Category Archives: Council

Council service cuts stories

We housed a homeless family back in the flat they’d just been evicted from. Landlord decided he’d get more from a nightly let

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“One homeless family was actually given the flat  [for temporary accommodation] that they’d just been evicted from. They’d been long-term tenants in that flat. Their landlord evicted them, because he worked out he could get more money if he offered the flat to the council on a Nightly Lets basis. When the family turned up at the council as homeless after the eviction, the council offered them the same flat they’d just been evicted from – this time as temporary accommodation at a higher rent.”

This is the first in a series of articles I plan to publish based on interviews with a council homelessness officer I’m working with. This officer has worked in a number of different council housing offices in London and Greater London in the last 20 years and still works as a frontline council homelessness officer in and around London.

This officer interviews homeless people when they go to their local council for housing help, decides whether that council has a duty to house people who are homeless and must help find accommodation for people if a council does have a duty.

These days, this officer finds the job depressing and almost too difficult to contemplate. Antidepressants and sick days are features of this person’s life. Going without a job and the income isn’t possible, though.

The officer will remain anonymous in these articles.

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First article:

Watching voracious landlords screw every pound they can out of homeless families and councils

This first article is about the problem that homelessness officers have finding temporary accommodation for homeless people who desperately need a place to stay that day.

In the interview transcript below, the officer talks about two major problems.

The first is nightly lets /nightly paid accommodation. The officer explains how money-hungry landlords make flats available to councils for homeless families on a night-by-night basis only, rather than for longer-term, more secure lets. The nightly lets options can be more lucrative for landlords. Landlords can also evict families more easily when a flat is let on a nightly basis.

“Nightly lets – you’re talking mostly about the crappiest accommodation in London, or outside of London,” the officer says.

The officer describes one case where a family who’d just been evicted from a flat they’d lived in for several years went to their local council for help – only to be placed straight back in the flat they’d been evicted from on the very same day, at a higher rent. The landlord had realised he could get more money by letting his flat on a nightly basis. He evicted the family and offered the flat back to the council as a nightly let for a higher charge:

Says the officer:

“There was a family that had been evicted from their house. They were [in] private rented. The landlord’s served a notice [to evict the family] – “[he’s said] oh, I want the property back.”

The family were evicted about 9’o’clock that morning. They came into [the] council.

The officers said, “we’ll give you temporary accommodation.” The accommodation that was given to them was the very house that they were evicted from that morning.

Basically, the landlord’s realised that he can get more money for this property as a nightly let. [He’s decided] “I’m going to evict these people.”

He’s obviously gone to the council and said, “here’s a property that’s going to be available on this day. You can have it as a nightly let.”

They went to that flat. Imagine how pissed off they were. They’d been packing all their stuff up for three weeks and put it in storage.

They’re like, “where are we going?” [The council is like] – it [your new temporary accommodation] is very close to where you were living before… and you’re going back there, with the same landlord who evicted you.” Continue reading →

People sent by councils out of London like this will be parked on benefits for life. Is that the actual aim.

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Here are a few thoughts on the council trend to force homeless people out of London AND on the supremely unhelpful council homelessness system that people must battle through to get any housing help at all:

Regular readers will know I’ve been writing about Chantelle Dean, a 32-year-old woman who is about to be evicted from her private-sector rented flat in Newham.

Chantelle’s landlord wants the flat back, so Chantelle must leave. She’s just received her final eviction notice. The bailiffs will be round to throw her out on 27 July. Newham council won’t help Chantelle with emergency housing until that day:


 

 

 

Two points to put to you today:

1) Sending Chantelle to live out of London makes absolutely no sense – unless the aim is simply to get poor people out of rich people’s faces 

Chantelle has good reasons for wanting to find another flat in London. She has a three-year-old son who starts school in September. She receives Income Support at the moment. She wants to give herself the best chance to find work and training when her son starts school. Chantelle’s mother lives in Newham and can look after Chantelle’s son for free. Still, the council has told Chantelle to look for flats out of London (you can read email exchanges on that subject here). That’s because Chantelle will struggle to pay the inevitable shortfall between her housing benefit entitlement and expensive Newham rents.

So.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: moving mothers with young children to places where they’re a long way from work and free childcare is a very sinister move.

The concept is a cruel nonsense by definition. If you send people who have no money away to live in areas where there is less work and no family nearby for free childcare, you cut people off from opportunities as a matter of course and they disappear. No doubt that’s the idea – Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind and all of that. Continue reading →

How can the DWP STILL leave people to “live” on a pittance? Will any of this ever change?

