Here are a few thoughts on the council trend to force homeless people out of London AND on the supremely unhelpful council homelessness system that people must battle through to get any housing help at all:
Regular readers will know I’ve been writing about Chantelle Dean, a 32-year-old woman who is about to be evicted from her private-sector rented flat in Newham.
Chantelle’s landlord wants the flat back, so Chantelle must leave. She’s just received her final eviction notice. The bailiffs will be round to throw her out on 27 July. Newham council won’t help Chantelle with emergency housing until that day:
Two points to put to you today:
1) Sending Chantelle to live out of London makes absolutely no sense – unless the aim is simply to get poor people out of rich people’s faces
Chantelle has good reasons for wanting to find another flat in London. She has a three-year-old son who starts school in September. She receives Income Support at the moment. She wants to give herself the best chance to find work and training when her son starts school. Chantelle’s mother lives in Newham and can look after Chantelle’s son for free. Still, the council has told Chantelle to look for flats out of London (you can read email exchanges on that subject here). That’s because Chantelle will struggle to pay the inevitable shortfall between her housing benefit entitlement and expensive Newham rents.
So.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: moving mothers with young children to places where they’re a long way from work and free childcare is a very sinister move.
The concept is a cruel nonsense by definition. If you send people who have no money away to live in areas where there is less work and no family nearby for free childcare, you cut people off from opportunities as a matter of course and they disappear. No doubt that’s the idea – Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind and all of that.
I have interviews with women with small kids who were parked for several years in emergency housing miles away from anywhere accessible. One woman, Alicia Phillips, even had to give up her job in London, because she couldn’t afford the expensive commute from the Welwyn Garden City hostel that Waltham Forest council placed her in. Another mother was still trying to commute to London to work with two little kids in tow, but she was finding it almost impossible.
I’m not saying London is the only place in the world to live. I live in Manchester myself. I’m saying that I’ve talked people who’ve been relegated to poverty, because they’ve been dumped miles away from family and the nation’s major economic hub. They go backwards, not forwards, because going forwards is made so difficult. What are we going to do about that?
2) When people are threatened with homelessness, they find themselves at the mercy (there isn’t much, btw) of frightening and unpleasant council systems.
Chantelle approached Newham council for housing help in January this year, when she received her first notice to leave the flat. Chantelle says the council told her that it could not help with her housing problems until the actual eviction day. The council’s only suggestion was that Chantelle spend the time until eviction day searching for a cheap flat out of London and a landlord who would accept a housing benefit tenant. Chantelle has not been able to find such a landlord. If Chantelle wanted the council’s help with emergency accommodation, she had to stay in the flat until the day the bailiffs showed (that’s 27 July, as you can see in the notice above).
While waiting in the flat as instructed, Chantelle became liable for £355 court costs for a possession order – her landlord’s costs which the courts insisted that she pay. How grossly unfair is that. This “system” is designed to punish people very harshly for their poverty. God – the number of people I talk with who are cracking under this kind of debt.
Now, Chantelle has this eviction notice – and the usual soul-destroying uncertainty about where she’ll be placed, the kind of housing she’ll be placed in and whether or not she’ll be moved on again in the near future when a new private landlord decides to chuck her out because he wants his flat back, etc. Chantelle’s son is due to start school very soon. God knows where that will be. I’ve interviewed women who’ve had to move their kids from school to school as the family has moved from one flat to another.
You see my point. None of this makes any sense if we’re talking about helping people get on their feet. It makes perfect sense if the aim is to make sure already-impoverished people are insecurely housed forever in places where nobody important has to see them, or do anything about their enforced poverty. Job’s a good‘un if that’s the case. Which it is.
I’d ask Newham council for its view on all of this, except that the council refuses to talk to me. I’ve asked Stephen Timms to ask the council instead.
You’re right that it is a brutal and senseless system but there are definitely some things she can do now.
First of all, challenge the council’s assertion that they can’t do anything until she’s actually evicted. This is, frankly, arrant nonsense. See section 4 of our factsheet on homelessness applications and particularly about being threatened with homelessness – “You are threatened with homelessness if it is likely you will become homeless within 28 days” http://www.ageuk.org.uk/Documents/EN-GB/Factsheets/FS89_Homelessness_fcs.pdf?dtrk=true
She would probably also benefit from the input of a housing solicitor, and homelessness is still eligible for legal aid advice, i.e. it’s free. More details from Shelter available here https://england.shelter.org.uk/get_advice/going_to_court/advice_and_representation
Hope she can get something sorted, keep up the good work highlighting this kind of thing.
Cheers Paul, that’s much appreciated. I can’t understand why they’re making her wait until the actual day of eviction. I’ve had councils say that to me before.
But where are people going to move to? If they come Up North there’s a shortage of housing here too, as well as school places, & hospitals & Doctors surgeries struggling to cope, not to mention the lack of meaningful & équitable employment. The local Councils are stretched to breaking point too. It’s just passing the buck.
