The officer gives this story as another example of the shambles in council homelessness departments in austerity. Staff shortages, extreme caseloads and a mass of application forms and paperwork created by personal housing plans mean that officers in under-resourced housing offices can too easily lose the thread.
The officer talks about a recent case where a Greater London council threatened to find a woman intentionally homeless. The council made this threat even though the council itself was completely responsible for the woman’s homelessness. The council denied the woman housing benefit for 12 months, because it failed to keep proper track of the woman’s supporting paperwork and evidence. She was ultimately evicted for rent arrears. Brilliant.
The officer was responsible for reviewing the woman’s case.
The woman worked as a cleaner. The officer said that she “worked all hours,” to make ends meet. She still didn’t earn much. She claimed housing benefit to help pay her rent.
Just over a year ago, the woman changed jobs. She let her council know about this change.
That’s when the problems began.
For reasons that the woman never understood, the council shut down her housing benefit claim completely. The council wouldn’t restart her claim, or even set up a new one quickly. Continue reading →
Here’s a scenario that I’ve seen several times now: a woman facing homelessness after losing her kids in a custody battle that she couldn’t afford to fight.
One of the women I’ve written about several times for this blog has been in touch to say that she is facing eviction and homelessness. She has serious rent arrears – thousands of pounds. She has an eviction notice and will be thrown out her flat.
This woman is facing street homelessness. The arrears and eviction likely mean that her council won’t help her find housing. They’ll decide that she’s responsible for her eviction – that she’s made herself intentionally homeless.
Except that things aren’t quite that simple. They rarely are.
This woman is in arrears for two reasons:
The first is the benefit cap. The arrears began when the benefit cap was applied. The woman lost over half of her housing benefit entitlement literally overnight. There was no way she could make up this sudden loss of rent money.
The second reason is that the woman recently lost custody of her children. This was brutal. I can’t give much detail here, but I’ve seen this scenario several times.
The woman’s relationship with her ex-partner ended acrimoniously. Her much-better-resourced ex lawyered up and went to court for the kids. The character assassination this woman endured during this case was nasty.
So was the woman’s isolation. She had no money and no lawyer for most of the time (she scraped together a bit of money for advice early on, but couldn’t keep that going on any level. She didn’t have any money). This woman was one of the thousands of people who are now forced to represent themselves in bitter, convoluted and drawn-out custody fights. Even getting basic advice about entitlements and rights was impossible. She never had a chance.
So – the rent arrears. Already in debt, the woman stopped receiving housing benefit (Universal Credit in her case) for the bedrooms that her children had occupied. She couldn’t meet rent payments at all. The thing is completely out of hand.
She’ll be evicted soon.
God knows what happens after that. I guess that at best, she’ll find a crappy studio flat somewhere – if she can scrape together money for a deposit and rent, and find a landlord who accepts Universal Credit claimants who’ve been evicted for serious rent arrears. At worst, she’ll be street homeless. She’ll have no chance of getting her kids back without a place for them to stay.
Any constructive suggestions on this situation are welcome. I’ve interviewed three women in the same situation in recent times. There must be a way of getting legal representation and housing for people.
Marsha and her daughter in the one room in their hostel
In the transcript below, Marsha talks at length about the invasive attention that she has drawn from council social services and her daughter’s school as a homeless single mother.
Social services and her daughter’s school have been on Marsha’s case for a while. They order Marsha to bring her daughter to same-day meetings with social workers, or ring to say she must get to her daughter’s school right away.
There’s not always been time for Marsha to arrange for someone to accompany her to these meetings. That’s a big concern. Marsha has been questioned in detail by authorities about her mental and emotional health, and her daughter’s mental and emotional health. She’s been put on the spot by people she does not know in a system that she can’t trust – often without witnesses, or representation. Women I speak with raise this issue all the time.
The thing is – Marsha IS worried about her daughter’s mental and emotional health, and her own. Bad living conditions and relentless questioning from social services and schools inevitably affect a family’s frame of mind.
