ANOTHER leaked email telling support workers not to help disabled housing and benefits claimants

Posted on October 7, 2025 by Kate B

In my latest podcast episode:

Another professional has leaked an outrageous email to me – the second in as many weeks.

In this email, a Hackney council officer tells an education specialist to stop writing support letters for families with disabled children who need to be moved out of terrible housing.

This officer works with autistic and SEND children. Their families need these support letters to tell their councils why they must be rehoused. Some letters say that children are at high risk of death in their current housing.

Pat McFadden – the new fibbing head of the DWP

I also talk about Pat McFadden, newly-minted secretary of state for the DWP.

I’m intrigued by the lies Pat McFadden is telling about people being able to declare themselves longterm sick to claim benefits. This is rot. People cannot declare themselves long term sick to claim benefits. They have to go through a humiliating work capability assessment and then wait for the DWP to decide if they should get benefits. Often, the DWP decides they should not.

I talk with Latoya Wray in this episode. She works 3 minimum wage jobs and claims a bit of universal credit to stay afloat.

When she’s not doing that, she’s living in fear of her 8 year old autistic son falling to his death from their flat in a Hackney highrise council block. She has medical and education reports saying that her son is at high risk of death and that the family urgently needs rehousing.

Unfortunately, as seen in the leaked email, education specialists have been told not to write letters to tell that council to rehouse families with autistic and disabled children who are at high risk of death in their housing.

Pat McFadden needs to take his fingers out of his ears and pull out the one he has in his butt, and listen to Latoya. This is what life is really like when you need to claim benefits and help with housing.

Leaked email: Council tells NHS staff to stop writing rehousing support letters for families with disabled children

Posted on September 24, 2025 by Kate B

My latest podcast episode is about an extraordinary email that a senior health professional leaked to me.

The email says that a Hackney council officer told health and medical staff to stop writing supporting letters for families who need to be moved out of terrible housing – that’s families with disabled children.

The email was circulated in this consultant’s NHS workplace.

This is outrageous. Families want and NEED these supporting letters to give to the council. The letters are medical evidence that a child’s health issues and disabilities are made worse by their awful housing. They prove that the family must be moved. Some of these letters say that disabled children are at risk of death in their homes.

But this email tells NHS staff to stop writing them.

The email is full of other rubbish. It says that families of disabled children can find a place to rent in the private sector in one month – implication being that they don’t need to get on the council housing waiting list or ask for a transfer somewhere better. A month for low income families to find a place to rent in the private sector? That’s just fantasy. We might even call that a lie.

The email also says that the council has a robust system in place “to identify need and allocate housing.”

That’s rubbish. There are families in the podcast who have letters and reports which say that their disabled children are at high risk of death because of the state of their current housing – but they still haven’t been moved.

So. I have a few theories on why a council might want to shut medical staff up on the topic of potential council failures to keep disabled children safe.

Bleeding more cash out of homeless people

Posted on October 10, 2023 by Kate B

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We go back to Marlin Apartments in Stratford, where homeless families live 4 and 5 to a single room – around which they are pursued by militias of rats, mice, bedbugs, cockroaches, tiny flies and other pests that I didn’t care to view closely at the time. There are pictures and stories here if you can stand it.

Being eaten by bedbugs was plenty to be getting on with, but now, there is more. It turns out that the above vermin aren’t the only ones in pursuit of Marlin residents. Energy and water companies are after them, too – for money that the residents neither owe, nor can pay. No surprises there, of course. You don’t get much time off from your life as prey when you are poor. Your whole day is lousy with bloodsuckers, muggers and vultures who can’t wait to chew you out. You get down to bone, but your tormentors will still charge in to gnaw it.

Which is not to say that they don’t form a type of queue. In any list of voracious wankers, water and energy companies invariably make their way to the top. In a stampede for your twitching carcass, they will bullock past the rest in the race for your soft parts. Which they’ll get.

So it is at Marlin Apartments. Recently, while thumbing through mail that the rats had yet to fully consume, residents found water and energy demands for several hundred pounds. In some cases, these demands were for more than £500:

Image of water costs bill showing a demand for £531.82

At the same time, Marlin residents received letters from Newham council which said that they had to set up their own accounts with energy companies, and pay the usual exorbitant power bills directly to those companies.

image from letter about changed conditions for charging for energy bills at Marlin Apartments

As I understand it (I don’t entirely), up until September, bills were included in residents’ rent – one bill for the lot, residents say. I suppose that makes sense given that Marlin Apartments were once serviced apartments for city-visitor management types, who probably paid an all-inclusive bill for a stay.

