Opportunity knocks! – if you have a home and front door, etc

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Happy New Year! Kind of!

Let’s start with some good news:

There’s this young child in London who lives in a crappy homelessness hostel BUT who has real singing talent, which at the moment is being nurtured. Last year, this little girl got a place on a music programme for children where she gets singing lessons, support and chances to perform.

This could take her great places – perhaps out of poverty and into a future with just a bit more hope, and maybe a housing option where she and mum don’t have to share a bed, or skirt ponds of wee in the hostel lift, or listen to endless shit from the council re: not being overcrowded and sucking it up by sticking an extra bed in the kitchen, etc. That’s the dream, anyway. It’s a warming dream in its way, at least from a middle-class angle – a Billy Elliot for the temporary accommodation age.

So, that’s the good news. The less good news is like many young children in poverty, this one will have to outperform a council that has perfected a modern art of its own – ie turning hope into landfill. And who knows? She may succeed! – though she’ll be coming from a long way behind and she’ll need a pretty big finish.

I say this, because late last week, their council sent J, the girl’s mother, a letter to say that J and her daughter will be chucked out of the hostel in the 2nd week of February. Happy New Year to you.

This letter struck J the two usual blows. It told J that she will be made homeless, because the council is ending its duty to help her. Then, it threw the sucker punch (you could almost hear the council winding an arm up for it), which is that social services had been instructed to turn its attentions to the little girl. They’re great, these letters – exactly the sort of thing you need through the hostel door when you’re already homeless, near breakdown and have nowhere to go in the middle of a terminal housing crisis.

The council did throw in a Sorry About This, Pal, line at the end of the letter: “We appreciate this decision is not the one you would have wished for and apologise if it has caused you any distress,” but I’m not totally sure this has squared things. J has still taken her letter badly. She thinks it means that social services will take her child away, because the child is facing street homelessness. She is also wondering if her fast-failing mental health will improve that much when she’s living in a doorway and desperately bidding for council places on a shaky wifi in some unstaffed library warmbank.

Government and councils seem to think this sort of scenario is character-building, although it could be time that they tried it. Given that J has never had secure housing in her adult life, her fear that she may be homeless forever is not wild imagining. It may also be why I’ve heard more crying than singing in J’s recent phone calls with me.

And why is J being evicted? Her sin was the usual one. She balked at a council offer of temporary housing, because it was in an area that her abusive ex frequents. That really ought be enough, but I’m not sure how much these issues help your case these days. When you’re poor, turning down a council offer of housing tends to win you little sympathy, even if you’re legally owed it. Say No to a place that the council deems suitable and generally, that’s you gone.

Reading through her paperwork, I’m not convinced that J did formally reject this place, particularly given that someone who has spent months in counselling and tears about years of sofa-surfing, eviction, non-molestation orders and abuse, etc, is probably not on top of the fine print.

The council says that J bid on council places in areas that her her ex lived in, but J says she absolutely did not. She just cries and cries. She says she needs a secure tenancy and place to live, because she can’t cope with another move to another hovel, and then another move to another hovel, and so on and so on, forever. None of us can or would cope with that, but more and more people are expected to all the same. “Fiasco” doesn’t begin to cover the housing fiasco. It’ll drive the whole population out of its box.

Of course, there are those who will say that councils have no choice these days – that there are nowhere near enough homes available, so a chance to strike someone in need from the list has to be taken if the rules it can be. I think something different – that perhaps councils could go a lot easier on people in J’s situation. They could even start to protect people from the more vicious rules and refuse to evict, and chuck the vitriol at the government. Something HAS to change. As for the little girl and her singing talent – well, you try to hope. I suppose we can look on the bright side and say is she’s just been handed the chance of a lifetime to star in a real-life Les Mis.

16 thoughts on “Opportunity knocks! – if you have a home and front door, etc”

  1. At least the ‘Billy Elliott’ scenario holds promise, better than the Billy Casper route that gave some of us false hope half a century ago, there’s no future in taming Kestrels and no more “pits” to avoid a working future going down.
    In other respects though Council’s do drag their feet, mine are currently overwhelmed and inundated by/with applications for the Discretionary Hardship Fund. For the poor much of life involves playing a waiting game, you can’t move in any direction without money.

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    • The whole thing is most of the way gone. You can’t run housing departments with no bloody housing to put people into and more and more people needing somewhere to go. Sunak needs to sort something out – how useless is he. I’m minded to encourage everyone to go and hang out at his place. Plenty of room.

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  3. Disgusting to see Wes Streeting speaking at the ‘Centre for Social Justice.’ This is Duncan-Smith’s set up that has caused so much trouble for people on benefits. Truly a right-wing heartland of free-marketeers and neo-liberals.
    What the hell are Labour doing in a place like this, sucking up to the Tories ?
    Or do they feel the need for Tory approval, that if they win the election they’ll be good boys and not cause any trouble ?

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    • Well, it’s Blair 2.0 innit, and we all know that Tony is a Tory, ergo so is Starmer.

      If I only know one thing, it’s that I’m not going to lone my vote to the Labour Party as I did in the two previous elections where they had a half-decent candidate for PM, (even though I disagree with his idiot left stance on Ukraine) who would have actually done a huge amount of good. But the tories in the Labour Party were having none of it, of course! Too much like democracy!

      I keep asking myself when the insanity will end, but I think that it will take radical change before it does, and that means, probably, the disintegration of the UK and the English regions demanding more autonomy. with England effectively becoming a federal nation state.

      When Labour hopefuls start to attend events organised by bodies like the Centre for Social Justice you know it augers badly. Labour should be talking directly to the people, not to the chinless wonders in right-wing think tanks.

      ( I know I’m commenting over a month late, not looked in for a while, and Dave G made excellent points.)

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  4. The whole government system has broken, & it’s dragged all the Council’s along with it!

    This constant false Austerity, when there are now more Billionaires in the UK than ever before, just shows how much all of these decisions are political in nature.

    The ones who suffer for it, of course, are J and her poor daughter!

    It’s despicable that Labour are supporting the Tories in all they do – they tend to abstain in votes, rather than go against the Tories, except for the very few Labour MPs who still have a soul – and this tells me that any GE, taken with FPTP, will just be a waste of a vote, as we only have a choice of a BlueTory, or a Red Tory, to get into power.

    I really can’t understand why we haven’t got a General Strike arranged for the whole of the UK yet?

    There are far too many people, like J and her daughter, who needlessly suffer, so where are the cries of protest? 😭

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