Precisely. When I’m not talking with people who are being chucked out of London, I’m talking with people who can’t find decent housing in the northwest:
https://www.katebelgrave.com/2017/06/we-consider-you-housed-because-you-have-a-grotty-caravan-to-live-in-this-is-austerity/
Homelessness in Manchester and surrounding areas is no small problem, as you are doubtless aware. Am sure it’s only a matter of time before I start seeing people I met in London queuing up at the homelessness desk in Manchester.
I actually want out of London, who wants to swap?
(1 bed flat with bus, tube, train & tram access to central & surrounding areas. Sw19).
I’m curious what your solution is to the problem of subsidising housing? I don’t see easy solutions. Rent capping is often thrown around as a facile solution, but anyone with half a brain knows it doesn’t resolve the problem as it just removes stock from the subsidised sector. Throwing more money at the problem won’t solve it either, paying more to keep people in the areas they’d prefer to live in just drives rents up further. Someone always has to pay, people who glibly say money can be got from unspecified ‘rich’ people or evil corporations are idiots, this is the real world not a 1970’s sitcom. To subsidise housing someone else has to take responsibility for providing, somebody else has to put in extra shifts.
Now I personally believe everyone should have a safe place to live that is as reasonable as possible to their needs, just as they should be as reasonable about their needs and responsibilities as possible, I’m more than willing to pay my taxes so that happens, it’s a must have thing for me; I’m willing to take that responsibility. I want my taxes to help people have what they need. I think it would be a nice to have thing if they could live near their family, or their friends, or where they’d ideally like to live, or where there are culturally similar people, but those are nice to have things, they are much lower priorities than having a safe and reasonable place to live, and if it doesn’t cost extra to cover wants as well as needs then there’s no harm done, but wants aren’t my responsibility. Sometimes you have to make trade offs, I’ve made them myself, living in areas that weren’t my preference due to cost, moving hundreds of miles for work, so I’m unsympathetic to mardy arse special pleading.
For the same reasons I don’t believe in continuing to subsidise housing which is bigger than what is needed if it is going to cost more that subsidizing just what is strictly needed (if there’s no extra costs fine, but what people want is not my responsibility). To me it’s for the greater good that subsidised housing stock is allocated where it’s most beneficial, so if in ten years time the kids have left home and only one bedroom out of three is actually needed (rather than wanted) then it’s better for the three bedroom subsidised housing to go to someone who needs three bedrooms and someone who needs just one bedroom downsizes. In the private housing market it is considered perfectly rational for people to downsize when they no longer need the bigger property, but the incentives in the subsidised housing sector are different simply because ‘someone else’ is bearing the cost. The concept of the ‘Bedroom Tax’ (I still don’t understand how cutting a subsidy someone else pays is a tax on the person who is being subsidised?) is along the right lines it’s just a shit execution because it doesn’t properly take into account those who genuinely need the additional space and it doesn’t properly incentivise or enable those who are being subsidised in properties they no longer need (but may still want) to downsize.
How many bedrooms does ex-A4e boss Emma Harrison have, and who paid for that? Does Lord Freud really *need* that 11 bedroom mansion in Kent? If those questions mean that I belong to a 1970s sit-com, so be it, I wish it still was the 1970s, at least the Unions had more power back then and people weren’t required to fulfill endless meaningless conditions to claim the bloody dole. Fuck the Rich and the Government. They can get things moving pretty fast when it comes to Fracking, or bailing out the Banks, but that niggling little problem of housing the Poor and making sure no one is hungry continues to elude them. Nothing short of a Revolution will sort out this Capitalist Hell-hole of a country, regardless of you & your fucking taxes.
Whether those people need big houses isn’t my problem as long as they are not asking me to pay taxes to subsidise their housing. I’m as sceptical as the next person about how deserving some fat cats are of their earnings, but even if they are guilty of rent seeking it’s not really the cause of the problem of people needing housing subsidies, especially additional subsidies so they can’t live where they want to rather where they can afford.
I’m all for housing the poor and making sure they have enough to eat, I just don’t see it any obligation on my part to extend my responsibilities to cover wants and preferences. In my opinion there shouldn’t be an expectation that ‘someone else’ will cough up so you can live in an area you cannot afford just because it’s where you’ve always lived or where you’d prefer to live. I realise the fact that ‘someone else’ has to pay has been abstracted out of the narrative to a degree, so it’s a callous system or a greedy fat cat or a bent politician who doesn’t want to cough up, rather than millions of ordinary people who actually have to put in an extra shift so the person whose always lived on the same London estate never has to know the horror of Welwyn Garden City or some other place outside of London that’s probably not that bad, maybe even better than the estate, but just not London.
It is the responsibility of the State to ensure that people are provided with suitably adequate housing. It became the State’s responsibility because of the Inclosures when people were forcibly driven off the Common land and replaced by sheep, and a nation of landless peasants was born. It does not mean that you or anyone else has to work an extra shift, you and everyone else quite rightly pay taxes, that’s the way a society functions, and those taxes fund a wide variety of essential things that you don’t get to choose about. If the revenue raised is insufficient to provide for the needs of the people then it is clear that those with excess wealth must pay more and thereby the wealth is distributed in a way that benefits Society.