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Let’s start the week with a rant:

I’ve said this a million times, as has everyone, but let’s say it again:

Some people don’t have enough money to live on. Nothing is changing that I can see.

People are deliberately kept in debt to the state and in crushing poverty as a result. The DWP sanctions and reduces benefit money to the point where people can’t meet basic bills, and then deducts even more for loans and that people can’t pay. People are forced to cough up fines and costs for court appearances for unpaid council tax and rent – bills that they couldn’t afford to pay in the first place. That’s why they’re in court. Something needs to be done, but it isn’t being done. I wonder exactly how long the turning-point will sit on the horizon. How long will people be forced to wait for change?

We’ve had plenty of chat recently in the MSM re: politicians accepting that austerity is terrible and that people loathe it. I’m all for that chat, but a timeline for actual improvement would be good. I realise that we’ve had major political movement in recent times, from Brexit to the Christ-ly rise of Jez, and I try to get/stay enthused/interested, but the truth is that useful results on the ground still feel a very long way away.

I still speak to people who didn’t vote in the general election. They still shrug and say, “it doesn’t make any difference.” You see their point. They’re still at foodbanks. They’re still fighting the DWP for a few quid in hardship funds. They’re still written off as scroungers. Recent political events haven’t meant much in real terms for them.

After squandering months on an election and its aftermath, our “leadership” and parliament will soon take summer break. I wonder if a break should be allowed. Then again – who cares. What’s a couple of months in the greater scheme. Even if Jez launches the glorious revolution tomorrow, it’ll take years – decades – to rebuild public services to the point where people who really need those services get them in a way that feels helpful. A revolution would look great on facebook, but I wouldn’t hold my breath for the rest. I realise that I take a childishly simple view of political realities here, but I feel the need to get down to basics. A lot of people have been waiting an awful long time for the aforementioned turning-point to really arrive. Quite a few people have died along the way.

Some specifics from real life out and about:

There are three key problems I hear again and again from people as I go from foodbanks to lunch kitchens to meetings with people who have housing problems:

1) The DWP, councils and housing associations are deducting money from people’s benefits by way of sanctions, loan repayments, council tax and fines, and rent arrears. The upshot is that people are left with a pittance to live on. It’s not uncommon to hear people talk about a figure of £50 a week and less. Doesn’t matter whether or not you think people deserve these slapdowns because they’re single mums, unemployed, low earners, ex-cons, or whatever. They’re stuck forever. The state and its offshoots crush people with debts that they’ll never repay. The state does not help these people. It owns them. We, or someone, needs concrete plans to change that.

2) People are waiting for an Employment and Support Allowance decision, or a Personal Independence Payment decision. The waiting is going on and on and/or their application is turned down. The mandatory reconsideration and tribunal appeals processes drag on and are extremely difficult to navigate if you can’t grasp complex government bureaucracies. Which many people can’t, because these systems are too hard to deal with even if you do feel up to it. At the moment, in one way or another, I’m dealing with/writing about three people with learning difficulties and health problems who have been found fit for work this year and have not been able to appeal these decisions, or sort out interim income, without help from local support groups.

3) People are fighting eviction and paying big court/bailiffs costs on the way. They’re always insecurely housed, because they must rent in the private sector.

Here are three very recent examples of these:

Continue reading →

Here’s a woman explaining in detail problems she’s had getting council homelessness help. This system is garbage.

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The aim of this post is to show you what it’s like when a person tries to get help from a council when that person is threatened with homelessness.

As you’ll know, there’s been a lot of discussion about the realities of these council systems after Grenfell.

I want to give you an idea of the shambolic and often startlingly unhelpful council bureaucracies that people must use when they need help to find a place to live. I want to show you the system as people who must use it see it. We live in an era of massively oversubscribed and under-resourced council homelessness offices (god knows I wouldn’t want to work as a frontline council homelessness officer these days). We also live in an era where big councils are very keen push poorer people out to live in cheaper areas, because housing benefit doesn’t cover private rents in expensive areas. These things show.

To the story, then. This is one person talking about the systems she’s experienced:

In the past few weeks, I’ve been talking with a 32-year-old Newham woman called Chantelle Dean. For much of this year, Chantelle has been threatened with eviction and homelessness. She tells a story that will be very familiar to anyone on this circuit.

