Category Archives: Council

Council service cuts stories

Wonder how many women in austerity worry about their kids being removed

Posted on by
1

There is a quote below from one of the women I’ve been interviewing at Boundary House, a hostel for homeless families in Welwyn Garden City.

I’m publishing the quote here, because it’s the sort of comment that I’ve heard a lot in the past few years from women who are homeless and/or who are really struggling to make ends meet. They worry that their children will be removed if a council knows that they are struggling financially, or if they break down because they are under pressure and living in poor circumstances. I’ve written about this before: as I say, women have made this sort of comment to me over the years. People clearly believe that the threat of losing children is there. It is a thought and concern that they factor in:

“Like me and my children, we never had a house which is not overcrowded. Never. It has basically been like this a lot, but there was no support from council… Then, if I’ve gone crazy or something, then they would have taken my children away. That’s what I am saying. They draw you into this kind of situation, into this madness and then they say “Oh, you’re not a suitable mother. We’re going to take your children.”

I think about this a lot. I wonder how many people have this thought and concern in their heads. I wonder how many people decide never to challenge a council about their poor living conditions, or to never apply for, say, a discretionary housing payment to help make up their rent, because they don’t want to draw a council’s attention to their problems. For every woman I meet who has decided to protest about her living conditions, there must be plenty who have decided not to. Fear keeps people pretty quiet.

Posting here will less frequent for the next few months while I work on a case studies project. There will be more from this article in that project. You can still get in touch here.

Could someone from Brent Council please contact me? Hello?

Posted on by
5

Update Friday 16 October:

Received a response yesterday from Brent Council which details the council’s rent in advance and deposit support scheme, and outlines the flat-inspection process that the council has undertaken to get the deposit paid retrospectively in this instance. The council says that having completed its checks, it has “now arranged to pay the money to the agent who has agreed to return the deposit he received.” Sounds very good. Will update this post when everything is finally settled and write more detailed article about this issue of rent in advance and deposit payments for people who can’t afford those payments as housing pressures intensify. The council’s response did not include comment on the request for the inspection findings for the previous flat, so will make another request for that.

Was intrigued by a line in the council’s response which said I’d never emailed or phoned the council press office about this issue. I find this an interesting remark, given that I’m sitting here looking at the email I sent to the press office about the rent in advance and deposit issue on 30 September at 12.23pm and also at the phone log record of the call I made about an hour earlier on the same day, but I’ll let that one go for now because I am feeling uncommonly generous today. It is Friday after all.

————————–

Original post.

Well – it’s been about a week since I posted this attempt to get answers re: Brent Council’s policy on paying rent in advance and deposits for re-housed tenants, and reimbursing people who pay that money on behalf of others. I also asked in that post if Brent Council could let me know how a flat inspection carried out about six months ago panned out.

I’ve been completely ignored. Being ignored is not something that sits well with me in the general run. Am presuming Brent Council is still there (their twitter feed is), so am starting to think that there may be reasons to take this silence personally. Which I am.

My contact details are here, Brent Council. Am standing by.

Barnet council workers strike against privatisation 7 October 2015

Posted on by
Reply

From Barnet Unison:

Barnet UNISON members whose jobs haven’t yet been outsourced will begin a 24 hour strike action on Wednesday 7 October (the strike excludes community schools).

The strike involves social workers, coach escorts, drivers, occupational therapists, schools catering staff, education welfare officers, library workers, children centre workers, street cleaning and refuse workers, all of whom have made it clear they want to remain employees of Barnet Council and don’t want their jobs outsourced.

Picket lines on Wednesday October 7 will be at:

Barnet House from 7 am.

Mill Hill Depot—Starts 6 am onwards.

East Finchley Library—Start 9 am onwards.

Rally 12.30 – St Johns Church Hall, Friern Barnet Lane.

Read the rest (including council plans to cut library services) here.

Fighting Brent Council for rent in advance and a deposit for a disabled man’s flat

Posted on by
8

Update and council’s response here.