Now that the apartments are used as temporary accommodation for homeless people, things have changed – to bring Marlin residents in line with “arrangements that are made with all residents of temporary accommodation,” according to the above letter from the council. I say, “as I understand it,” because the council has not responded to my requests for clarification on the new and old charging “systems.” Also, the text in the council’s letter is about as clear as catflop. I tried hard, but there are sentences that are taking a while to stick:

“As a result of the rising energy costs, it has been agreed with Marlin apartments that the cost of water heating via the gas supply to the building will be made by them directly to you.”

I think that means, “as energy costs go up, homeless tenants will be hit for the lot.”

So, that’s great for residents. As we all found out last year – and a long time before in many cases – knowing that your heating bills will increase in winter, and as dangerous damp and mould set in, is not especially hilarious.

National and local government like to argue that billing homeless people like the rest of us (ie, violently) is character-building and the path out of dependence. This argument tends to circumnavigate the fact that problems with meeting bills are generally less about a lack of character than about a lack of money, but we must grow where we can, I guess.

I suppose that there is a bit of bright side, in that worrying about impossible energy bills could be a refreshing change from worrying about being eaten alive by bedbugs. Then again, maybe being slowly gassed by anti-bedbug pesticides is a better way to go. As I say, you look for positives where you can. Every aspect of council homelessness provision is so terminally stuffed that I now tend to rate problems by degree and length of torture. When looking for answers to problems, you really do find yourself asking questions like – is sitting in a damp room and choking on mould particles over several winters better or worse for body and soul than being munched on by bedbugs and mice? What should you deal with first?

People living in temp housing get both, of course, Such are the times. If you are homeless in 2023, housing success is not about finding somewhere comfortable, or safe, or clean, or even habitable. It’s about finding a place that you and your kids might survive.

Anyway. I imagine that some people who read this won’t give a toss, logic being that we’re all stuck paying huge water and energy bills, so why should homeless people miss out. Also, heaps of people get random batshit demands for hundreds of extra pounds from energy and water companies, so, I can see some people thinking – welcome to the club. I got a random demand for £2,000 from Southern Electric once. Amusingly, they ended up paying me £600 after I started blogging about it.

My point, though: when the squeeze is put on homeless people, you see again that there are no limits. End-stage capitalism hunts for money where there is none. It would be kinder, and certainly prettier, to throw homeless people to actual sharks.

Temporary housing? – not for the cockroaches

Posted on August 27, 2023 by Kate B

We return this morning to Marlin Apartments, the Newham temporary housing hellhole where homeless families with very young children are “placed” (deposited?) for years at a time.

As I wrote last week, the building is overrun with bedbugs, cockroaches, mice and rats and their many offspring, and other crawlers, biters and slimers that absolutely nobody I know would want chewing through the family’s food and feet.

I gave the bedbugs a writeup last week, and posted pictures of some of the injuries that the bedbugs and other vermin are inflicting on very young children – children who have, in some cases, lived in these terrible flats for several years. If you think that those kids are going to grow up in good shape, or grow up at all, it might be time to think again.

This morning, I’m posting pictures of some of the many cockroaches and maggots that roam and writhe through and around Marlin Apartments. It goes without saying that something major needs to be done about all of this.

One idea would be to fill a skip with several Marlin Apartments cockroach swarms, road trip them up to North Yorkshire, and dump the lot into Rishi Sunak’s lunch and bed.

The cockroaches in the pictures won’t be going, but there are plenty more where they came from (the pics are from the flat of a family who have a toddler and 4-month old baby):

Here are bugs crawling round the baby’s crib. Mum threw the crib out, because the baby was being bitten. The family can’t afford a new crib, so now, the family sleeps on the floor.

Bedbugs on crib - Marlin Apartments

And video of maggots out the front of the building – the residents say that the communal bins overflow. There are too many people living in too small a space, with too few services.

And I haven’t even got to the serious overcrowding problems in Marlin yet, or the new problems with energy bills that residents face. They used to pay their bills as part of their rent, but now must set up individual accounts. A number of people showed me letters which demanded several hundred pounds for outstanding bills which absolutely nobody can understand.

