People have been in touch on twitter re: the photos I’ve been posting of mould in a Northwest London flat where a man with learning difficulties has been living:

Mould in doorway entrance

Thought I’d put up a short post with more detail as people wanted to know if the problem had been reported, etc, and what could be done. I also thought this was a good opportunity to make a few pertinent points about the people who have taken the real kicking in austerity – and the abject failure of mainstream politics to acknowledge those people or that kicking as we head into the election.

On notifying the council – I reported the mould and this flat to Brent Council a couple of weeks ago on 27 March after visiting the flat. I was shocked by the state of the place then – you can read about that here. The council rang back a few days later with an inspection appointment date for yesterday. As reported here,  the man in that flat is also being evicted from it, just to add to his problems. The Kilburn Unemployed Workers’ Group (who have made an amazing effort to try and sort things out for this bloke) helped him make a homelessness application a few weeks ago and have been ringing landlords and agents all over the place to find someone who will accept a housing benefit tenant. A member of the group was even ringing agents yesterday when we were at the flat waiting for the council officer to arrive for the flat inspection (I took the pictures you see in this post yesterday). Hopefully, this part of the situation will be resolved soon and this man will have a new place to live.

A few extra points, though.

I want people to understand what a collection of disasters people in these situations must deal with. These sorts of things must be happening to people in similar situations all over the place. When the council bloke inspected the flat yesterday, he said that the worst mould – the thick mould on the entrance ceiling in the photo above – could be the result of a water leak problem of some kind upstairs and that the council would instruct the landlord to investigate. The mould round the doors, however, was more likely to do with ventilation problems – the (one) door not being left open often enough, moisture being trapped in the flat and so on. But this is the thing. There are so many problems that have led to this situation and they all have to do with not having enough money. That’s probably an incredibly patronising thing to say, but I’m saying it all the same.

For one thing, the flat is tiny and horrible (mice and cockroaches, etc). The kitchen, bed and fridge are all crammed together into one small space with a very small bathroom clipped on at the back. Cook anything in the one room, or take a shower in the tiny bathroom cubicle, and the place fills up with steam (the extractor fan in the bathroom wasn’t working – that was noted. There’s a second small fan by the door). If you live in a spacious mansion with plenty of windows that you can throw open, that sort of thing is surely less of a problem. It’s different when you live in a small groundfloor box with your bed and kitchen in the same little space. In this flat, there’s one door and a very small window which open into the backyard, but that’s it. The tenant can’t leave the door open at night, because the flat is on the ground floor. He doesn’t like to leave it open much in winter, because he’s older, gets cold easily and is not well. Unfortunately, that groundfloor door is about his only option. He told us something else yesterday – that the washing-machine he is meant to use is broken. He’s been washing his clothes in the sink and hanging them in the bathroom cubicle. There were clothes hanging in the bathroom yesterday. They were all wet and they obviously weren’t going to dry very fast in that place. He’s been doing that with his clothes for a while.

This is the kind of thing that really gets to me. If there was enough money around for carers, maybe he could have had someone come in a couple of times a week to help him get his clothes to a laundromat and bring them back clean and dry while the washing-machine situation was sorted out. He has a support worker now (again through the efforts of the Kilburn group), but I’m thinking here of personal care as well. The problem is that there’s no money for anything like that – or, at least, our glorious leaders say there is no money for anything like that. It can be hard to know where to start to fight back on that rhetoric. People often don’t even know who to ask.

Which brings us to our other big problem – that the bureaucracies people must navigate to get any sort of support are stretched past the limit and unbelievably complex. In the past few months, this man has had to make his way through the council’s homelessness and private rental complaints procedures, court eviction processes and also the DWP, for good measure. He’s signing on, because he was made redundant from his last job several years ago. He has learning and literacy difficulties, and struggles with the endless paperwork he receives and the phone numbers he’s given to call (and he keeps running out of phone credit).

You see what I am getting at. This is what happens to the people who are slipping through the ever-widening gaps in our so-called safety net. People’s lives become a sort of perfect storm of bad housing, failed facilities, overstretched councils, barely-functional jobcentre bureaucracies and god knows what else. People don’t even know where to start when they need things sorted out. I don’t know who to approach or what to do half the time myself and I spend a lot of time on these things. There must be hundreds and probably thousands of people in similar situations to this guy’s, disappearing into a sea of mould and mouseshit and all the rest, with everybody blaming everybody else. Things can be incredibly hard to fix and most solutions are short-term. This man, I guess, will get a year’s tenancy somewhere in a private let. That means in year’s time, we could well be doing all of this again.

Just do me a favour (I mean that literally, not sarcastically) and ask whoever is running for office in your area why people in these situations are considered acceptable political collateral. Remember too that when your local political hopeful starts rabbiting on about supporting working people, and fails to mention people who aren’t working, it’s people in the sort of situation I’ve described here who are being cast adrift. As for scrounging – well, the only person having a laugh that I can see is the landlord who is collecting housing benefit for this dreadful flat. I suppose the political class would consider him a hardworking hero. Or something. I don’t pretend to understand what that lot really thinks.

Anyway – thanks for circulating the photos on twitter. Hopefully, this guy’s situation will be sorted out this week. The thing to remember is that there will be plenty more people in the same situation. It’s high time that mainstream politics took responsibility. I plan to up the ante on that front after the election myself. This weird simultaneous bullying and exclusion of people who need support can’t go on.

Mould around doorframe