Marsha has severe depression and anxiety. She often says that she is concerned her small daughter is being negatively affected by their cramped living space and the social services meddling that the little girl has witnessed. You’d be dreaming if you thought that a child would not be affected by those things.
In the transcript below, Marsha says:
“All of a sudden, [my daughter] is seeing me in a very distressed state, because of everything that I’m going through. These people around here – she is exposed to conversations [which she shouldn’t be]…”
The problem is that Marsha must justify her family’s responses to their living conditions to organisations that hold all the cards.
Marsha is in a situation that a lot of homeless single mothers talk about. She’s been placed in poor housing by public authorities [her council]. Then, she’s been made to answer to public authorities as her family’s health has disintegrated because of the poor housing that the family has been placed in and the lack of decent alternatives. There’s no way to win. Marsha has no power in this scene.
Marsha says she understands that authorities have safeguarding roles – but that doesn’t mean that they’re above cornering women. Most single mothers in poor housing I talk with worry constantly about councils taking their children. That means they’re always on the back foot. There can be no balance in conversations that they have with authorities because of it.
Says Marsha in the transcript:
“…it was totally out of order how the council referred me to social services without even telling me [and insisted that Marsha brought her daughter to a social services meeting]. I even said, “I don’t even know why [my daughter] is there [at the meeting].” [The social worker] said, “No, we just want to see if there is any concerns.”
“….I still complied, because I’m thinking the last thing that I want to do is jeopardise myself. So, if [the social worker is] saying that she wants to see me and my daughter, of course I am going to see her [the social worker] … [but] I would never had let [my daughter] sit through these conversations [if I’d known how they would affect her]. If I could have called my mother and say, “could you hold [my daughter] for two hours while I have a conversation with this lady [social worker]…”
Women should not be forced to retreat and retreat like this. Continue reading →
Marsha is living in temporary accommodation in a one-room hostel with her little daughter. The two have lived in this cramped space together more than two years.
Marsha has severe depression and anxiety. She sometimes cries when we talk. She is stuck in dreadful poverty in a way that she fears is permanent: “They [Newham Council] will put me in housing (out of London, away from jobs, training and free childcare with family) and I will be on benefits for the rest of my life.”
Marsha gets no respite from a public sector that should be in place to help. Marsha is being crushed by that sector. The public sector has no resources and no patience, imagination, or humanity as a result. That’s austerity.
On her own, Marsha can’t get housing in Newham near family who could look after her daughter while Marsha studies to qualify for the jobs that will get her off Universal Credit.
Marsha relies completely on her mother to look after her daughter and for much-needed emotional support. If Marsha is housed miles away from her mother as the council has historically insisted she must be, she’ll be isolated on benefits and in debilitating depression forever. The facts are also that job and training opportunities are much better in London than they are in the places that councils suggest people live.
This is why homeless families fight so hard to stay in the city. It’s not because homeless families can’t stand the thought of living in towns that don’t have a Harrods. It’s because employment and training opportunities in smaller towns can be hard to come by.
People also worry about racism in other towns, just by the way. We live in febrile times on that score.
Meanwhile – social services and her daughter’s school are constantly on Marsha’s case in a threatening way. They demand that Marsha and her daughter attend same-day meetings to discuss her daughter’s mental and emotional health – health that is inevitably deteriorating because of the conditions that Marsha and her daughter are kept in. Like so many people I speak with, Marsha worries that the mental and emotional health problems that are caused by the family’s living conditions will lead to her daughter being removed.
Meanwhile again, Marsha’s jobcentre adviser has sanctioned Marsha for attending college – rather than sending off the hundreds of never-answered applications for minimum-wage jobs that the DWP demands.
I talk to too many women with children who are held in poverty in this three-way clamp housing, social services and DWP all keeping single mothers in their place.
On the housing front:
I think that Newham council is stringing Marsha along when it comes to promises of better (ie fit for human habitation) housing. Such promises are as cruel and dangerous as they are empty – particularly when you are dealing with people who live in hellholes and have very serious depression.