I’m getting to that.

To finish – this picture is of one of the single rooms that families live in. I have a vague memory of someone on twitter saying that these ex-serviced apartments couldn’t be single rooms, but at least 3 of the ones I saw were, so there you go. In these single rooms, there was a bug-infested double bed (or 2 single beds pushed together), a bug-infested couch and a cot all in one space with a small kitchen at the top end.

Picture of a single-room Marlin Apartment. I”m holding the camera. There is space behind me for a couch and that’s it.

No doubt these apartments were all very nice when they were properly serviced and rented to single businesspeople who were enjoying week-long London jollies, but things have taken something of a slide since the council arranged to rent them from Marlin for homeless families. The “serviced” bit sort of disappeared from the “serviced apartments” idea.

I’ve asked Newham council for comment on this, but they’ve stopped answering. Probably nothing to say that’ll make any of this all right. Would like to see every member of Sunak’s cabinet living and working in this building, though. Lock them in the place for a year, then torch it.

When your Uber or delivery driver’s kids are being eaten alive by vermin

Posted on August 21, 2023 by Kate B

This was a fun one to start the weekend on:

On Saturday, I took the picture below. It shows a six-year-old girl who lives in temporary accommodation in Marlin Apartments in Stratford. Newham council uses rooms in the building as temporary housing for homeless families and my word – what a shocker.

The building is infested with bedbugs, rodents, cockroaches, weird, tiny flies and god knows what else. The girl in the picture and her family have lived in a single room in Marlin for 3 years. For that whole time, the bedbugs, doubtless fleas and other crawlies have been chewing away at this little kid. They’ve been all over her body – not “just” arms, face and feet. From the looks of things, they plan to keep going until they finish.

The girl has scratched and scratched, and is covered in scars and marks. Her mother showed me boxes of creams, prescription eczema treatments, soothing ointments, emollients that she couldn’t really afford and all of the rest.

“They don’t work,” Mum told me. She was pretty clear why – fumigation or no, the bugs kept coming back. Needless to say, the scratching wasn’t helping the girl recover.

In the interests of putting distance between the bugs and their snack, Mum had taken to sleeping on the hard floor with the little girl and her younger sibling. The family had stopped using the sofa bed in the room, because the bugs live in it.

I didn’t have a chance talk to Dad, because he was out delivering takeout around the city to those who felt they must have it right then. A number of people who “live” in Marlin are Uber drivers, or people who deliver food around the city on motorbikes – those lucky punters who get up every day to live again the gig economy dream.

The family gets some universal credit, because Dad isn’t paid enough to live on. He certainly can’t pay a London rent. That’s why the family is grinding it out on the floor in Marlin, losing an endurance test with insects.

His young daughter, meanwhile, appears to be paying for the city’s cheap eats with her skin. I can only conclude that we’ve reached a point where society considers that sort of thing the acceptable price of being able to get McDonald’s delivered to your door at all hours.

In which case – talk about taking one for the team.

She isn’t the only one in Marlin with bites, of course. Here’s a little girl with a faceful of welts – people say it is common to find these on kids in the morning:

Which is not to imply for a moment that the rodents are missing out. Here’s a picture of a mouse bite on a toddler’s leg. On Friday, the mouse climbed over the little boy and bit.

He’s just a little kid.

I have a lot to write about the Marlin apartments situation. There is the gross overcrowding, the people sleeping on hard floors with only a thin duvet between them and the surface, and the maggots crawling in the entranceway.

There is also the fact that uber-dolt Rishi Sunak is partying it up in Disneyland while people in low-paid and insecure jobs sleep 3 and 4 to a lousy (literally) bed, or on smaller and smaller parts of the floor when the bugs get ahead in the land grab.

There are a lot of questions to be asked re: who is responsible for this and who is going to fix it. I asked Newham council for a view today, but alas, did not get a response to that question. There’s probably also a question here for the rest of us re: whether feeding kids to vermin is acceptable collateral in the greater ongoing human quest for cheap taxis to parties and round-the-clock fried-eats deliveries. Let me know if it’s time to abandon hope.

Your Newham Get Me Out Of Here Bushbash Challenge – rising to a slug infestation

Posted on August 8, 2023 by Kate B

Well – this is revolting.

