Your report (Ministers could ban London councils ‘dumping’ homeless families miles away, 9 June) almost made me weep, just like I did when, as chair of housing at Ealing council in the early 1990s, I was challenged to go to Slough station at 6.30am to see 30 children in Ealing school uniforms trying to maintain a continuation of education while being housed around 15 miles from the home they’d known.
The sheer cruelty of a government that forced councils to sell off their housing stock at a huge discount, allowed them to keep only half of the proceeds and prevented them from spending even that on replacing the lost secure homes is up there in the hierarchy of horror that also saw our gas, water and electricity flogged off to spivs and distant hedge funds.
