exta 2870 of these people coming in to work in 2007, it might not sound very much, might it? I instinctively suspect that these stats for 'short-term' stayers are under-estimating the numbers, but anyway, Waltham Forest had a estimated 7,460 'non-worker' legal short-term arrivals and legal 2,870 short-term 'worker' arrivals. That's another 10,000+ people the overcrowed borough had to accommodate which had apparently not been planned for, just like the better known and understood movements of legal longer-term arrivals who seemingly turned up out of the blue. The 2870 short-term workers in Waltham Forest in 2007, to give you a idea of the scale of this, compares with 3130 for the whole of Manchester.
The point about this, of course, is that councils whose population has been disproportionately under-estimated, have been provided with disproportionate resources to fulfil the needs of their residents as a result. Hence maybe the row about us having 120 too few police, and the council's increasingly desperate attempts to pretend the books make sense, when anyone with half a brain can see they are going broke and hence trying to transfer recuring maintenance costs off the budget or otherwise sell off the family silver to stave off bankruptcy.
Remember the PR hoo-ha a couple of years ago at community councils, &c? 'What Will Waltham Forest be like in twenty years?'
This was cover for the Council's agreement with central gov't to plan for an extra 20,000 population in the next (?) five years, in return for some extra infrastructure money of about £5 million, ie, peanuts. When pressed at these meetings, Council officials admitted they had no idea whether that 20,000 were already here but uncounted, but this didn't seem to dampen their enthusiasm for another 20,000 officially.
With other straws in the wind this made me think that there's been some tacit agreement to make LBWF the Soweto for London, of low-wage immigrant commuters: this would explaing why workplaces in this Borough are constantly being allowed to be replaced with housing, usually of very low spec. It also reminds me of Brecht's crack about a government, disillusioned with its electorate, being constrained to import a new one.