Maria Miller gets a fancy house while women with no money must beg for homes

Posted on April 6, 2014 by Kate B

Video: a person sleeping rough outside legendary tax-dodgers Starbucks in the Stratford Centre on Friday. Hope Newham Council does not slap an Asbo on this person.

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Ok. Today, I will give you an example of our one-rule-for-the-rich-and-one-rule-for-everyone-else society in action:

Almost to the day that Maria Miller gave her non-apology for ripping taxpayers off for a house and her own financial gain, I stood outside Newham council’s housing offices with a group of young people who were there to plead for accommodation. Some of the young people were Focus E15 mothers, the group of young women who lived or still live at the Focus E15 hostel in the mother-and-baby unit and have been campaigning for social housing in the borough. Others were young people who aren’t parents, but who live in other parts of the Focus E15 hostel and are worried about eviction.

So. It was pretty hard not to think about the rank hypocrisy of the political class as I stood with this group of people outside Newham’s housing offices. There’s so much of this hypocrisy around now that you actually find yourself watching it unfold live. You can stand in a London street reading updates on Maria Miller’s meaningless “apology” on your phone while a group of people who have no money plead with council officers for homes. This is the time and place we’re in. We live in a society that is constructed entirely of double standards. Maria Miller has money – a lot of it ours, it would seem. The young people outside Newham housing offices on Friday, on the other hand, don’t have money. They have no money and no connections. Some of them have “problem” histories. They are dismissed because of those things. They are young, but will be dismissed forever because of those things. This double standard will finish us all if you ask me. Maria Miller gets the warm support of David Cameron and Iain Duncan Smith and a wee slap on the wrist for hoovering an incredible amount for her second home (and so what if she is ultimately sacked or demoted. She’ll be back. These people are never sacked). By comparison, the young people campaigning for housing outside Newham council on Friday regularly get called sluts (because some of them have babies), wasters and layabouts and told that they’ve done nothing to deserve a roof.

I’ve heard variations on that theme ever since I started writing about the Focus E15 mothers’ campaign. Worthies at this recent women’s event asked me, for example, if I really thought that the young campaigners deserved social housing. Did I really think that would be the best thing for them? The concern seemed to be that housing these “poor” people securely would awaken the dreaded, so-called sense of entitlement in them. Of course – no mention was or is ever made of the startling (and poisonous) sense of entitlement that people like Maria Miller have. You never hear about that. Ever. You only ever hear about the greedy, grasping, aggressive poor who will take an inch and then a mile and then your wallet. It’s the double standard that gets me. The double standard is unreal.

Continue reading →

Children in mouldy, decaying houses, councillors at property investor fairs in Cannes…

Posted on March 23, 2014 by Kate B

To Manor Park library yesterday and the “Meet Mayor Robin Wales” event yesterday, where there was a big turnout. Housing problems were on many minds.

I spoke to a woman who works as a cleaner and has been in temporary accomodation with her three children for four years. She earns £500 a month as a cleaner and her housing benefit does not meet her whole rent. I went round to her house to film the mould, missing floorboards, uncollected rubbish and peeling wallpaper later on in the day. Look at the mould growing here – the woman has to wipe it off regularly and it keeps coming back. There’s a two-month-old baby living in this place:

There was a woman who said her rundown place was full of mice and an older woman who was there on behalf of a disabled friend who she said was also in temporary accommodation…and that wasn’t the half of it. Decent, secure housing that people can afford is becoming very hard to find, we all know, and people were definitely concerned and angry. You’ll see from the videos that there was quite a turnout for meeting at a small library on a Saturday morning.

Focus E15 Mothers were there to ask Wales if he would back their campaign for social housing. Politicians won’t back these women, of course – young women who have children and who are on benefits for now aren’t thought worthy of that sort of attention. Kate Middleton can make her home over to the tune of £1m, but women like the Focus E15 mothers are regarded with suspicion and sneered at. More than one worthy at this recent women’s event asked me if I really thought that the Focus E15 mothers deserved the local social housing that they’ve been campaigning so hard for. Did I really think that would be the best thing for them? The concern seemed to be that housing the Focus E15 mothers securely would awaken the dreaded, so-called sense of entitlement in them. Of course – no mention was made of the startling sense of entitlement that people like Kate Middleton have.

