Let’s start this one with a story from the large collection in my Nobody Gives A Stuff If Women And Children Are Homeless file:

Image: dead mouse in the bathroom

I’m talking at the moment with a young Newham woman called Chantelle. For some time now, Chantelle has been living in a private-rental craphole. She has a three-year-old son. Cockroaches and rodents roam around their rotten flat. Chantelle told me that exterminators have visited a couple of times, but that they may as well have saved themselves the trip. The roaches and rodents have always come charging back. Wonder if they’re galloping in through a hole in a wall somewhere. Chantelle took some pictures of the roaches, which I’ve posted above and below.

Image: dead cockroaches in the flat

A couple of months back, Chantelle’s landlord told her that she had to leave the flat. Chantelle says that she doesn’t have rent arrears and hasn’t damaged the flat. Her landlord just wants the place back. Sometimes, landlords want to charge somebody else even more to live (should I say “live”) in a flat. Who can really say.

Chantelle went to Newham Council to explain her troubles and to ask for help. You can guess how fulfilling that visit was. Chantelle would’ve been better off waiting for December and writing Santa for a tent. The council was supremely unhelpful as councils can be these days. It hardly matters where you go. Frontline officers have no resources, which means they have no answers. You hit a gatekeeper as soon as you arrive at reception, or send an email, or make a call, or whatever. The opening line is often Goodbye. Some put this more politely than others, but that’s the essence. I’ve seen emails from the council which demonstrate that was the essence here. Chantelle was advised to look for cheap places out of London. People don’t know how to fight for more.

At the very least, councils give people instructions that they find almost impossible to follow. Chantelle says Newham told her that she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, be helped as a homeless person until she was actually evicted, or the bailiffs were at her door to evict her, or her notice expired, or something to that effect. She still wasn’t entirely sure when we talked and anyway: technicalities. The technicalities mean little to people when it comes down to it. Everyone still ends up at the same place – ie, nowhere. The long and the short of it was that as far as Chantelle was concerned, she was told to wait, to try and find herself another flat out of London (she has no chance of that now in London’s private rental sector, which she can’t afford) and to only come back to the council when the bailiffs were racing up the road after her, or something along those lines. I’d ask Newham council to clarify the situation, except that Newham council has refused to talk to me for several years on account of my Focus E15 housing campaign stories and general attitude to press offices and life, etc. Those guys can really drag out a grudge.

Chantelle’s understanding was that if she left the flat before she was thrown out of it, the council would say that she’d made herself intentionally homeless. This is the kind of understanding that a lot of people are left with these days. I went recently to First Choice Homes in Oldham with a 67-year-old bloke called Paul who was told while we stood there that he was considered to be adequately housed because he had a tiny, rotting caravan to live in. He was also told that he would make himself intentionally homeless if he left the caravan voluntarily – ie, without being chucked out of it by whoever owned it and/or the campsite. True story.

Chantelle stayed in her flat as she believed she’d been instructed to. She waited for the eviction date to draw near, which it has. It is today. She had a court date for her eviction yesterday. Needless to say, she’d accumulated a bucketload of court charges by yesterday – £355, if you don’t mind (this money seems to be made up from the landlord’s court costs). Chantelle can’t afford to pay anyone £355. Who the hell can. The courts decided that she could, though, and set a repayment plan at nearly £4 a week. Charming. I thought these costs could be waived for people on benefits or low incomes, but maybe not. For now, we’ll understand the charges as the latest installment in our era’s long and apparently endless campaign to bleed money out of people who haven’t got it.

Next part goes like this. Under the much-misguided impression that as a citizen in a democracy (don’t laugh) she might take her story to her MP and be helped or shown something other than the door, Chantelle contacted her local Labour MP. To cut this short part of the story even shorter, her MP’s office told Chantelle that there was little help available on account of the general election taking place this week, because, you know, chaos and busy and so on. Chantelle was advised to ask for help elsewhere if she could. God knows where people thought she could go. They certainly couldn’t have imagined that the Newham CAB was an option. Just getting your arse over the threshold there after sunrise is an achievement. I’ve personally had the *pleasure* of queuing for advice at Newham Citizens’ Advice, only to be asked to leave at 9am, because all the appointments for that day had gone. Other than that, I couldn’t see many options for help. I don’t do god, or pray, so that’s out. I don’t suppose anyone’s going to fork out for a solicitor.

So.

This all brings me to my central point today – my endless frustration for years now, on behalf of myself and others, if you’ll excuse the assumption, at always being told to go away, or to go away and wait, or to sit tight, or to hang on, or to sort things out yourself, or anyway, to scram if you have these problems.

When people are on the rough end of government policy, they must always wait. They must wait for help in a literal sense – for an officer who has the time and knowledge to offer constructive assistance in an impossible situation, or for a council house they’ll never get, or for an eviction notice to run its course, or for bailiffs to turn up, or whatever.

There’s more at the moment, too. There’s the UK’s extraordinary political instability, which new and old media thrive on, but which leave real life and real-life complexities on hold – possibly forever, I’m starting to think. At the moment, people must wait for attention while big-ticket political items and voices hog the stage. In recent months, people have had to wait for local elections to be fought and finished. Now, they must wait for the general election to be fought and run. After the general election, they will very likely have to wait while one or even two vicious party leadership battles are slugged out. After and/or during that, they will have wait while politics and press tear the place to pieces over Brexit rules and roles. Then, they’ll have to wait for Brexit. They must wait and wait for the political class to achieve a useful formation – or, at least, a formation that will finally lead politics to deliver something more substantial than viral tweets, facebook likes and the very occasional spritz of trickle-down. I know that we must have hope and all of that, but you can see why people lose faith.