Category Archives: Council

Council service cuts stories

Mental health problems – but benefits sanctioned. In hospital with asthma – but benefits sanctioned. No money – but benefits sanctioned. ENOUGH.

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On benefit sanctions:

Leafleting on Friday at Stockport jobcentre with Stockport United Against Austerity, I spoke at length with two (more) people who have been left destitute this year by benefit sanctions.

Craig was in his 20s. Anne was 50 (I’ve changed both names).

Craig was a Universal Credit claimant. Anne received jobseekers’ allowance.

Craig said he’d been sanctioned twice this year. His current sanction would run into June. He said he was getting about £30 a week to live on.

Anne was trying to survive on hardship payments of £40 a week. Her sanction was from March until June.

Both Craig and Anne had appealed their sanctions. Both had lost their appeals.

This Just. Never. Ends.

It’s still all too easy to find people in these situations – people who are forced to live on the edge because their benefits have been sanctioned. They can barely afford food. They certainly can’t afford to heat their homes adequately.

These are human rights issues. So is the fact that inflicting such hardship on people who are out of work and money is widely considered acceptable and even desirable. The world needs to wake up to that abuse.

Sanctions achieve nothing. They don’t address the real issues – the lack of work (especially for people who are disabled, or older), the failure of support (particularly for people with mental health issues and/or support needs) and the malaise that inevitably defines an outlook when people have been unemployed for a while and know that every single one of the DWP’s compulsory jobsearch activities is a charade.

I can’t make that last point strongly enough.

Attending jobcentres meetings, or pointless work courses, or compulsory websurf session where you must sit at a jobcentre computer and send endless CVs to people you’ll never hear back from – none of these mandatory jobsearch activities go ANYWHERE for so many people. Just about everyone I’ve talked to at Stockport so far has mentioned these aspects of jobsearch.

Every meeting, course, or web session is a slap in the face because of that.

Sanctions as punishment for people who are trapped in this circuit is out of all proportion to the “crimes.”

Stopping people’s already-meagre incomes and pushing them further under the breadline for the minor sins of missing jobcentre meetings, or forgetting sicknotes, or whatever, is the real criminal act.

Still, the state enjoys it. It certainly gives itself free licence.

Like most people I meet in these situations, Craig and Anne relied on friends or family when their money was stopped.

Craig said:

“Basically, I’ve been living off £120 a month since January… [It’s] dreadful. If it weren’t for my mum and dad, I would be…[he shrugged].

Anne said:

“It’s £40 a week [I get in hardship money]. I’m on Pay As You Go [for] gas and electric – ten pound a week on them two. Then you’ve got £30 a week on food… I even had to borrow £4 off her [Anne’s daughter] to get up here about my money [the bus ride to Stockport jobcentre from Anne’s place cost about £4]. I went to the bank on the Wednesday and I thought “Oh No.” I didn’t even have the £4. I had to borrow it off her. Don’t like asking, but what can I do.”

Continue reading →

Behind the scenes with frontline service users in austerity: excerpts from interviews and covert videos and recordings

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The post below – Linda’s story – is an excerpt from a story in a collection project I’m working on.

The project collects interviews I’ve made with people directly affected by benefit cuts.

It also collects covert recordings I made from 2014 when I accompanied people to jobcentre meetings, ESA and PIP assessments, and council homelessness meetings.

My aim is to show you how benefit and service cuts have ravaged the lives of people who’ve been among the most marginalised by welfare reform and austerity.

The videos and transcripts from the meetings that I recorded between people in need and frontline staff demonstrate how utterly dysfunctional frontline services have become.

The project also shows how people respond personally and politically to a brutal austerity state.

I’ll post more extracts from this project as I work on it this year.

This collection of interviews and transcripts is being made possible thanks to a Barry Amiel & Norman Melburn Trust grant. 

Amiel_Melburn_logo

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The rest of this post is an extract from a story about a Kilburn woman I call Linda.

I met Linda and her partner Eddie (name also changed) in 2014.

Linda and Eddie were in their 50s.

Both had learning and literacy difficulties, and worsening health problems.

Both received jobseekers’ allowance. I recorded their jobcentre meetings for about three years. They attended Kilburn jobcentre when we met.

The post focuses on a particularly difficult experience that Linda had at Kilburn jobcentre at the start of 2016: Kilburn jobcentre erroneously closed Linda’s JSA claim when she was ill and missed two signon meetings.

She was left without income or rent money for months.