Right. This is a post about trying to house a disabled tenant and trying to find a deposit and rent in advance… Read on for more about one weapons-grade shambles that I’ve seen first-hand. I wonder how many people are having this sort of dire experience as more and more people are shifted out of inner London boroughs…

This is a story about Brent Council’s great reluctance to cough up the rent in advance and deposit on a place for a disabled man who was rehoused out of an absolute dump of a flat earlier this year. This situation really is a shambles. I would be happy to talk about it with the council, except that the council won’t talk to me. My attempts to contact the council have gone unanswered to date, so I am saying Boo Hiss to the council right now. I am posting this to talk to the internet about the problem instead. I am also hoping Brent will see this post and respond to me and everybody else and FINALLY AGREE TO MEET TO RESOLVE THE PROBLEM.

Earlier this year, I attended an emergency homelessness meeting at Brent Council with a man in his 50s who has learning difficulties and health problems. The meeting was held at Brent Council‘s very flash Civic Centre which is next to Wembley stadium. (This is the Civic Centre that the council opened a couple of years ago with a legendary £98,000 ceremony if I may digress for a moment . Brent is also the council that famously found £12,000 for a virtual assistant hologram for its reception desk. I like holograms – who doesn’t – but you see where I am going here. There is some money sloshing about at Brent Council – for opening ceremonies and holograms, at least).

Money can be harder to come by if you’re looking to rehouse a disabled man, though.
The man with learning difficulties had been living in this mould-encrusted hellhole in Kilburn:

ceiling_mould

He’d received an eviction notice, because his landlord wanted the property back. He needed rehousing fast. This man was terribly stressed by all of this. He hates change and he had also been distressed for months about the mould and mice in his flat (the council came and inspected the place when I called to complain about the mould, just by the way. I asked the council for the results of that inspection a couple of months ago. I’ve heard nothing more on that, either. Brent Council may be good opening ceremonies, but it really is useless at communication. I held a sit-in at the Brent Council foyer with disabled woman Angela Smith about social care problems around a year ago. Maybe the council’s still pissed off about that).

The council said that it would look for flats for this man. (The council did offer several flat viewings after the meeting, but the man turned them down, because he did not understand then that housing benefit only covered flats as small as the one he’d been living in. He was very worried about being stuck in another tiny, airless flat and getting sicker). Officers at the meeting also put great emphasis on encouraging the man to search for a flat himself. Rent in advance and a deposit would obviously be a problem for this guy (he signs on for jobseekers’ allowance).

The council officer at the meeting said this about the rent and deposit help that Brent Council could give:

“If he finds something to rent and… if you don’t have the incentive, like the deposit, the rent in advance, the council could provide an incentive which could be the deposit and the rent in advance, so there are things that we can do to try to help you find your own accommodation as well as assessing this application.”

As luck would have it, I have a recording of that statement. Continue reading →

Barnet council workers to strike against privatisation 7 October 2015

Posted on by
Reply

From Barnet Unison:

Barnet council UNISON members will begin a 24 hour strike action on Wednesday 7 October.

The dispute involves social workers, coach escorts, drivers, occupational therapists, schools catering staff, education welfare officers, library workers, children centre workers, street cleaning and refuse workers. All have made it clear they don’t want their services or jobs outsourced.

Barnet Council is about to agree outsourcing and cuts across a number of council committees over the next four months which would see the number of staff employed by the council reduced to less than 300.

Read the rest here.

Join the Focus E15 campaign this Saturday: March Against Evictions!

Posted on by
1

From the Focus E15 Mothers’ campaign:

“It’s the second birthday of the Focus E15 campaign for decent housing.

Join campaigners this weekend as they march against evictions:

12pm Saturday 19 September 2015 at Stratford Park, West Ham Lane, London E15 4PT

Bring whistles, horns, sound systems, drums and pots and pans! We will not be cleansed and not be silenced!

The Focus E15 campaign was born in September 2013 when a group of young single mothers were served eviction notices after Newham council cut its funding to the Focus E15 hostel for young homeless people.

To make matters worse, Newham council had recently decided to prioritise access to social housing for people in work – a decision that effectively discriminates against single mothers and their children, who are being especially hit hard by the government’s public spending cuts and welfare reforms. When they approached the council for help, the mothers were advised that, due to cuts to housing benefit and the lack of affordable housing in London, they would have to look for private rented accommodation and were likely to be moved as far away as Manchester, Hastings and Birmingham if they wanted rehousing.