I’ve been sent the slug gallery below by a resident of a flat in Newham.

R and their family (including a toddler and a very young baby) were homeless. They were living in the Newham Brimstone House emergency homelessness hostel. After a while, Newham council placed the family in the flat in the pictures below.

That was the good news. The bad news is that the family isn’t the only crowd there. Slugs have also made the flat their home, sliming their way across floors, walls, the baby’s room and cot, and over kitchen utensils, sponges and containers when they want a novelty ride. Seems as though even slugs are sick of the rain and parked-up jetstreams and are moving their operation inside. There are gaps in walls and holes to the outside, which the slugs clearly see as some sort of invitation to intimate dialogue.

The family reported the problem to the council and landlord months ago. Pest control has apparently been around, but clearly may as well not have been. The council did send the family some links on slug combat, but a bit of a surf isn’t really the same as being rehoused to somewhere habitable, and you start any fight against slugs a long way behind if they have multiple routes inside. You can napalm them with actual crap, or whatever you like, but they don’t care. They just find another door.

Here they all still are. Isn’t grinding poverty and homelessness fun.

Perhaps someone will respond to these photos:

Taking bets on when this council block will collapse

Posted on February 1, 2023 by Kate B

We return today to Brassett Point, the waterlogged Newham council block where the pipework down one whole side of the building is so wrecked that daily life for residents is an actual shower of shit.

Wet ceilings, leaking sewerage and water pipes, and buckets and towels all over – see residents’ vids below. Doesn’t look good. I admit I’m no engineer, but I don’t think you have to be. Can’t bode well when your building turns into a sieve.

Bucket collecting water in Brassett Point

You also start to wonder if the council has given up when you tell them that pipes over your loo are bust – and their suggestion is that you pee in a bucket.

Readers of this site will remember a recent story about the council giving a Brassett Point resident a portaloo to use when the leaks raining down on her toilet became tricky to swerve while perched.

The resident wasn’t thrilled with this arrangement. I think we can all agree that having to sit on a bucket next to your friends in your lounge is socially kind of blunt.

Really – MPs and the council need to get onto this in a big way before the whole sodden building collapses with everyone in it, etc.

The council fixes one leak here, only for another couple of leaks to spring over here. Can’t see this lasting for long.

Water coming through the ceiling

More on this soon, but for now – and I do mean now – let’s get moving on this before whatever is still holding the building up finally dissolves.

And the portaloo, just as a reminder of scenes late last year at Brassett Point. I took this picture when I visited:

Portaloo in Newham council flat

And one more video. Why not:

Is the idea to find out how much cold poorer people can take?

Posted on December 14, 2022 by Kate B

Got a bunch of pretty desperate whatsapp messages last night from N, the disabled single mother of 2 little kids whose housing problems I’ve been writing about for about a year. Happy anniversary to that, etc.

Last week, her council finally moved N and her kids from the cramped emergency homelessness hostel she’d been stuck in for 3 years into temporary accommodation. That sounded like good news at the time – except that now we find there’s no heating or hot water in the temporary place. The oven doesn’t work either, so not much chance of warming up a bit by gathering around that – probably not something to encourage a toddler and crawling baby to do anyway. The little ones may not be in the mood, of course, given that they are both now sick.

In recent days, there’s been plenty of snow and ice outside to make sure that the temperature is as perilously low as it can be. Innovation is key at these points – I’ve just been thinking that you could work up a bit of warmth by cuddling your phone close and reading about the middle classes tobogganing in Greenwich park.

N had hopes for this temporary accommodation, chief among which was having a place for a friend to stay next week to look after the kids while N has surgery on the arm that her abusive ex twisted in a rage. Blokes, eh. What can you do.

N says 2 appointments were made for someone to come and fix the heating, but nobody turned up for either. Maybe third time lucky? Or maybe not. I thinking that I won’t put money on it.

Update: An engineer has turned up and said there’s no electricity and/or the boiler isn’t connected to it. N says she is now back on the phone to the council, listening to hold music. So… that’s third time, but not 100% lucky?

And another update: A blog and an activist email to the council later, and the hot water and heating now work. All N needs to do now is find ways to pay for it..? One thing at a time.