Chantelle lives in a small, rickety, two-bedroom rented flat in Newham. Rodents and cockroaches are a problem, as they often are in houses in cramped, older rows. There are gaps in walls which rodents use as entry-points: “the [exterminator] guy said no matter how much foam they put in, the mice are going to be coming through. It’s so old and there are so many holes,” Chantelle said. I’ve posted photos of the anti-mouse plastic foam the exterminator sprayed into wall-holes below.

Chantelle has a three-year-old son. She was placed in her flat about three years ago by Newham council after working her way through family problems and contact with social services. Chantelle receives Income Support. She plans to find work when her son starts nursery in September. She said she’s applied for jobs. Her mother lives nearby and can provide free childcare. That’s the plan.

Unfortunately, the plan is threatened by Chantelle’s precarious housing situation.

Chantelle is about to be evicted from her flat. As of Friday last week when we met at her flat, she still had nowhere to go when eviction day comes. She’d been trying to sort the problem out for months. (Chantelle managed to get another meeting with the council this week, so I’ll update this post if there’s progress to report).

The trouble began at the start of this year when Chantelle’s landlord gave her a notice to tell her that she had to leave the property (a section 21 notice, I think. I don’t mind saying the paperwork that comes with these things confuses me as well). She had to leave the flat by March.

She was very upset about this, as well she might be.

Chantelle went to the Newham Council Housing Needs office in East Ham in January to tell the council about the notice and to ask for help find another flat in the area. This is where things began to get messy, as they do.

Chantelle said the council told her that the council couldn’t help until the day that she was actually evicted from the flat – when the bailiffs turned up at her door, as she understood it. She said she was advised to stay in the flat and to wait to receive a possession order – which, I gather, is the next stage in the so-called system (the possession order is mentioned in the officer email below). This was, needless to say, of concern. Chantelle wanted help as soon as possible. She wasn’t keen to wait until bailiffs hammered at the door. She was also worried that she’d end up with court fines and costs if things went as far as possession orders and bailiffs (this is exactly what happened, as you’ll see).

She said that getting anyone to listen was extremely difficult. Noting this frustration is important. People constantly report this sort of frustration with frontline services:

“All they [the council] repeat is that, “we’re not going to help you until you get the bailiff’s warrant.” Once you get that, you come back up here [to the East Ham housing office] and give it to her, my caseworker, and then she will give me an appointment at [Newham Council’s] Bridge House on the day when the letter says that the bailiffs will come. Anything from that – they don’t want to talk to you. They don’t want to see you. Anything.”

Continue reading →

DHPs are a stopgap. They don’t fix the real housing problems. The whole system is wrecked

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A few thoughts on the government’s disingenuous guidance to *help* Grenfell residents with housing costs by providing Discretionary Housing Payments (DHPs):

On Friday morning on twitter, some of us were discussing this DWP memo on getting DHPs to Grenfell residents. (This was hours before the Guardian finally picked up on the memo and ran a let’s-brown-nose-the-government-by-putting-the-government-defence-up-front story on it. That story didn’t offer an interview with anyone who had actually gone through the often-invasive and thankless process of applying for a DHP. Don’t start me on that. I’m not in the mood).

Anyway.

The memo told councils to prioritise Grenfell residents who applied for Discretionary Housing Payments for help with rent in advance, deposits on new homes and rent shortfalls in new homes. This memo made me furious, for many reasons.

One is, of course, that people who survived the Grenfell fire should not have to apply for anything at all, through any of these council processes. Deposits and full rents should be paid on the homes of their choice for the rest of their lives. I genuinely think that. I can’t see why people wouldn’t think that.

Another reason for disliking this government memo “initiative” is that DHPs are only stopgap payments. They are short-term payments made by councils from a government allocation. They are used to cover housing-cost problems for people on housing benefit, or the housing component of Universal Credit – say, a rent deposit for a flat for someone on a low income, or the bedroom tax, or a shortfall between the amount of housing benefit people can get and their full rent, particularly when people must rent in the expensive private sector. (I’ve helped people apply for DHPs).

DHPs do NOT change the welfare reform policies and issues that cause the problems in the first place – the bedroom tax, local housing allowance caps, benefit caps, the fact that homeless people must be placed in the expensive private rental sector because there’s not enough social housing to go around, and the fact that everyone who rents privately is exposed to runaway private-sector rents. Those problems go on – seemingly forever, at the moment. They’re not changed by DHP allocations. The DWP memo on DHPs made clear Grenfell people remain subject to welfare reforms such as the benefit cap.