The video and transcripts in this post show:

– the problems that people with learning difficulties had meeting the DWP’s strict signon criteria and the excessive punishments people faced if they did not meet DWP demands.

– jobcentre advisers admitting that people in Linda’s situation were vulnerable to sanctions and claim closures, because the DWP had removed the specialist disability staff who might have intervened when people with support needs were threatened with sanctions. Disability Employment Advisers were removed from jobcentres as part of austerity cost-cutting at that time.

– Linda’s distress at her illness and at not being able to to find a jobcentre staff member to help her restart her claim

– the DWP’s general institutional contempt for people who relied on benefits.

————-

Let’s go in at the deep end.

This article starts with a description of that devastating time for Linda: the months in late 2015 and early 2016 when Kilburn jobcentre closed her JSA claim and left her without income or rent money.

Video: Linda at Kilburn jobcentre on February 26 2016.

I called Linda in Feburary 2016, because I hadn’t seen her for a while.

Linda told me she hadn’t received any money for weeks, because the jobcentre had terminated her JSA claim.

Jobcentre advisers said they’d closed Linda’s claim, because Linda had missed two JSA signon meetings.

Linda said she’d missed the meetings because she’d been too ill to attend (she found out later that she had thrombosis). She told me that she was still very unwell and couldn’t walk far.

Closing Linda’s claim was an obscene decision by any measure.

The jobcentre knew Linda well. Advisers knew her story. Linda had signed on at Kilburn for more than seven years. Hers was a familiar face at the jobcentre.

Advisers knew that she had learning difficulties and was in poor health. They knew Linda relied on her JSA. They knew that her age, learning difficulties and deteriorating health meant she wouldn’t find work – that she hadn’t suddenly stopped attending JSA signon meetings because she’d found a job.

They also knew that Linda would only miss a meeting at the jobcentre if she had good reason. Linda often said she hated the jobcentre, but she attended her appointments there religiously – possibly because the jobcentre was a place she knew and could go to.

Advisers knew all of this, but still they closed Linda’s JSA claim. Such were and are the times. Advisers told us that the rules said two strikes (two missed meetings) and you were out (your claim would be closed). Some staff were sticklers for the rules.

Finding someone at the jobcentre to take responsibility for restarting Linda’s JSA claim was a nightmare. Continue reading →

Council officers told off by managers for deciding that homeless people should be helped. Wtf is going on here.

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I’m back, so here we go:

As readers of this site will know, I’ve been publishing interviews in which a council homelessness officer talks about working on the homelessness frontline as the housing crisis deepens (there are links to earlier articles at the end of this post).

This officer has worked in housing offices across London and Greater London councils for nearly 20 years (the officer still works in council homelessness and housing offices in the same areas).

Sometimes, this officer has worked as a council review officer.

Review officers re-examine council decisions that homeless people want to challenge. Review officers can overturn a council’s original decision not to help a homeless person with housing if that officer decides the original decision was wrong.

Problem is – this officer has come under pressure from senior council management NOT to overturn original council decisions when those original decisions found against a homelessness person’s entitlement or priority for housing assistance.

The officer says that this happened not long ago at one London council.

At this council, the officer overturned the council’s original decision not to give an older homeless person and a disabled homeless person priority for housing help.

A so-called medical adviser from the private sector who “advises” councils on such things (more on this external-medical-advice-for-council-homelessness-officers racket soon) had come up with assessments which were taken to mean that the two homeless people shouldn’t be given priority for help on medical grounds.

The officer disagreed.

Events took an outrageous turn after that.

The officer was told off by management for overturning those two decisions – for deciding that the council must give those two homeless people priority.

The officer reports being called into a meeting with management and asked to justify overturning these decisions not to give those homeless people priority.

Senior management was displeased to find that review officers were overturning council homelessness decisions – even though overturning council decisions after reviewing legislation and a homelessness person’s application was a key part of a review officer’s job.

The officer was very unhappy about this. The officer says, “it was like getting a formal warning” for saying the council should help homeless people that it wanted to disregard.

The officer felt that the whole incident was a worrying development – senior management hauling reviews officers over the coals for overturning decisions that reviews officers should overturn.

More than that – the officer was asked to liaise with the council’s housing options team in future if the officer decided to overturn any more council homelessness decisions.

This was an extraordinary instruction.

Review officers are supposed to work separately from the housing officers whose original decisions are being reviewed. They might ask the original officer for more information about a case and decision – but not for permission to overturn it.

The whole idea is that a homeless person’s application goes to a different officer if the homeless person wants to challenge the council’s original decision not to help.