Do migrants feel separation from family less or something

Posted on December 7, 2022 by Kate B

One hypocrisy I really enjoy is this: how the great and good go full the berserker when war, or Trump or other name sociopaths separate families for the political #win, but sort of let it slide when it happens here.

This is particularly true when the families are very poor, or immigrants, or, naturally, very poor immigrants. The consensus seems to be that immigrants feel the pain of separation less.

Email text which says please help me I can't live alone anymore without anyone no friends no family no one is very difficult

Certainly, the rest of the world feels their pain less.

In the past month or so, I’ve been speaking regularly with C, who is a woman in her 30s.

In her life, C has made two of our era’s bigger social mistakes. First one – she was born in Europe. She is Portuguese, but here. Gah. Second one – she’s a single mother. This is absolutely not her fault, but good luck marketing that. Main thing here is that C is suffering for her sins, so that at least will keep the jingoist crowd happy. Somebody’s getting something out of it, etc.

Actually, C is suffering for her landlord’s sins, but no doubt that also works. Two years ago, C was forced to ask Waltham Forest council for help, because she was homeless. The then-pregnant C had been renting a room from some chiseller who said he was the landlord, but was not. He was a tenant who sublet rooms to C and several other women, and, needless to say, paid their rent to himself.

The real landlord, of course, turned up one day in search of his rent. He wasn’t thrilled to find that his rent was all gone and that his place was being run as an unlicensed HMO by a robber. He chucked C and the other women out.

So far, so private rental sector.

Enter the calamity that is Waltham Forest council (I’ve had experience with Waltham Forest council’s treatment of homeless single mums, most of which I hope to forget).

Ever on the (often successful) prowl for ways to make a lousy situation worse, the council made the extraordinary decision to move C and her baby to a flat in very far-off Blackpool to live, presumably forever.

Even accounting for the possibility that nobody in Waltham Forest knew where Blackpool was, the council outdid itself sending C so far away from friends, family and her baby’s brother and father – an hours-long, massively overpriced return train journey “provided” by your choice of useless transport companies that at the moment couldn’t organise a trip to the shops.

Surely, the council could have found C a low-end flat in a neglected and downtrodden area closer to home? Councils used to like dumping homeless people in ratholes in towns like Slough and Colchester. What happened to those golden days? C didn’t actually demand to stay in London. She just wanted to be able to take the occasional trip there.

Placing C so far away isn’t even a cost-saving exercise, at least for the state. C was employed in London, but now must claim benefits by way of universal credit. As for landing a job in Blackpool – never say never, of course, but Blackpool has one of the highest unemployment rates around. C doesn’t know anybody, has no-one to help care for the baby and she is still learning English. She has also has serious depression now, because she is so isolated. Think we can safely say that she’ll be claiming universal credit for a while.

So, there we are. I doubt that C will be getting any big ideas about her human rights, or even being human, soon. Even dog rescue centres usually try to rehome dogs from the same family together, the understanding being is that dogs really feel these things.

You do find yourself wondering why this council practice of tearing people away from their families is still such a thing. No doubt it’s just part of the bigger game we’re playing – you know, the one where we’re trying to find out how much immigrants can take.

The screenshots are from some of C’s emails with the council over the last couple of years.

Update on mould shocker & the bucket for a toilet at Brassett Point estate

Posted on November 24, 2022 by Kate B

Been movement on the portaloo story:

I posted this no-repairs repairs story on Monday about a Brassett Point housing estate tenant who can’t use her toilet, because water and sewerage drip onto her head whenever she or anyone else takes a seat. In lieu of repairing the broken pipes which are leaking watery crap down several floors in the building, Newham council gave the woman a portaloo. Can’t quite imagine who okay’d that one – possibly someone who feels that council tenants don’t know they’re born.

Anyway, following publication of that story, local MP Lyn Brown got in touch to ask if the residents could contact her, which they did. An email has since arrived from Brown’s office to say that she’s pursuing the repairs with the council (wonder if the council will want the portaloo back).

The possibility of proper repairs is good news. We hope to hear the repairs are underway soon and that they take place before a buttload of poo-soaked plaster collapses through several ceilings and into a baby’s cot etc. There are heaps of little kids living in these flats.

In the meantime, here are some pictures of the mould, water and sewerage stains, and broken pipes and plastic that I took at several Brassett Point flats last weekend. Probably a good thing that you can’t smell pictures…the smell was not that great.