The capital's centre of gravity is moving in the same direction at both ends of the economic scale

Alex Fenton of the LSE's Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion:

There has been much speculation as to whether the coalition's housing policy, especially on housing benefit, will displace lower-income households from inner London. At the same time, some worry that income inequality means that rich and poor households live increasingly segregated from one another into well-off and disadvantaged neighbourhoods. The Centre for Analysis for Social Exclusion has been looking at what happened to poor neighbourhoods under New Labour in the 2000s as part of a major research project for the Trust for London. We find that in London poverty was already becoming more suburban and more diffuse even as income inequality in the city rose.

Fenton has found that while poverty rates fell in much of poor inner London, it rose in much of outer London, "especially in the eastern suburbs." His analysis of the data includes attributing much of this change to the continuing loss of social housing in inner London, resulting in poorer families renting privately in the cheaper outer-east.

This seems to fit with what Newham and Barking and Dagenham have been complaining about for years - that the poverty-related problems they already have to deal with are made worse by high-rent inner London boroughs exporting their poor.

Yet there's a parallel trend in the same geographical direction, which may or may not give grounds for hope. Here's Boris Johnson in June 2010 opening the examination in public of his replacement London Plan:

It provides the springboard for my broader aim of moving London's heart eastward... If you look to the east you can see the scale of what is possible. Achieving the vision in this Plan will require us to make sure we make the best use of the under-and-unused land in east London. What you can't see from here, though, is the sheer extent of the need east Londoners have for regeneration and development. We need to focus on the need and the opportunity, and meet both. I suspect it will be impossible to deliver on one without the other.

An Olympics legacy, which Mayor Johnson described in the same speech as the Plan's "highest regeneration priority," is an important component of this eastward shift in growth potential and investment, a theme that outgoing London 2012 legacy chief Margaret Ford speaks about here and that her colleague Andrew Altman has stressed repeatedly.

Will exploitation of the great east London opportunity meet the great and growing need of east London? Big question.

Footnote: Alex Fenton's article identifies several other important issues about the diffusion of London poverty and what it means. Read it all here.