The team that made the original decision should NOT be given the chance to lean on a review officer who is considering overturning the housing team’s decision. Certainly, a review officer should not have to ask the original decisionmaking team if that team is okay with somebody overturning a rotten decision that team made.

Said the officer:

“The manager [who came to see me] had these files in his hand.

He said, “let’s have a chat.” I said, “Okay.”

They [the files] were some non-priority decisions. I had overturned them. Continue reading →

Let me tell you how useless councils are at answering questions about homelessness, intentional homelessness and threats to separate families. I give you Barking and Dagenham…

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I post this article as an example of torture by council.

I want to show those who don’t generally have the pleasure how evasive and uhelpful councils are when approached for information on topics such as homelessness and intentional homelessness. They drag non-answers and the silent treatment out FOREVER.

It’s a miracle I haven’t kicked in a town hall door yet.

With that in mind, let’s go to Barking and Dagenham:

As readers of this site will know, I’ve written recently about a woman who was evicted from her Barking and Dagenham flat last year. She had rent arrears of several thousand pounds.

She has three children under 12.

The woman says her housing benefit stopped and rent arrears grew, because she had trouble registering a JSA application.

She, the council and I have spent ages arguing about whose “fault” this was. Fact is it hardly matters. Pretty much EVERYONE I talk to these days is in serious rent arrears. That’s the part that matters – the fact that so many people have housing, rent and eviction problems. I’ve got an inbox full of emails from people who can’t afford housing, or who’ve crashed into debt and conflict when rent problems have arisen. I inevitably find that a council’s primary concern is to make sure that it is not blamed for such problems. A council’s main aim is to rush to prove that the fault is entirely the tenant’s. I’m sick of this. Why even bother to sift through a small corner of the wreckage at this point in the national housing disaster? Council fingerpointing doesn’t solve the core issues (I get to these core issues as i see them later in this post).

By the time the woman in the story and I talked in January, the family had serious problems.

The woman and her kids were homeless. They were sofa-surfing between her mother’s flat (which itself was temporary accommodation) and a friend’s place. Eight people were living in the mother’s temporary accommodation when I visited in February. The eight people shared one toilet and one bathroom. Two of the kids slept on airbeds in their grandmother’s room. The third child slept on a rollout mattress on the floor in another room with two adults. The kids commuted to Barking and Dagenham to school. I need hardly mention the effect that these arrangements will ultimately have on the kids’ schooling and life chances, etc.

There was more.

In a letter to Barking MP Margaret Hodge, the council said it would likely decide that this woman had made herself intentionally homeless.

The council also said that if it found the woman intentionally homeless, it wouldn’t house her. It would, however, refer the kids to Children’s Services (you can see that paragraph here). The woman took this to mean that Children’s Services might separate her from her children. Everyone who reads such sentences thinks that. Needless to say, this sort of text makes people even more reluctant to contact a council to discuss housing problems. A threat of referral to Children’s Services works as a form of gatekeeping. It is disgusting. I see it time and time again these days. Councils insist they’ve tried to contact people to help sort problems out. They also send letters which guarantee people will do anything BUT get in touch.

Which brings me to the core reasons for rent arrears which I mentioned above.

I find there are two main reasons why so many people end up with serious rent arrears. Both need addressing on a national scale.

The first is very simple. People don’t have enough money. They can’t afford rent, LHA shortfalls and/or rent arrears. They don’t have £2000 (or £200 for that matter) to throw at problems such as stopped, delayed, or sanctioned benefits, or to bridge gaps while benefit problems are fixed. They’re already in debt to the public sector for council tax arrears, court fines and DWP loans. God knows I’ve written about that. Let’s not forget either that benefit problems can take MONTHS to fix, because DWP and council bureaucracies are so often outrageously dysfunctional. Arrears grow and grow as problems drift. Continue reading →

Putting disabled people in flats with totally inaccessible upstairs toilets, giving pregnant women airbeds because there’s no furniture: more from the housing frontline

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This is the fourth article in my series with a frontline council homelessness and housing officer who has worked in housing offices across London and Greater London for 15 years.

There’s a full transcript from this interview at the end of this post.

In this article, the officer explains how basic human dignity and any notion of safety or comfort have gone by the wayside for homeless people in austerity.

The erosion of these basics speaks volumes about society’s real opinions of people in homelessness and hardship. We do better by our dogs.