It’s the short-termism of DHP help that really gets my back up. Covering payments and problems such as deposit and rent shortfalls with DHPs is a real get-out for government and councils. It means that the government via councils can use DHPs to mask housing and rent problems caused by the high rents, the discharging of homelessness duties into the private sector and welfare reform for six months, or a year, or, to put it crassly in this case, until mainstream press attention moves away from Grenfell and people are left alone to battle council and DWP bureaucracies. DHPs don’t address reasons for a housing crisis at all.

There’s another problem, too – one that isn’t discussed as often as it should be. People (I mean a lot of the mainstream media here) seem to assume that the bureaucratic systems that people must use to apply for DHPs, housing, housing benefit and the UC housing component function reasonably well, or even at all – ie, that there’s an operational system in place for people who are homeless and/or who need housing benefit and DHPs and so on. The truth is that these systems are in absolute shambles. I realise that government says rules should be relaxed for Grenfell residents and every effort made to assist people. I’m saying that I have no confidence in this being the case in an ongoing way. That’s because wherever you go in the country, things are so often an unbelievable mess. I can’t tell you how often I’ve gone to housing meetings, or jobcentre meetings, or whatever, with people, and come out with nothing resolved. This needs to be addressed in councils and bureaucracies all over. These problems apply all round.

Continue reading →

We consider you housed, because you have a grotty caravan to live in. This is austerity.

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This one goes out to all those politicians who seem only newly acquainted with the notion that austerity is rotten and ridiculous, and that people are very sick of public sector cuts:

I’m posting here yet another story from a frontline homelessness office which will tell you something about hopelessly stretched housing resources in austerity. It will also tell you something about the farcical conversations that homeless people and housing officers must have during austerity – ie, at a time when all sense of proportion has left the building.

In the discussion reported below, a housing officer at First Choice Homes in Oldham (First Choice provides the homelessness service for Oldham Council) told the 67-year-old man called Paul who I was with that Paul was considered adequately housed because he had a crappy old caravan to live in on a site in Oldham. Take that.

Image: in the caravan

This conversation took place in the last week of April. A month or two before that, Paul had been offered sheltered accommodation, I think it was, but he was too concerned about the spectre of escalating service charges in sheltered accommodation to go with that. Nothing is easy in austerity. Every option has a sting in the tail and/or one on the horizon. The idea of service charges – in sheltered accommodation, or anywhere – scares the shit out of people generally. Nobody ever knows how big service charges will get. Certainly, nobody believes the sky will be the limit when it comes to service charges going up. The mere mention of service charges is enough to put people off further dialogue.

As we talked about sheltered accommodation, the officer agreed that service charges were a thing: “we pass that [court manager] charge onto the customer, because it’s the customers that are in need of that service…maintenance charges, we charge those to all our customers…. communal areas,” etc, etc.

That being the case, the caravan was it.

“The advice that you got… is that you were able to return to your caravan, so you’re not homeless… that’s why they’re not giving you the homeless priority,” the officer said to Paul. So, there we were – an older bloke with a heart condition being told that living in a caravan was acceptable. We knew that this line was ridiculous. The officer, to her credit, knew this line was ridiculous too, but there we were all the same, going down together. Again. God knows how many similar conversations I’ve witnessed in the last few years. Austerity has redefined our notions of “acceptable,” and “logical.” You hardly know what you’ll hear next.

Continue reading →

Can real problems like homelessness get more than fleeting attention these days?

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Let’s start this one with a story from the large collection in my Nobody Gives A Stuff If Women And Children Are Homeless file:

Image: dead mouse in the bathroom

I’m talking at the moment with a young Newham woman called Chantelle. For some time now, Chantelle has been living in a private-rental craphole. She has a three-year-old son. Cockroaches and rodents roam around their rotten flat. Chantelle told me that exterminators have visited a couple of times, but that they may as well have saved themselves the trip. The roaches and rodents have always come charging back. Wonder if they’re galloping in through a hole in a wall somewhere. Chantelle took some pictures of the roaches, which I’ve posted above and below.

Image: dead cockroaches in the flat

A couple of months back, Chantelle’s landlord told her that she had to leave the flat. Chantelle says that she doesn’t have rent arrears and hasn’t damaged the flat. Her landlord just wants the place back. Sometimes, landlords want to charge somebody else even more to live (should I say “live”) in a flat. Who can really say.

