Think this fractured society will be healed soon? It won’t be while women and little kids live in the rotten conditions described below, and with no way out. Nobody builds a united future when young families must live in chaos and when the social security systems that should support them have been destroyed:

On Monday last week, young mothers who live with their kids in cramped single rooms in the Welwyn Garden City Boundary House homelessness hostel protested at Waltham Forest Council about their living conditions. All the women are homeless. All were placed in the Boundary House flats by Waltham Forest Council. The accommodation at Boundary House is horribly cramped and isolated. Placements at Boundary House are only meant to be short-term. Most of the women I’ve spoken with this year say their councils told them that they’d be in Boundary House for a couple of months at most – but some have been stuck in Boundary House for more than two years (Newham council used to place homeless families in Boundary House as well). The rooms look like this:

Photo credit: Snapsthoughts http://photos.snapsthoughts.com/

It will surprise nobody to hear that relations between Boundary House residents and Waltham Forest council have reached breaking point. In the video below, you can see the women and council officers yelling at each other as the women descend on the council’s housing office to demand better housing and to make the very valid point that their living conditions are intolerable and that they need better housing:

Things are not generally good at places like housing offices and jobcentres these days, whether there’s a protest on or not. Furious homeless families and overstretched frontline staff have been abandoned to fight it out with each other in austerity. Shouting is not unusual. Desperation is certainly not unusual. Security guards are not unusual. When the mothers arrived, the housing office was already very busy. Some people who were waiting to be seen even had their suitcases and belongings with them. I’ve seen that in a number of housing offices in the last year or so. This is how a lot of people live now, if “live” is the word:

There was a heavy security presence, as there often is at housing offices and jobcentres now. I’ve attended enough meetings at frontline offices to know that you get guards at these places whether there’s a protest on or not.

The Boundary House women have two major problems. The first is that their accommodation is unpleasant, but they must raise their small children in it. The second is that they know their chances of getting money together for anything better start to evaporate as soon as they arrive at Boundary House. The Boundary House women live with their children in small, single-room flats in the hostel. The families only have that one room. Beds, kitchen, clothes and belongings are all crammed into that single space. Each flat has a small, separate bathroom. People complain about cockroaches and woodlice – you can hear the women talking about that in the video above. The building itself is isolated. Boundary House is down a suburban side street. The walk to Welwyn Garden City train station takes a half-hour and from there, people face an expensive (around £300 to £400 a month) commute to London.

It’s this isolation from the city, and from training and work, that people fear. The women struggle to afford the commute and to drag their kids to and from London. Without work and training chances, you are stuck. You go nowhere. This is how women with kids are edged out these days. Worthies often demand to know how women end up on their own with kids. The truth is that the reasons don’t matter a damn. Whatever the backstory, women with children are punished. (“There is never, ever, EVER a right time for a working-class person to have a baby,” Focus E15 campaigner Jasmin Stone told me recently. “Because you’re never going to have enough money. You’re never going to have secure housing.” Indeed).

Alicia Phillips, a mother of two who has lived in a single-room Boundary House flat with her children for two years, told me earlier this year that she had to give up a London nursery nurse job because she couldn’t afford the fares from Boundary House. Her year-old son had heart surgery soon after he was born. She must still take him to London to see specialists. Abigail Tumfo, who has one child and is seven months’ pregnant with her second, says that she spends nearly half her wages making the trip to her job as a chef in Fenchurch Street. Samira John – I’ve posted a transcript from an interview with her below -has a place on a teaching course which starts in September, but says that she won’t be able to study if she’s still living at Boundary House. She can’t afford the travel costs. The reality for young mothers who are trying to stay housed and to stay employed isn’t as straightforward as the likes of Stephen Crabb would have you believe.

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Samira John.

Here is a transcript from the interview I recorded with Boundary House resident Samira John. Samira is 25, has a two-year-old daughter and has spent a lot of time as a carer for her mother who has serious mental health problems. Samira wants to study to be a teacher. She was placed in Boundary House in March this year with her daughter Aiyana. Her family was evicted from their home in London for rent arrears. She talks about homelessness and about having to deal with a public sector bureaucracy which is on its knees. This is an important point. I don’t think people know how threadbare council services are these days. Cuts have had their devastating effect. Things are barely functional a lot of the time. It can take 20 minutes and more just to get through to anyone on the phone at some places. I know this, because I’ve tried many times. Sometimes, I’ve given up.

How did you get to Boundary House?