The officer says that at one council recently, pregnant and sick and disabled homeless people (one person just had major renal surgery) were given cheap airbeds (which didn’t always inflate) to sleep on in temporary accommodation, because there were no proper beds.

There was nothing in the way of furniture at all in these places. Giving homeless people an airbed to take to the accommodation had just become par for the course. Cheap airbeds which often broke were considered good enough, even for people who had trouble moving around and standing up:

“Some woman who was like seven months’ pregnant. You know – she was enormous, because she had this huge big baby in her belly. She was given an airbed to pump up… There was some old guy who’d had an operation. I can’t remember what the operation was – I think it was a kidney operation…? or something like that. He’s given this airbed to pump up.”

The officer also talks about a disabled person being placed in temporary accommodation in a split-level flat in London where the toilet was upstairs and couldn’t be reached by that person. The disabled person had to use a commode downstairs in the main room before a complaint was made and alternative housing found:

“The bathroom’s upstairs and they [the tenant] are like, “well, how am I supposed to use that? I’m in a wheelchair…. [I suppose] they’re [the council is] like, “well, you know, get a commode… shit in a carrier bag…”

So it goes these days, the officer says. Councils place homeless people in any accommodation that serves the two basic purposes of housing people in immediate need and getting them out of the office fast:

“It is just the fact every council is scraping the bottom of barrel a lot of the time for TA [temporary accommodation]. I think a lot of the time, they [councils] just put people in shit and just hope they don’t complain. If they do complain – okay, we’ll do something about it…but we will wait until they do that [complain].”

The officer says the airbeds situation came about because the council rented blocks of empty flats from landlords who bought flats to let out for as much money as they could get – but spent nothing on making the flats habitable.

The officer says that in the past, when there was more money around, councils would put in place programmes to make sure temporary accommodation was furnished:

“The council might say, “give us a ten-year lease on these and we will put some furniture in them, or something,”

but in austerity:

“Now, it’s just money-saving – like, “fuck it – we’ll just take it as it is and give somebody an airbed…These were really cheap airbeds, so you would get people coming back the next day saying, “this airbed didn’t even…it’s got a puncture, or the pump don’t work.” So, they spent last night sleeping on some half-inflated airbed.”

Continue reading →

Intentionally homeless with kids? Council will house the kids but not you – ie, you’ll be separated from them. The hell with this.

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This does my head in. It should do yours in as well.

I spent an hour this morning interviewing a young woman who has three kids under the age of 12.

She was evicted from her flat at the end of last year for rent arrears. I have a letter from her council to her MP which says the council is likely to find her intentionally homeless, because of those arrears.

The young woman believes that the council has found her intentionally homeless. She has no fixed address, so she isn’t sure where any post advising her of her situation is going, or if it is being posted at all.

She’s sofa-surfing with her three kids at the moment – sometimes at a friend’s place and sometimes at her mother’s place. Her mother is in temporary accommodation herself and has eight family members in the flat with her. Two of the school-aged kids are sleeping on airbeds with their grandmother in the grandmother’s room. The older child sleeps on the floor in a room with two others.

At the end of that letter is this sentence:

“If [name removed] is found intentionally homeless, then the Housing Options team will not assist her into alternative housing and will only give her advice and support to find her own accommodation. A referral will, however, be made to Children’s Services in respect of the welfare of the children”:

In other words, people who are found intentionally homeless risk having their children removed, or, at least, having their children housed away from them. What a threat that is – and to so many people. So many people are evicted for rent arrears these days. So many women tell me that they are terrified that the council will remove their kids if they can’t find decent – or any – housing for them. Getting evicted and finding yourself without a roof is bad enough. Now, homeless people believe they risk losing their kids if they return to to their council to challenge an intentional homelessness decision, or if they approach a council for further housing help.

This shit has to stop. Councils cannot be permitted to threaten women with the loss of their children, just because those women are poor.

This situation is untenable. Let’s have some #metoo outrage about it. Imagine the headlines and fury if some council tried that that sort of threat on with a middle class family, or – gasp – a celeb.

“We’ll come after your kids.” I think not.

Image: the two airbeds on either side of the grandmother’s bed:

Forget #metoo celebs for 5 mins. Where’s the wall-to-wall mainstream outrage and coverage about the violence the austerity state visits on women?

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Am pissed off this morning. Here are my perceptions of celeb domination of #metoo and mainstream obsession with celeb suffering as a priority:

I just finished a phone call with a woman who has three young kids and is homeless. They’re all homeless. She and the kids sofa-surf at a friend of the woman’s some nights and some nights with the woman’s mother in her mum’s flat.