A couple of months ago, officers showed Marsha a pigsty in Woolwich and told her to live in it, or else (the “or else” being that the council would give Marsha no more “help” if she didn’t shut up and take the flat).
Later on, under pressure, the council apologised to Marsha for treating her in this way.
Councillors said that they would find Marsha and her daughter a better home – ie, something human beings could just about live in. They even said they’d located such place.
That was months ago. Absolutely nothing happened after that. You started to wonder if this better home existed at all.
The council told Marsha that she couldn’t move in, because it was fixing the flat. I can’t imagine what sort of fixing this has involved. It’s been months.
And maybe Marsha was right to wonder if this promised flat was real. Certainly, the promise of it wasn’t. Marsha just told me that the council has rung to say that the flat is off the menu. The council says it has another flat in mind. Marsha was crying when she said that she doubted this. She said she was thinking of giving up – of leaving the homelessness hostel and bunking down wherever she could. This – from someone with very bad depression and anxiety.
You can see why homeless families in Marsha’s situation beg councils for social housing and secure tenancies. It’s not just that private tenancies are notoriously expensive and insecure, and that you’re likely to be facing eviction and homelessness again in a matter of months. It’s that councils can’t keep a grip when they’re farming people out to these places.
I could go on and I will in another post. I have more to post on the non-stop interference that Marsha and women in her situation get from social services.
For now though – Newham council needs to sort this out. Destabilising people with depression in this way is disgusting and dangerous. I’d ask Newham council for comment on this, except that I’ve been blacklisted. I will still ask councillors directly, though. The hell with it.
Transcribing a lot of interviews atm which takes me a long time. Should be back with posting soon.
A couple of things to think on:
I have an interview that I’m working on with a housing officer. This officer said that the council they worked for was placing more and more people in Travelodges for emergency accommodation. It isn’t news that homeless families are placed in Travelodges, but it did make me wonder how much hotel chains collect these days in housing benefit/Universal Credit and if hotel chains built or set up new hotels to cash in.
this officer said that there was concern in some council officers about councillors responding in a knee-jerk way to bad publicity about housing. If a homeless family received publicity about their housing problems, some councillors would tell staff to prioritise that case and to find the family decent local housing. If a homeless family didn’t have publicity and/or a lawyer, they wouldn’t get any such treatment and would languish for years in emergency or temporary accommodation – if they were lucky to get even that far. Backlogs of such cases piled up on officers’ desks. Variations on this theme have long been the case, of course. It was just that officers were getting mightily pissed off about it. In times of extreme housing crisis, systems that are supposed to be in place go to pieces.
Back to homelessness in East London – where Newham council tells Maya and Rakib, a homeless couple with two very young children, that a flat with smashed and broken storage sheds and no floor coverings, or stove, or furniture is perfectly adequate for (the likes of) them.
The couple is homeless. That means they have no rights and no voice. They must live wherever authorities tell them to live. They must be grateful. They must understand that they’re at the bottom of the pile – and that’s how everyone else sees things.
Truly, homeless people are disenfranchised.
Says Maya:
“The council officer said they often rent flats out as shells and that was okay.”
This is important. It shows where the official mindset is at.
Windowsills in the flat
We’ve reached a point (we’ve been at it for a long while) where officers and politicians genuinely believe that it IS okay to shove homeless families into shells and hovels – and that homeless people who are offered a shell, or a hovel, don’t know they’re born.
I think that a lot of officials genuinely believe this. After years of austerity, this institutional contempt is rife.
“At least you’re inside,” the argument goes. In the bureaucratic mind, sleeping on an uncovered floor under a roof is better than sleeping on a park bench – because that’s the choice. That’s where the line is now. We’re all meant to accept it. Homeless people no right to expect the basics, let alone a healthy environment, or anything so romantic as comfort.
Homeless people who hope for the basics are felt to have a scandalous sense of entitlement.