This attempt by Newham council to displace the mothers from London, removing them and their children from their families and local support networks, is just one example of a city-wide process of social cleansing, with low income people being forced to the fringes of London and beyond by soaring rents, benefit cuts and a shortage of social housing. This prompted the mothers to form the Focus E15 campaign, demanding access to decent ‘social housing not social cleansing’. Continue reading →

Support Gabriel Pepper: protest for former ILF recipient facing a massive cut to care support

Posted on by
2

Update 2 September: Mirror story now out on this care cut: This disabled man has lost HALF his care after Tories axed the Independent Living Fund.

——————————————————————————–

Original post 1 September 2015:

Disabled campaigners and supporters will hold a protest today at Waltham Forest Town Hall in support of former Independent Living Fund recipient Gabriel Pepper, who is facing a substantial cut to his care package now that the ILF is closed. The ILF used to pay for some of Gabriel’s care. Now, Gabriel must rely entirely on Waltham Forest council to pay for his care package – a package that will be cut by about 48%.

So much for government claims that councils could and would meet disabled people’s care needs when the Independent Living Fund closed. “All disabled people, including those transferring from the ILF, will continue to be protected by a safety net that guarantees disabled people get the support they need,” Cameron’s last government waffled in 2014 when then-Minister for Disabled People Mike Penning announced again that the ILF would close. (I say “again” because the courts had recently thrown out a previous government decision to close the ILF. Undeterred, that government returned in March 2014 to say again that it would close the fund).

Obviously, Penning was talking rot. We all knew that, but still.

The protest about the cut to Gabriel’s care package will take place from:

12pm to 2pm
Waltham Forest Town Hall
701 Forest Rd
Walthamstow
E17 4J

All support appreciated.

Here’s Gabriel discussing his disability and the reasons why he needed the ILF to pay for extra carer hours:

Update: 5pm.

Tweets from Penny Pepper at the protest today:

 

What exactly is the planned endgame for people in poverty? Permanent homelessness? Debtors’ jail?

Posted on by
20

I wonder.

The letter that you see on the page below is a demand for rent arrears money received recently by a very young Stratford woman I know. This young woman has been through the wringer on the emotional and domestic fronts this year. I’m not giving details here, but her situation has been very difficult. She’s had an experience that nobody would envy.

Financially, things are in tatters. Earlier this year, her benefits were stopped for a while and then reduced. Her housing benefit doesn’t cover her whole rent, there were payment problems a while back that nobody at this end entirely understands (I’ve looked through the relevant papers and I don’t get it), and she falls further behind in her payments each week. She will be evicted and made homeless unless her council and landlord can be talked around.

Housing_letter

It seems unlikely that the council and her landlord will be talked around at this stage. You can see from the letter that her landlord wants £66 a week in payments towards her rent shortfall and arrears, and that eviction and homelessness are very much on the cards. That £66 is an impossible amount for someone whose weekly benefit payment is not much more than that. There’s more, too. Apparently, this young woman just heard that the DWP will start deducting money from her benefit each week for a loan repayment. She recently had a bailiff threat hand-delivered through the door for £746 for an old travel fine that she says wasn’t hers (you can see that demand below). It never stops – demand after demand for money, costs and god knows what else.

Needless to say, this young woman stopped coping with this situation a long time ago. She can’t respond to the torrent of mail, so she ends up responding to none of it. I see this time and time again. The problems get so big that people try to ignore them. The endless post goes unopened, calls are ignored and people fall further behind each day. I don’t know what the planned end game is for people in these situations. Permanent homelessness? Debtors’ jail? The workhouse? Can’t be anything good:

Bailiff_letter

The point of this post? – to remind the world that people in these situations exist, even though government insists that they shouldn’t. Doesn’t matter if the electorate – or parts of it – voted for austerity and against social security. Doesn’t matter if government and the so-called opposition insist that people simply need to pull themselves together to get out of holes. Here people are all the same. Debts pile up, the bailiffs are always circling, court action is always on the horizon, and threatening letters cascade through the door. You either have the money, or the means, or even the mental health, I guess, to drag yourself out of breakdown, or you don’t. If you don’t, you sink. I suppose that’s the idea.

Justin Tomlinson talking shit on the Independent Living Fund #saveILF

Posted on by
5

Short update on the recently closed Independent Living Fund:

A couple of weeks ago, Minister for Disabled People Justin Tomlinson wrote an imperious letter to the Guardian in response to an Aditya Chakrabortty article about social security cuts.

