To Manor Park library yesterday and the “Meet Mayor Robin Wales” event yesterday, where there was a big turnout. Housing problems were on many minds.
I spoke to a woman who works as a cleaner and has been in temporary accomodation with her three children for four years. She earns £500 a month as a cleaner and her housing benefit does not meet her whole rent. I went round to her house to film the mould, missing floorboards, uncollected rubbish and peeling wallpaper later on in the day. Look at the mould growing here – the woman has to wipe it off regularly and it keeps coming back. There’s a two-month-old baby living in this place:
There was a woman who said her rundown place was full of mice and an older woman who was there on behalf of a disabled friend who she said was also in temporary accommodation…and that wasn’t the half of it. Decent, secure housing that people can afford is becoming very hard to find, we all know, and people were definitely concerned and angry. You’ll see from the videos that there was quite a turnout for meeting at a small library on a Saturday morning.
Focus E15 Mothers were there to ask Wales if he would back their campaign for social housing. Politicians won’t back these women, of course – young women who have children and who are on benefits for now aren’t thought worthy of that sort of attention. Kate Middleton can make her home over to the tune of £1m, but women like the Focus E15 mothers are regarded with suspicion and sneered at. More than one worthy at this recent women’s event asked me if I really thought that the Focus E15 mothers deserved the local social housing that they’ve been campaigning so hard for. Did I really think that would be the best thing for them? The concern seemed to be that housing the Focus E15 mothers securely would awaken the dreaded, so-called sense of entitlement in them. Of course – no mention was made of the startling sense of entitlement that people like Kate Middleton have.
The Focus E15 women – who were or still are all homeless and living in temporary accommodation in the Focus E15 hostel – want decent and secure social housing for all (you can read their story in detail here). Some of the women have been placed in private lets in London for a year – which means that they’ll very likely have housing problems again when that year is up. Others are still living in the Focus E15 hostel with their babies. More on that soon. The group had trouble pinning Wales down for a chat to start, as you’ll see. When he did speak to them, he said that their argument should be with government, not with the council. That didn’t go down too well. People want councillors to join their campaigns, not tell them to take their campaigns elsewhere. The mothers asked why boarded-up flats at the Carpenters Estate couldn’t be opened for social housing and if homes in the borough’s post-Olympic residential builds would be earmarked as social housing…Wales was a little vague on that, as you’ll see in the video:
The Carpenters estate was to be demolished as part of a Newham Council/UCL plan to build a £1bn campus a couple of years ago. Campaigners managed to stop that plan for the time being and to keep their estate and homes in Newham – they wanted the estate to be refurbished and retained as social housing. At least a year on, flats on the estate remain boarded up and unused. This is certainly a sore point with residents and with people who are on the council’s housing waiting list (there are about 24,000 people on that waiting list). The council’s allocation policy prioritises people who are in work over people who are not in work, too.
In this next video, I asked Wales why he attended a recent property investors’ fair in Cannes and what he did there. There has been a great deal of anger about councillors’ attendance at that fair, as you’ll read in this Guardian story:
“Protesters accuse local authorities at week-long MIPIM of being ‘in pockets of investors’ and ‘selling off’ Britain’s cities…Every year, for a week in March, this stretch of the French riviera is transformed into a global property trading zone, a souped-up real estate supermarket, where whole swathes of cities are put up for sale to the highest bidder.
“This year saw more than 20 UK local authorities taking part, the biggest presence since the 2008 peak.
“Public sector attendance at MIPIM has long been contentious, with budgets for local authorities’ presence at the fair often stretching up to £500,000. The symbolism of council chiefs on a champagne-soaked jamboree, as swingeing cuts bite back home, has not gone unnoticed, prompting most authorities to find private-sector funding and trumpet visible results from the week of networking.”
I’m always keen to hear Wales trumpet, so I asked Wales what he’d been up to in Cannes. Had to chase him round the corner with the “were you selling Newham?” questions… he wheeled round at that point and answered with an angry No I Wasn’t:
“It’s all paid for by our development partners,” Wales told the Guardian. I find that an even bigger worry if I’m honest. Time for some absolute transparency on all of this – who met with who, when, why, what was discussed, who will be “investing” in what and what sort of money will move between which organisations and people and why – and how the people who turned out to Saturday’s event to try and get their housing problems solved will benefit. I didn’t get a chance to ask about the council’s recent moves to slap Asbos on homeless people in the Stratford centre, or where homeless mothers and babies will go when the Focus E15 mother and baby unit closes down, which the East Thames Housing Association has confirmed it will.
The Focus E15 mothers will be at next Saturday’s 1000 mothers march for justice: 11am Saturday 29 March. Assemble at Bruce Castle Park, Lordship Lane, N17 8NU.
More soon – post will be updated.