I wrote about 67-year-old Paul in Oldham, who was told by officers at First Choice Homes that the filthy, tiny and rotting static caravan that he lived in counted as adequate housing and he’d make himself intentionally homeless if he left it. I attended a meeting with him where an officer actually said that.
Paul in his caravan
I wrote about Marsha who was shown a place in Woolwich with stained mattresses, a broken, filthy oven and broken doorframes. She was told to accept the place, or else.
Oven at the flat Marsha was shown
Homeless people must accept all of this, or risk a council discharging its duty to them – that is, refusing to help them any further.
Their “choices” come down to – “do you want to live inside, or outside?” and “live in this hovel, or else.” Continue reading →
Regular readers will know that I recently published a story about the letter on this page – a letter that threatened a Newham hostel resident with homelessness if she didn’t attend a meeting.
Lukia, the woman who received the letter, has serious mental health issues.
She’s recently been in the care of a mental health unit.
The note said that Lukia would be thrown off the council homelessness list and evicted from her hostel room if she didn’t attend a meeting that day.
Needless to say, Lukia found this note upsetting in the extreme.
When I first posted the letter, some readers here and on facebook felt that it couldn’t be genuine – that staff couldn’t have issued such a rough note on an unheaded piece of paper in such unprofessional way.
I understood that. Nobody wants to think that council and hostel staff professionalism have collapsed to such a point.
Except that professionalism has collapsed – at councils, at the DWP – all over.
In the two recent videos below, Newham mayor Rokhsana Fiaz apologises for that letter. She says that there’s been an investigation into the note and that the person responsible has been sacked.
I’ve heard the same thing on the grapevine, so we’ll go with it for now.
Thing is – what next? – for Newham, for councils generally, for the whole of the public sector?
The political and media classes couldn’t care less that the public sector is actually anarchic a lot of the time. Brexit is their one interest and fatal obsession. You’d be better off asking Santa for housing than putting in a request with that lot.
Politicians like Fiaz do a good line in apologising (google “Rokhsana Fiaz apology” for a look), but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re still overseeing a housing catastrophe. The national housing disaster is going nowhere even faster than Brexit. Sadly, unlike Brexit, it isn’t live-blogged by mainstream press outlets in real time.
The best you can hope for now with local politicians is a kneejerk response that goes in your favour.
I know for a fact how things “work” behind the scenes at certain council offices at the moment, because I’m in contact with officers here and there. Campaigners and welfare advisers bring individual housing cases to the attention of a mayor or a council leader. That mayor or leader rushes down to the housing options team in that council and tells staff to find housing for that individual pronto.
Staff do as they’re told and money is somehow found to meet a local rent (this part always intrigues me), but staff seethe. Some leave. There’s no system as such – just reflex reactions from sensitive politicians. The thing really is lawless – like Brexit, if you will. Sign of the times, I suppose.
If you’re campaigning with people who are homeless, that sensitivity is your main way in. Problem is – not everyone who is homeless knows that, or is in a position to pressure a council.
Update 28 Feb: the council says that it is investigating this situation – to find out how someone living in one of its homelessness hostels came to receive such a letter.
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Original post:
Seriously.
I wrote a fortnight ago about Lukia, a woman with serious mental health difficulties who lives (if “lives” is the word) in a Newham homelessness hostel.
Lukia has previously been in the care of a mental health unit.
She is battling Newham council for permanent housing.
Lukia came home last week to find this note under her door:
The note says:
“You are request [sic] to come into the office in Victoria Street today by 3pm. Failure to do so will lead to you being removed from the homelessness list and you will be asked to leave your home.”
I post this to show you again the way that people with no clout are addressed by authorities.
Every contact is a threat.
People aren’t invited to meetings with council or hostel staff. They’re told to attend, or else.
The “or else” part can be the threat of being thrown off the homelessness list and out of a hostel room, as in this case.
It can be the threat of street homelessness and child removal. Whatever form the “or else” takes, these threats are heavy-handed, dangerous and unjustified.