The woman was made intentionally homeless by her council for rent arrears – arrears the woman said she didn’t realise were building up, because her housing benefit, which was paid straight to her landlord, suddenly stopped last year. Her housing benefit was stopped, because there was a problem processing a JSA claim she’d made.

She was accused of “getting money from somewhere else.”

Just about every woman I talk to in these situations is accused of “getting money from somewhere else” – which, for so many women I speak to, often means accused of living with an ex, or sleeping with some bloke who pays, or your choice of variations on that charming theme.

This side of things is remarkable, now that I think about it. I’m actually sitting here as we speak thinking about all the women I’ve written about over the years who’ve received housing benefit, or other kinds of state support. It occurs to me that nearly all of these women were accused by a council or the DWP at one point or another of cheating the state by generating extra cash for extra goodies via a man – ie, living with an ex, or with new bloke, or with some bloke nobody had even heard of.

That should tell you all you need to know about the state’s real view of women. We’re all cheating liars who’ll suck anything for an extra fiver for drink and fags – and that goes particularly for women who receive housing benefit. No matter that the state accuses people wrongly. No matter either that some women need extra cash in austerity and that people take the options they have with good reason. The realities of real women’s lives in this era doesn’t matter a damn. Women are seen as graspers, whether we need money or not.

Back to the story. The woman I talked to this morning was eventually evicted and found intentionally homeless. The woman says that the council told her that it would house her kids, but not her. The council would find the kids somewhere to go if social services got involved – but not her. The subtext there was pretty clear, to her at least: she’d be separated from her kids if she went down that line. I hear this story again and again and again and again. I hear this story every time I interview a woman who has a housing problem, rent arrears and kids. “You’ll go one way and your kids will go another.” It’s the threat to beat all threats. It never, ever ends.

Which brings me to my main point. Where is the wall-to-wall #metoo mainstream press outrage for women in these situations? Where’s the non-stop support and mainstream press coverage that #metoo celebrities have now had for months on end? Why is a night out or a trip in a cab with a groping celeb or politician now the only sure way to get women’s issues on the mainstream agenda, especially as a viral and ongoing concern? Reading the mainstream press at the moment – even those publications we’re supposed to rate for maturity and depth – feels like spending too much time on rubbish celeb sites. I know this, because I do both.

Where’s the widespread mainstream press and political eagerness to believe and report non-stop women’s stories of abuse and dismissal at the hands of the austerity-enforcing state? I tell you this – I bet a lot of the women I speak to wouldn’t even be believed by the media and political classes at the moment. They’d be called liars and exaggerators. Even in polite liberal circles, there’d be smirking about the choices made by these women and about women who have children in poverty (for all the world as though women always have a choice). Councils and the DWP would say that women had lied about making rent payments and about missing jobcentre meetings and all the rest. They’d be believed – not the women. There’d be snarky remarks about the feckless and irresponsible poor, and the working-class mother’s terrible and destructive sense of entitlement.

Celebrities are admired by the mainstream and generate web traffic. Women who are throttled by the state in austerity are not and do not. I know this. I get this. I can’t accept it.

Council contempt for homeless people, rotten temporary accommodation: why is this acceptable for people who are most in need?

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Article by me at politics.co.uk today.

“You’ve got all the benefit porn on TV,” the officer says. “This whole idea of unemployment and benefit claimants being scroungers and getting the blame for having to bail the bankers out… that is coming into housing as well.”

The officer overturned one intentional homelessness finding made in the case of a woman who left her flat and local area because she’d been raped by a local man that she kept seeing around. She wanted to get away from him and the area they lived in, which was hardly surprising.

“Somebody found her intentionally homeless [for leaving her flat voluntarily],” the officer says. “They [the council officer who made the decision] were like, ‘I overheard her friend say, ‘You’ll come down here and you’ll live near me.’ They [officers] jump on this and say, ‘see – that means that they [the homeless person] tried to leave the place and it [the person’s story] is all contrived’.”

Read the rest here.

 

“If you don’t pay your rent, we’re going to look at every penny you spend and see whether you’re intentionally homeless…” How contempt for homeless people really plays

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This is the third article in a series with a housing officer who talks about the realities of providing housing services at councils in austerity across London and Greater London councils.* There’s a transcript from the interview at the end of this post.

In this article, the officer talks about two issues that should enrage everyone:

1) the grossly unfair intentional homelessness decisions that some councils make

2) the contempt for benefit claimants and homeless people that drives some intentional homelessness decisions and some frontline officers generally. I and others have certainly seen that in the past few years.