I came here [to Waltham Forest Council] and submitted my homeless application. Then, I came [here] on the morning that I was evicted. I had to wait for a while in there [the housing office]. Then, they said that I had to go to North London – which was actually Hatfield. I didn’t even know the area.

They did offer to get someone to pick me up and drop me there, but I had to collect the rest of my things from my house for her [my daughter], so I ended up making my own way there [to Boundary House in Welwyn Garden City]. When I got there, no one met me and it was raining. [It was] about nine o’clock at night. I was locked out. I didn’t have any keys and when they finally came with the keys, there was no electricity. Someone had taken the keys and left it in £15 debt, so I didn’t have any money on me. [I had] no electric. I had to wait… they had to get some sort of wire thing to wire the electric. Then, maybe about a week later, they posted the electric key to me just through the door.

They didn’t really show me around the building, or even the room. There’s one radiator that’s not working. The room’s freezing. They do know about it. I’ve got hot water. I’m on the bottom [floor].

Why did you get evicted?

I was living with my mother. She’s bipolar. She’s got issues. She’s been sectioned and stuff. We was evicted for rent arrears. Right now, she’s sleeping at a friend’s house on the floor, my mum. My sister is privately renting now, but yeah – that’s why we was evicted.

I’ve got my place [at college, to start studying in September] but I don’t know if I’ll be able to… I definitely won’t be able to afford it. I won’t be able to afford travel. I wanted to do a year course in teaching, a post graduate course. My caseworker knows that, but hasn’t even replied to me, or written to me. Apparently, I was supposed to get a letter about a month ago, which I haven’t had yet. Don’t know what’s happening. Just feel like I am asking so many questions to them.  Not getting an answer forever. It’s a bit frustrating, because I’m living in limbo. [[I’ve been placed far away]. I used to look after my mum. She’s really paranoid. She takes medication and stuff. I can’t look after her while I’m so far away.

So she’s just on her own?

Yeah, she’s on her own. Right now, I’m looking at like bedsits and stuff for her. It’s hard for me to go and view places, because she won’t go on her own. She wants me to help her…. so far away. She wants to be around the area, because this is where we’ve lived, I’ve lived for the last 25 years, my whole life. Had my grandparents living in Leyton. They used to watch her [my daughter] for me a lot.  Now, I’m just stuck. I don’t even know the area where I am. I don’t even know where the parks are, or anything.

On Boundary House

Oh, literally driving me [crazy in that room]. She’s [my daughter] ill every other week with a cold, because it’s freezing at night. Got a lot of woodlice and bugs, ones I’m sweeping up every day. The front door – the buzzer is fixed, but the side doors are always open. Sometimes at night, I hear people in the building. The side doors are always open and I know they’re supposed to be closed. Nobody is supposed to be using the side entrances.

I know it’s hard to find everyone a house, but at least improve the standards. Like at night, I’m almost scared to sleep, because I think anyone could get in…I literally stuff something in the lock in the door to make sure that the door doesn’t open. I remember when I first moved in, the man just literally put card in the door and pushed the door open. It was that easy to get in. Anyone can get in and buggies can get stolen.

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The women at the protest eventually got a meeting with housing head John Knight. In a statement, the council said that agreed actions included dealing with complaints about conditions at Boundary House, and reviewing residents’ cases to decide on alternate temporary or permanent accommodation. I could say that we’ve been here before, because we have. Pressure on housing is terrible. Solutions are not at hand. Alicia Phillips said that after kicking up a fuss in the past, she’d been told there were properties she could look at. Nothing ever came of that. The council apologised for the problems that people had getting hold of officers: “as a service, we are dealing with a very large volume of enquiries…” etc, etc. On and on and on it goes.

The real problem is that there is no political will to change any of this – to address the chronic lack of housing, the chronic shortage of staff, the chronic destruction of everything. Even post-Brexit, austerity is a long way down the list of mainstream concerns. It’s certainly comes in a long way after mainstream obsessions with party leadership battles. There seems to be some political will to clamp down on immigration – whatever that actually means and for all the world as though that will improve problems caused by austerity – but I am hearing a lot less about ending the austerity that has wrecked the essentials and made it impossible for people to get out of poverty. In the meantime, people who have absolutely no money continue to pay. It seems that the only way to draw attention to problems is to get together with other people in the same situation and make a noise at your housing office, or jobcentre, or wherever it is. That works sometimes and not others. It’s hardly a system.