It’s high time that councillors and MPs addressed this. A shortage of housing does not justify a shortage of decency and care.
Lukia, as I’ve written, has a history of serious mental health difficulties and of being placed in temporary accommodation so vile and substandard that she’s been moved out of it.
She feels that permanent accommodation is her only chance at the stability that might lead to an improvement in her health.
Threats of homelessness hardly help people achieve that.
Marsha is living in a homelessness hostel in Newham – in a one-room hellhole which she shares with her six-year-old daughter.
I reported this week that Marsha had written to the council to ask when she and her daughter would be placed in longer-term housing in Newham.
The two have been living in that stifling hostel room together for over a year.
Marsha is desperate for a place in Newham. She is at college. Her daughter is in school. Marsha relies on family for childcare and mental health support. Her mental health is deteriorating, because of her housing problems.
Marsha is being bullied by the council.
Like so many homeless mothers I and others speak with, Marsha fears that children’s services will remove her daughter if she pushes her case.
Certainly, social services have Marsha in their sights. When Marsha wrote to the council about her housing last week, she was suddenly dragged to two meetings with social services. She and her daughter – who is only six – were grilled about their health and wellbeing.
Now, there’s more.
After that story appeared and I emailed the mayor, Marsha got a call from housing options yesterday.
She was told that the council had one private-rented flat in Woolwich that she had to look at and accept. She was told that if she didn’t accept the flat, she’d be out on the streets. End of story.
That’s the way homeless people are spoken to.
Oven at the flat Marsha was shown
The flat was disgusting – cracked walls, filthy oven, broken locks, stained and squalid mattresses and grimy sinks and walls. I’ve posted photos through this article.
The agent who show Marsha the place said that he wouldn’t house his family members in it.
Homeless women, of course, are expected to be grateful for such places.
Mattress and bed in the flat Marsha was shown
Marsha called me in a terrible state. She has a choice: she can take her six-year-old child to live in this pigsty, or she can live on the side of the road. That’s not much of a choice in my book.
Marsha has become more and more distressed as this has gone on.
The bullying, the threats from and of social services and the upset and rotten housing that she must expose her child to are taking an obvious toll.
I’ve asked the mayor for a response to this. This is council aggression and bullying, pure and simple. The mayor better come back to me soon.
Broken walls and doors in the flat
I’ll tell you this – homeless women I’m speaking with say that they are inevitably treated like this – “do what you’re told and live in whatever hovel we send you to, and be grateful.”
It’s bad enough to know that your mental health is deteriorating because of this and because your kids are exposed to filthy living conditions and your distress.
It’s very bad to know that social services is watching you as that happens.
Readers of this site will know that I’ve recently been interviewing Marsha, a homeless 30-year-old Newham woman who lives with her six-year-old daughter in a single room in a Newham homelessness hostel.
The two have been stuck in this temporary accommodation for over a year.
Marsha and her daughter in their one-room temporary homelessness hostel accommodation
In the last article, Marsha talked about a concern that many homeless mothers raise. Mothers worry that council social services will try to remove their children because they are homeless. Doesn’t matter what the council can, or can’t, actually do. The threat hangs in the air and that is enough. I’ve written about this before.
In that recent article, Marsha said that Newham social services said they could take her daughter and place the child in care while Marsha “sorted herself out”:
“Social services is telling me – “oh, we can provide a home for your daughter, but not for you.”
“So I am scared.”
There’s been more since then.
On Tuesday morning, Marsha sent an email to her housing officer (Marsha copied me in). She asked for an update on her housing situation and whether she and her child could be moved to a better place than the awful hostel that they’re stuck in.
Marsha is in the dreadful limbo that so many women in poverty are.
She’s facing eviction from the homelessness hostel she’s in.
She’s studying at a local college to try and improve her chances of work and better-paid work.