The Focus E15 women – who were or still are all homeless and living in temporary accommodation in the Focus E15 hostel – want decent and secure social housing for all (you can read their story in detail here). Some of the women have been placed in private lets in London for a year – which means that they’ll very likely have housing problems again when that year is up. Others are still living in the Focus E15 hostel with their babies. More on that soon. The group had trouble pinning Wales down for a chat to start, as you’ll see. When he did speak to them, he said that their argument should be with government, not with the council. That didn’t go down too well. People want councillors to join their campaigns, not tell them to take their campaigns elsewhere. The mothers asked why boarded-up flats at the Carpenters Estate couldn’t be opened for social housing and if homes in the borough’s post-Olympic residential builds would be earmarked as social housing…Wales was a little vague on that, as you’ll see in the video:

The Carpenters estate was to be demolished as part of a Newham Council/UCL plan to build a £1bn campus a couple of years ago. Campaigners managed to stop that plan for the time being and to keep their estate and homes in Newham – they wanted the estate to be refurbished and retained as social housing. At least a year on, flats on the estate remain boarded up and unused. This is certainly a sore point with residents and with people who are on the council’s housing waiting list (there are about 24,000 people on that waiting list). The council’s allocation policy prioritises people who are in work over people who are not in work, too.

In this next video, I asked Wales why he attended a recent property investors’ fair in Cannes and what he did there. There has been a great deal of anger about councillors’ attendance at that fair, as you’ll read in this Guardian story:

“Protesters accuse local authorities at week-long MIPIM of being ‘in pockets of investors’ and ‘selling off’ Britain’s cities…Every year, for a week in March, this stretch of the French riviera is transformed into a global property trading zone, a souped-up real estate supermarket, where whole swathes of cities are put up for sale to the highest bidder.

“This year saw more than 20 UK local authorities taking part, the biggest presence since the 2008 peak.

“Public sector attendance at MIPIM has long been contentious, with budgets for local authorities’ presence at the fair often stretching up to £500,000. The symbolism of council chiefs on a champagne-soaked jamboree, as swingeing cuts bite back home, has not gone unnoticed, prompting most authorities to find private-sector funding and trumpet visible results from the week of networking.”

I’m always keen to hear Wales trumpet, so I asked Wales what he’d been up to in Cannes. Had to chase him round the corner with the “were you selling Newham?” questions… he wheeled round at that point and answered with an angry No I Wasn’t:

“It’s all paid for by our development partners,” Wales told the Guardian. I find that an even bigger worry if I’m honest. Time for some absolute transparency on all of this – who met with who, when, why, what was discussed, who will be “investing” in what and what sort of money will move between which organisations and people and why – and how the people who turned out to Saturday’s event to try and get their housing problems solved will benefit. I didn’t get a chance to ask about the council’s recent moves to slap Asbos on homeless people in the Stratford centre, or where homeless mothers and babies will go when the Focus E15 mother and baby unit closes down, which the East Thames Housing Association has confirmed it will.

The Focus E15 mothers will be at next Saturday’s 1000 mothers march for justice: 11am Saturday 29 March. Assemble at Bruce Castle Park, Lordship Lane, N17 8NU.

More soon – post will be updated.

Homelessness, Asbos, Operation Encompass

Posted on March 17, 2014 by Kate B

This is the first in a series of posts which feature conversations with people who are street homeless.

This series was inspired, if that’s the word, by Operation Encompass – the Metropolitan police-local council-UK Border Agency “partnership” to “combat begging and rough sleeping across six London boroughs.” Brilliant. They weren’t doing this by building more homes, or anything useful like that. They were doing it by – among other charming initiatives – hitting rough sleepers with Asbo warnings and telling people that they had to accept “help”. A few things appeared in local papers about this earlier this year – charities expressed concern about the operation “aggressively targeting and potentially criminalising some of the most vulnerable people in society” – and then things went quiet. I’ve asked the Met for an update – if it still going as Operation Encompass (the Met’s original press release said “activity” would be “ongoing“) and/or who is doing what and where. You can use Asbos to ban people from certain areas, see. This means that Asbos could be used by politicians to clear streets of people who might not, say, impress the bigshot property investors that council leaders have been hanging out with in Cannes, etc. These things need to be watched.