The officer in this article says that some housing officers have completely bought into the government line that benefit claimants are scroungers and deadbeats. This won’t be news to some people, but it needs pointing out for those who don’t realise. Some officers are very fair and helpful (I’ve certainly seen that), but some are not. In austerity, government disdain for benefit claimants can trickle down to officers who are supposed to be providing support services for benefit claimants. Trickle down may not work too well when it comes to sharing wealth with everyone, but it works very well indeed when it comes to sharing disdain.

Says the officer:

“Individual [council] managers will be pushing this [finding people intentionally homeless]. [They’ll be] saying, “let’s look at this… they’re [tenants] expected to pay this [rent] shortfall now. This is why we have benefit caps and LHA rates.”

“They have this idea that these people are sort of scrounging cunts – they should be paying their shortfall and if they don’t, we need to find them intentionally homeless…”

and:

“Since 2010, you’ve got all the benefit porn on TV – this whole idea of unemployment and benefit claimants being scroungers and getting the blame for having to bail the bankers out… and that is coming into housing as well.”

Some of the “bullshit” intentional homelessness decisions that this officer has overturned at the review stage include an intentional homelessness finding against a woman who left a flat and the local area to get away from a man who’d raped her, and an intentional homelessness decision made in the case of a woman who was evicted for rent arrears after her abusive husband left and stopped paying rent.

Intentional homelessness decisions can have nasty repercussions. When a council decides that people have made themselves homeless intentionally, the council doesn’t help those people sort their homelessness problems out long term. It holds those people responsible for their homelessness.

I realise that’s a simple take, but simple is fine in this context. That is how people on the rough end experience intentional homelessness. I realise that the Homelessness Reduction Act should improve support to an extent, but I’m not talking about acts, or the rules that staff should follow in this post. I’m talking about the ways people can behave at a point in history when whole societies are encouraged to write benefit claimants off. I’m talking about officer mindsets in austerity. I’m talking about the contempt behind some decisions – the institutional contempt which can permeate minds and organisations at a time when political derision of claimants is rife.

Continue reading →

Of course we don’t inspect all flats we put homeless families in. No resources. Mould, broken boilers: we know temp housing is foul

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“[We] move [a homeless family] into [temporary accommodation] and of course it is full of cold and damp, and things don’t work, and there’s rats running around…”

“….I do remember somebody who did actually have a hole in the ceiling and rain was coming through.”

“Mostly, it’s mould is the biggest problem….you get some terrible places.”

“[When placing people in other boroughs]…They [the originating council] don’t have the resources to go and look at the accommodation before they move people into it.”

This is the second article in a series I’m writing with a housing officer who has worked (and still works) in council housing offices across London and Greater London*. There’s a transcript from this interview at the end of this post.

For this article, I asked the officer whether London councils inspect accommodation before they place homeless households in it. I was especially interested in checks on temporary accommodation when London councils send homeless households to other boroughs.

I asked, because I’ve interviewed quite a few people who’ve been disgusted at the standard of the accommodation that they and their families have been placed in both in and out of borough.

Councils ALWAYS insist to these tenants that temporary accommodation in other boroughs has been and is inspected, either by council officers, or by companies which manage that accommodation.

“That’s bullshit,” the officer told me (a view that tenants usually share).

“The biggest problem with accommodation is – obviously, a lot of councils are having to get accommodation out of their borough. [It’s] not always a long way out of the borough, but maybe the next borough, or the borough after that one.

They [the originating council] don’t have the resources to go and look at the accommodation before they move people into it.

They’ll ring up and say, “well, as long as they’ve got a gas safety certificate and an electrical safety certificate…” other than that, they ask the landlord, “is the accommodation nice and clean and all that?”

They’ll [the landlord] be like, “yeah, of course it is [laughs]…[then you] move somebody in there and of course it is full of cold and damp, and things don’t work, and there’s rats running around…”

“….I do remember somebody who did actually have a hole in the ceiling and rain was coming through. That was obviously somebody who got moved straight away… but obviously, they [the council] didn’t know that when they placed that person there. The landlord didn’t mention the hole in the roof, strangely enough.”

“Mostly, it’s mould is the biggest problem. That is a problem, because it’s health. It affects some people’s health and clothes, and everything else…you get some terrible places. It doesn’t even have to be that bad. You know if there is mould there, you ain’t going to get rid of it very easily.”

Continue reading →