Update 27 March: the state of this flat has been reported to Brent council. They said they will arrange an inspection.
————————
Look at the mould here:
This is a picture from the tiny “studio” flat currently occupied by Eddie (name changed), the 51-year-old man with learning difficulties I’ve been attending jobcentre meetings with. He’s being evicted from this place – a couple of us went with him to Brent council on Monday to start his homelessness application. Eviction or not, he needs to get out of this room fast. I understand that the council is organising properties for him to look at. He may end up out of the borough.
God only knows how many other people are living in places like this. Here’s the mould on the ceiling in the little entrance-bay in the flat:
This studio flat is purely revolting. It’s very small – there’s a bed and a small, filthy kitchen all shoved into one room, with a shower and toilet sort of clipped on at the back. There are mice. There are cockroaches. The mould you can see in the pictures. I took the pictures today when I went to meet Eddie to walk to his jobcentre signon appointment.
But here’s the thing. Eddie’s landlord is collecting £1000 a month in housing benefit for this place. I’ve seen Eddie’s housing benefit settlement papers for this year – £250 a week, which his papers confirm is paid to the landlord. Remember this next time you hear George Osborne yapping on about scroungers. It ain’t guys like Eddie who are taking the piss with their miserable weekly jobseekers’ allowances of about £71. The people who are having a very big laugh on the taxpayer are the landlords who hoover up thousands of pounds in housing benefit for crapholes like you see here. This is the kind of mould that causes serious health problems, surely. The air was rotten. I couldn’t wait to get out of the place. But there we are. This is the kind of environment that is considered perfectly acceptable for people with learning difficulties in our day and age.
Brent council has been in contact on twitter about the photos of the mould that I tweeted, so I’ll be sending a complaint and the photos through. This landlord needs to be taken out of circulation. He’s evicting Eddie and God knows what his plans are next for this flat. I suppose he could decide to put a family with very small children in this place to live with this mould. He could pick someone else on housing benefit who has no choice except to live like this. Who knows.
Video of the flat taken in June last year:
Pingback: Surprise | Gabriel Vents
Pingback: A house is not a home. It’s a cash cow. | The Urban Woo
Barnet is the first entirely privatised council in the UK.
Social housing in Barnet is being sold off to developers to build luxury flats.
Universal Credit will absorb housing benefit from 2016-2017 and the sanctions under UC will become permanent as Hardship Payments become recoverable loans by direct deductions from futurte benefit or wages by court action.
People evicted from social housing so that luxury flats can be built in Barnet, are being offered social housing as far north as Birmingham.
This is being nicknamed the ‘social cleansing’ of the poor from London.
Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) are running MP candidates in London.
So is Class War in other voting areas of London.
In most of the areas where the parties of the poor are running, the poor of all ages now outnumber all other voters by the thousands, in some cases up to 15,000 more than the votes gained by the sitting Tory or Lib Dem MP to put them into the job in 2010.
The council here is Brent rather than Barnet, although a lot of the issues remain the same as far as out of borough placements go. This guy was told on Monday at his homelessness application meeting that he was likely to be placed out of Brent and that Birmingham was one option. Local council housing certainly wasn’t on the menu.
This landlord is a disgrace – it is his responsibility as the owner to make sure that the property is liveable in. Well done for getting those close up pictures.
Pingback: The real scroungers: landlords hoovering housing benefit for disgusting places like this | Kate Belgrave | Britain Isn't Eating
Hi, Kate
A new blog post on the Kilburn Unemployed blog includes a link to this page as an example of how adults with learning disabilities are treated in 2015.
Much attention has been given recently to the ‘soundness of mind’ of airline pilots etc who have others’ lives in their hands, and too little attention to the ‘soundness of mind’ and ‘fitness for purpose’ of the ‘key decision makers’ who too easily walk away from the disasters they create.
A General Election is a time to help redress the latter matter, as voters get to decide who they want ‘in the driving seat’. So the page concerned is called General Election 2015 and you. Comments welcome.
Thanks. That’s actually a good point about the viciousness of the people implementing all of this. Behave in this way towards other people in most walks of life and you’d be arrested.
On the ‘fitness for purpose’ front, Social Work Action Network was set up a few years ago to bring together social work practitioners and service users, academics and students against the takeover of social work by the joint ravages of managerialism and privatisation. SWAN’s founders were concerned that their profession was being taken over by people who lacked any sort of grounding in the core values of the profession.
Re motivations and actions, more broadly in society I’ve noticed that those most in favour of ‘deregulation’ — aka ‘cutting red tape’ — seem to be the most voluble proponents of regulating the lives of poorers people via benefit caps, claimant commitment, etc. And they also have the most to gain by adopting the definitions of ‘mental illnesses’ defined in the ‘Bible’ of the American Psyciatric Assn such as ‘ODD’ or ‘oppositional defiant dysfuntion’. What Doctor’s Don’t Tell You magazine’s March 2015 issue has an article Mama, We’re All Crazy Now about such cues for applying the chemical cosh, and the tie-ins with Big Pharma.
Benefit sanctions are applied with the excuse of ‘doubt’ rather than ‘reasonable doubt’ and so most benefit sanctions are overturned when challenged. Tne application of a sanction on the basis of ‘doubt’ without reason is thus an example of authoritarianism. Commenting on clinical psychologist Bruce Levine’s assertion that Albert Einstein had many of the characteristics of the typical ODD patient, Einstein biographer Ronald Clark says that Einstein’s real problems stemmed from abhorence of the authoritarian and Prussian discipline in the schools he attended.
The fiscal cosh is applied promiscuously to those who dare to claim out-of-work-benefits. Those sanctioned who do not kowtow to illegitimate authority are those most likely to get their benefits reinstated after a benefit sanction. So, naturally, US-based companies in the ‘welfare to work service industry’ who have applied the fiscal cosh even more than UK jobcentre staff would love the licence to apply the chemical cosh to defiant benefit claimants who are justifiably defiant, too!
Pingback: Update on the house mould pictures – and people who are excluded from political representation | Kate Belgrave
Pingback: Look at the state of this flat. Here is independence vs neglect in austerity | Kate Belgrave
Pingback: There is and will be another kind of austerity death – the slow death through neglect | Kate Belgrave