She doesn’t want to have to move to a flat miles away in Tilbury (which is where the council wants her to go), because Marsha relies on her mother for mental health support and childcare while she studies. If Marsha loses that support, she’ll sink.
Marsha has no-one else to help with childcare while she studies. The jobcentre certainly won’t. Her adviser already threatened to sanction her Universal Credit for spending some of her time studying rather than all of her time looking for work.
So, Marsha sent that email to the council asking about her application for better housing. There’d been earlier emails, too, as well as the stories posted here.
Enter social services.
The next thing Marsha knew was that social services was all over her – and asking questions about her daughter’s health and wellbeing.
Marsha said she felt extremely threatened by this. A woman asks a council questions about her housing application – and suddenly, social services is on the phone demanding meetings and firing off all sorts of questions about the woman and her child’s welfare.
You have to wonder.
Marsha says that first, she was contacted by someone from the local multi-agency safeguarding hub – one of the hubs set up to track children who could be “vulnerable”:
“I literally had to explain myself and my housing situation all over again. He [the MASH officer] was really like getting a bit personal… asking me questions about my doctor, my daughter, my wellbeing, [the] school that she [my daughter] attends, her attendance… just a lot of personal stuff…”
So, there was that.
Then on Thursday last week, Marsha got a call from Newham children’s services, demanding that she attend an appointment with them that very afternoon:
“Another lady called from the social services…she said to me that she’s been given instructions from her manager to call me to arrange a meeting with herself.
I said, “what is it in regards to, because I just spoke to somebody else in the department within the social services and they are saying something different to me…”
“[She said] that she has to do an assessment with me and my daughter to do with my housing issues, and I have to come and see her and I should bring my daughter…
“I said to her – “I’m in college until 4.15pm. Then, I have to pick up my daughter.”
“She was like, “this is important and you have to come and see me. You kind of just have to find time, basically.”
“So I said to her, “okay, well, I’ll grab my daughter from school early and I’ll come and see you.”
“I was really uncomfortable…”
At the meeting, the social worker questioned Marsha and her daughter about Marsha and the child’s wellbeing:
“It is… the stuff they were asking me, Kate, had nothing to do with my housing situation. They were asking my daughter if she sleeps well, how does she play, who helps her with her homework… It’s not relevant.
“It’s almost like I’m being investigated… do you know what I mean… everyone knows that my issues is strictly around housing. I feel so uncomfortable.”
“I feel like the council is just trying to use tactics to force me into a situation…I feel like I’m being punished. I’m trying to get my voice heard and I’m speaking to people and I’m raising issues. I feel like it’s a tactical to make me go away – like they are thinking, “let’s get social services to call around.”
Marsha said the social worker told her that Marsha and her daughter would soon be evicted from their temporary accommodation. Marsha and her young daughter are facing street homelessness.
That was the first Marsha had heard about her impending eviction.
She said that the social worker was shocked to hear that the council’s housing team hadn’t told Marsha that eviction was nearing.
The bed Marsha shares with her daughter
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You see my point.
I talk to too many homeless mothers now who say they feel ever-threatened by social services.
They don’t know if councils can take their kids, but Can or Can’t is beside the point. The point is that the spectre of social services is raised at the drop of a hat. An implied threat is plenty good enough to shut homeless people up.
People worry about challenging a council offer of housing, or complaining about the dreadful state of temporary housing, or drawing attention to themselves by asking a council any questions about housing at all. I wonder how many homeless people are disenfranchised – bullied into silence – in this way.
Said Marsha:
“It’s the normal thing that I’ve been experiencing with council, with social services – bullying, threatening, saying that you have to do this now and you don’t have an option…she [the social worker] sat down yesterday and she said, “as you know there is no affordable housing, affordable properties [in Newham]… it’s just been like 18 months of ongoing like turmoil with them.”
Indeed.
I have more on this which I will publish this week.
The Newham council press office has blacklisted me and so won’t give a comment, but too bad for them. I’ll be emailing the mayor and the head of housing with this article and asking the council what the hell it is doing.