Tomlinson’s letter included this very touchy paragraph about the government’s closure of the Independent Living Fund – the fund that severely disabled people used to pay for essential extra carer hours before the government closed the fund on June 30:

“Aditya Chakrabortty’s article (Disabled people have become human collateral in an ideological war, 9 June) is a travesty of the truth. First among a catalogue of inaccuracies is the claim that support made available to some disabled people under the independent living fund is to be removed. Responsibility for providing this support is, in fact, being transferred to local authorities. Far from being taken away, it will be administered in a way better able to take account of variations in local circumstances and services.”

Tomlinson was talking total shit, of course. We knew that and many have reported on it, but still. I sent an FOI recently to local authorities to ask for updates on the devolution of ILF funding to councils.

FOI responses have started to trickle in. It’s still early days, but we can already see where this is going. A few examples: Lewisham council says it still doesn’t have a final figure for the amount of devolved ILF funding it will get from government (Lewisham sent its response today). Sunderland only found out how much it would get a week before the ILF closed and only began to assess ILF recipients to figure out their future care needs and costs on 1 July. Some councils haven’t yet assessed the former ILF recipients that they’re now responsible for and some have only assessed a few. Nobody has any idea if they’ll get any money after 2016 (the government has said only the ILF money will be devolved to councils for a year). And I got an intriguing response today from Barking and Dagenham council in response to a question about the council’s expectations re: its ability to fund care for ILF recipients in an ongoing way.

I asked: “Does the authority expect to be able to meet the care costs of all ILF recipients to the same level as ILF funding?”

“No,” said the council.

Always interesting to get a straight reply from a local authority. It was certainly a straighter answer than Tomlinson gave in his highly misleading, disingenuous, whiny letter.

Anyway. There we are. More as responses come in.

Video: disabled protestors occupy parliament on 24 June in protest at the closure of the Independent Living Fund:

 

The hell with the Tories: Barnet council workers strike against mass privatisation

Posted on by
Reply

From Barnet Unison:

Barnet Unison members who still work for Barnet Council (that is, the people whose jobs that hopeless council hasn’t already cut or outsourced) begin a 48-hour strike on Monday 1 June against council plans to privatise a whole new mass of services.

People whose jobs are threatened by this latest wave of proposed outsourcing include coach escorts, drivers, social workers, occupational therapists, schools catering staff, education welfare officers, library workers, children centre workers and street cleaning and refuse workers. They have all made it very clear that they want to remain Barnet Council employees. They don’t want public services or their jobs outsourced.

“Our members don’t want to work for an employer which will place shareholders’ legal demands before local residents’ needs,” says Unison branch secretary John Burgess, rightly. “Our members don’t want to work for an employer which uses zero hours contracts. Our members don’t want to work for an employer which will not pay the London Living Wage as a basic minimum. That’s why 87% of our members working for the Council voted ‘Yes’ to taking strike action.”

Precisely.

I do like the way that the Tories try to argue that they need to curb the right to strike to protect essential public services. The truth is that people often need to strike to protect public services from Tories and privatisation. Ironic, innit.

Picket line information for tomorrow – get to the pickets if you can:

Monday 1 June

1. North London Business Park—From 7am
2. Mill Hill Depot—From 6am
3. East Finchley Library—From 9am

At 10.30am, strikers will travel to the Phoenix Cinema, 52 High Road, East Finchley, London N2 9PJ for a special screening of the Russell Brand Film “The Emperor’s New Clothes” starting at 12pm.

John McDonnell MP will lead on a Q&A session after the film.

Tuesday 2 June

1. North London Business Park (NLBP)—From 7am
2. Mill Hill Depot—From 6am
3. Edgware Library—Start  am onwards.

At 12pm, the strikers will march from the NLBP to St John’s Church Hall Friern Barnet Lane, N20 for a rally.

Other ways you can help:

Sign the petition to stop the outsourcing plans https://t.co/rMyBAeVDOQ

Follow @barnet_unison and #BarnetStrikes. Share updates!

Follow Barnet Unison on Facebook and like our page and share our posts.

Email messages of solidarity and support to contactus@barnetunison.org.uk