They’re not pretty. Boroughs like Newham seemed to be running their own Encompasses (I’d ask Newham where things are at there as well, except that the council refuses to talk to me). Only a month ago, we had mayor Robin Wales in the Newham Recorder boasting about cracking down on rough sleepers in the Stratford centre. (Wales, incidentally, seems to have been at last week’s property fair in Cannes. I do keep seeing the same faces at the moment). In his column, Wales said that rough sleepers who refused the council’s offers of “assistance” could not expect to continue to sleep on Newham streets. “I realise that this is a tough message,” Wales said, “and that some people will be instinctively unhappy with it.”

I was unhappy with it. I was very unhappy with it. The part that made me especially unhappy was the nasty, vengeful note in those statements – the “people with problems are not entitled, so they’ll damn well take what they’re given, or else,” line that informs so much of today’s political discourse. There was nothing in Wales’ article about the many reasons why people might be sleeping rough. There was nothing about the fallout from this government’s dreadful social security “reforms.” There was just a magnificent oversimplification of the reasons for homelessess and justification, if you can call it that, for lording it over rough sleepers. There was a real nastiness there.

You find that nastiness everywhere in political discourse on housing, of course. You find it, for instance, in this discussion with Hastings council leader Jeremy Birch, who told me that upgraded estates in his borough would not be open to people on benefits. People like the Focus E15 mothers hear it all the time, too. So do I when I’m out with them. For example: More than one Labour worthy at this women’s event last week asked me if I really thought that the Focus E15 mothers deserved the local social housing that they’ve been campaigning so hard for. Did I really think that would be the best thing for them? The concern seemed to be that housing the Focus E15 mothers securely would awaken the dreaded, so-called sense of entitlement in them. I found this extraordinary and extraordinarily patronising. It seems that young women who think they should have somewhere to live are now considered grossly pushy and grabby. Of course – no mention was made at this luvvies event of the startling sense of entitlement that the well-appointed have. Nobody asked me what I thought about Kate Middleton’s sense of entitlement when it comes to housing, or Nadhim Zahawi’s sense of entitlement when it comes to getting the taxpayer to pay to house his horses in heated stables, or MPs’ sense of entitlement when it comes to flipping and selling homes, etc. The political class never mentions those people. Their big concern in life is that everyday punters are on the make. Continue reading →

Focus E15 mothers take their petition for social housing to Boris…

Posted on February 21, 2014 by Kate B

…who of course wasn’t in to see the women. These people never are.

As many people will know, the Focus E15 women are a group of young mothers, classed as homeless, who have been fighting for decent social housing for all. They’ve been trying to convince Newham council and the East Thames housing association to find them decent social housing in London. They are concerned about being pushed into the highly unstable, unaffordable private rental sector. They are also concerned that to beat the benefit cap, Newham council will send them to live miles away in supposedly cheaper towns. That would remove these young mothers from the families and friends who they rely on and who can provide all-important free childcare when the women go into training and work. Continue reading →

The real problem with homeless people…they’re attracted to cardboard

Posted on February 6, 2014 by Kate B

This morning, I went to Stratford to report on the Focus E15 young mums‘ attempt to attend Mayor Robin Wales’ proceedings committee. As readers of this blog will know, these young mothers – all classed as homeless and all living in temporary hostel accommodation – have battled for months for secure social housing for themselves and for the rest of us. They wanted to appeal again to Wales for social housing today.

As I arrived, I was handed a copy of this week’s Newham Recorder, which carries a column from Wales about Newham council’s recent crackdown on rough sleepers round the Stratford Centre. As part of a programme that the council charmingly refers to as “a rude awakening for rough sleepers”, Asbo warnings were recently slapped on 28 people who were sleeping out around the mall. The council has been “helped” in this endeavour by the police, the UK Border Agency and Thames Reach.