Chantelle went to Newham Council to explain her troubles and to ask for help. You can guess how fulfilling that visit was. Chantelle would’ve been better off waiting for December and writing Santa for a tent. The council was supremely unhelpful as councils can be these days. It hardly matters where you go. Frontline officers have no resources, which means they have no answers. You hit a gatekeeper as soon as you arrive at reception, or send an email, or make a call, or whatever. The opening line is often Goodbye. Some put this more politely than others, but that’s the essence. I’ve seen emails from the council which demonstrate that was the essence here. Chantelle was advised to look for cheap places out of London. People don’t know how to fight for more.

At the very least, councils give people instructions that they find almost impossible to follow. Chantelle says Newham told her that she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, be helped as a homeless person until she was actually evicted, or the bailiffs were at her door to evict her, or her notice expired, or something to that effect. She still wasn’t entirely sure when we talked and anyway: technicalities. The technicalities mean little to people when it comes down to it. Everyone still ends up at the same place – ie, nowhere. The long and the short of it was that as far as Chantelle was concerned, she was told to wait, to try and find herself another flat out of London (she has no chance of that now in London’s private rental sector, which she can’t afford) and to only come back to the council when the bailiffs were racing up the road after her, or something along those lines. I’d ask Newham council to clarify the situation, except that Newham council has refused to talk to me for several years on account of my Focus E15 housing campaign stories and general attitude to press offices and life, etc. Those guys can really drag out a grudge.

Chantelle’s understanding was that if she left the flat before she was thrown out of it, the council would say that she’d made herself intentionally homeless. This is the kind of understanding that a lot of people are left with these days. I went recently to First Choice Homes in Oldham with a 67-year-old bloke called Paul who was told while we stood there that he was considered to be adequately housed because he had a tiny, rotting caravan to live in. He was also told that he would make himself intentionally homeless if he left the caravan voluntarily – ie, without being chucked out of it by whoever owned it and/or the campsite. True story.

Continue reading →

You can’t apply as homeless without an address. What.

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This week’s bureaucratic classic:

Yesterday, I was in First Choice Homes in Oldham with Paul, 67, who is homeless. He lives in a caravan at the moment (see pictures below). Joy.

Paul had to make a change to his homelessness and housing register application/record (they’re both on the same form, we were told). He needed to add medical information, because he had a new letter about his health from his doctor. He had to do this online as you must do most things these days. We were ushered over to First Choice’s computer bank as soon as we mentioned the change of circumstances at reception.

So.

Not long into the computer session, we hit a screen which demanded Paul’s address (again). There was, of course, a big and very immediate problem with this. Paul doesn’t have an address BECAUSE HE IS HOMELESS (he wasn’t able to fill in the House Type field either, given that there was no Caravan option in the menu). An address field on a homelessness form would surely be an optional extra in his case – and for the many people I meet who sleep rough, or sofa-surf all over the place, or whatever.  But no. The form would not submit unless the address fields were filled. This is the point where you have to cast about for any old shit that might work in the form fields – maybe a friend or relative’s address, or an older address if you have one. That hardly reflects your situation, though. It doesn’t give you much confidence in the process, either, given that the process doesn’t give accurate insight into your situation.

SIGH. Here’s a shot of the screen not working. It’s fuzzy, but you get the idea. The red fields and exclamation marks are as usual:

I can’t tell you how often my head is done in by public service applications and screens these days. There really does not seem to be a single benefit or housing application process which doesn’t involve a major hurdle or nine. Phone calls to the DWP and councils take ages/go nowhere. Online forms don’t work, or they demand information people can’t easily give. Some processes look and feel as though they were built in technology’s dark ages.

You can set aside a whole morning or afternoon to make calls, or fill in forms these days and get absolutely nowhere (I’ve set aside two afternoons this week for such calls and forms, and emerged no further ahead on both occasions). You inevitably conclude that all aspects of the system are designed to put people off applying. Certainly, very little seems to be designed with the real-life needs of real service users in mind. Can’t wait to see how much further things deteriorate as more and more public money is diverted into endless Brexit departments and projects. Out in the real world, this is how life goes. Continue reading →

“Towards Work” activities to get a DHP and stayed housed. How big is conditionality going to get?

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Throwing this one out there for your inspection:

Recently, I came across strict, new-ish Derby City Council conditionality rules for people who apply for Discretionary Housing Payments, Council Tax hardship payments and Local Assistance help.

Those rules are here.

For those who don’t know the territory: Discretionary Housing Payments are short-term payments to help people cover housing-cost problems such as rent shortfalls. Local Assistance Schemes buy items like furniture and fridges when people can’t afford them. Council tax hardship payments are, obviously, for people who struggle to meet council tax bills after council tax support.

Since November 2016 in Derby, this help has come with hefty conditions for some applicants. Of course – it is not unusual for councils to ask people to engage in an activity such as debt advice in exchange for a DHP, etc. That’s happened for ages. The Derby list sets out more hoops to jump through. That’s why I’m posting it. I found it while I was searching for help generally for a single mum. Other councils may have similar. No doubt more and more will as time goes on and more funding is cut.

You’ll see from this page that people who apply for DHPs, Council Tax help and Local Welfare Assistance and fall into certain categories: “must be willing to take up and remain engaged with appropriate support recommended by the council.”

This “support” may include:

– money advice
– budgeting support
– access to banking products
– access to digital skills support
– access to job clubs
– training and housing advice

Failure to participate could mean you get and/or keep nothing:

“If you do not engage with your support programme, any award that you receive from the Single Discretionary Award Scheme may be at risk.”

“Towards work” requirements are among the conditions as you can see.

So.

You may think this is all perfectly fair.

I do not.

This is the kind of list which gets on my nerves very badly. It smacks to me of gatekeeping and of the state’s ever-tightening grip on people who are in extreme financial hardship. Conditions for receiving benefits and hardship help become more and more invasive and exacting, as anyone who signs on for JSA or Universal Credit will tell you. Anyone who requests state help these days automatically loses all right to autonomy. Continue reading →

More recordings: intentionally homeless if you’re evicted for benefit cap rent arrears…?

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More food for thought from conversations about the benefit cap at the actual coal face:

I’ve posted below a recording in which a Basildon council officer says that people who are evicted because of benefit cap rent arrears could be found to have made themselves intentionally homeless.

Which was not the best news. Council help for you is very much reduced if you’re judged responsible for your homelessness. You’re more or less on your own with your homelessness problems if that happens as I’ve seen it. You would have thought that people evicted on account of rent arrears caused by the benefit cap should and would be cut slack in this area – particularly if they were placed in housing that they could afford before the benefit cap was lowered – but maybe not.

Certainly, officers make interesting remarks on the ground. It’s all important to note:

The recording below was made at a February meeting with a woman who has serious rent arrears because of the recently-lowered benefit cap. The woman and her three young children were placed in a Basildon flat by Newham council. Basildon council handles the family’s housing benefit claim. This woman’s housing benefit was cut by about £100 a week when the cap was lowered at the end of last year. A small discretionary housing payment covers part of her rent shortfall until the end of March. We went to Basildon council to ask what else she could do.

The officer said the woman should go back to Newham council to ask if Newham thought her flat was still affordable now that her housing benefit had been cut.

The officer then said intentional homelessness was on the cards if this woman was evicted because of benefit cap arrears:

(This audio has been altered to disguise voices. Am not particularly in pursuit of individual officers here. It’s the message that’s the issue).

“If you become homeless, it could be that you’d be seen as intentionally homeless anyway, because you… if you’ve been evicted for rent arrears, then it is through non-payment of rent that you’ve lost your property.

That got my attention, all right. In the recording, you hear me ask:

“Would that mean no one would have a duty to house her? Is that the case, even when [the rent arrears have been caused by] something like that [benefit] cap that’s come in subsequently….?”

“This is why you need to see Newham council about the affordability, because if they say it is affordable, then you’re going to have to struggle by and get it paid…” the officer said. “If they don’t think it’s affordable, then because they have a duty, they have a duty to assist you to find something cheaper, or…”

Or what? I thought.

I contacted Newham council to ask whether or not the council was likely to decide that people had made themselves homeless intentionally if they were evicted because of rent arrears caused by the benefit cap. Unfortunately, the council did not respond. Think I must still be on their blacklist (we apparently fell out over my Focus E15 stories. Do they hold a grudge or what). If anyone else can get an answer out of them, by all means let me know. It would be good to have that peg in the ground for future reference.

Anyway. Official positions don’t always matter when you get down to it. This is the sort of thing you hear on the ground. Putting it all out there.

Many thanks to @nearlylegal for help with benefit cap questions over the past while.