I found Wales’ column purely extraordinary (you can read the whole thing here). There’s a nasty, punitive thread running through it – a bit like shit through a goose, as the great Justin McKeating would say. It hits exactly the Clean Up or Piss Off pitch that Edwina Currie keeps aiming for. There’s a rough sleeping problem around Stratford centre, Wales says, because there is “easy access to waste food and cardboard,” (he sounds like he’s talking about drawcards for rodents in that bit). Rough sleepers who “refuse offers of assistance from us or our partners cannot expect to continue to sleep on our streets.” They can expect Asbos if they try, it seems. The council is “offering support to those who will accept it and enforcing the law where necessary,” Wales informs us. “I realise that this is a tough message,” he goes on to say, “and that some people will be instinctively unhappy with it.”

Bloody right. I’m one of those people. I bet there are plenty of others. This stuff is appalling. There is nothing remotely forgiving about the piece that Wales has written here. There’s no political context. There’s no detail about the many reasons why people might be trying to shelter from awful weather in cardboard in a walkway and getting pissed to block it all out. There’s nothing at all about the realities of the fallout from this government’s dreadful “welfare reforms” – JSA sanctions, homelessness, severe mental health problems, the loss of hostel housing, being thrown off employment and support allowance and so on and so on and so on. As it happens, I’ve talked with a great many people who are in and out of street homelessness and there’s inevitably a complicated story at the back of it. We need to hear more of these stories and less about Asbos if you ask me. I’ve talked to people with serious mental health conditions who’ve been displaced when their hostel accommodation has been closed. I’ve talked to people who’ve lived in tents while their ESA problems have rolled on and on and they’ve tried to address their serious addiction problems by moving towns. I’ve talked to people who lost their businesses in the recession and ended up unemployed, sanctioned and homeless.

I doubt that Asbos would have sorted those situations out, but it seems that you get councils going for it. And all this in a column from a mayor who Private Eye tells us this week has been using Newham’s repairs and maintenance services to carry out work on his home. This service “undertakes work for non-council tenants and this service is available to any Newham resident,” the council told blogger Mike Law (the story says that Wales paid about £1500 for the work). Which must be great if you have a house and money to pay for its upkeep. It’s probably less exciting if you’re homeless, eating food off the pavement and wrapping yourself in cardboard every night in the Stratford Centre to try and keep warm. There’s something very wrong with all of this. There’s a poisonous inequality inherent in it and the finger of blame is being pointed at people who deserve it least. I think here of the many boarded-up flats on Newham’s Carpenters Estate – homes that sit empty as the council wags a warning finger at 28 people who sleep in a mall and have nowhere to go and may not want to be strongarmed into “specialist support.” Those people may not want to take instruction from mayors who have enough money for their own housing and repairs. They may be sick of seeing the political class come down on the poorest like a shitload of bricks. They may just want decent social housing and paid work, but can’t get either. God knows that is happening everywhere.

Anyway – trying to make that point to the political class is almost impossible now. As I said at the start of this post – this morning, the young women of the Focus E15 housing campaign tried to enter a mayoral proceedings meeting to appeal again to Wales for social housing in the borough. This is a campaign that should interest anyone who isn’t rich and doesn’t own a huge house outright. Without secure social housing, we’re all at the mercy of increasingly merciless private landlords. We’re all looking at short tenancies, badly-maintained flats and skyrocketing rents. But the women have been told that they must take 12-month private lets in the private rental sector, or they’ll will get no more “help” from the council. They wanted to talk to Wales about this again today. Unfortunately, they were told that the meeting was over and that they weren’t allowed in. You’ll see that in this video:

I’d ask the council for a comment on this, except that the council won’t talk to me. That part of things has gone a bit emotional, in a crappy council way. As I wrote here, I can only guess that my earlier stories about the Focus E15 women’s battle for secure social housing and the rotten standards at the temporary hostel they’re living touched a nerve. So, we’ll take what I write as written. Apparently, a press officer turned up later on today to say the mothers should have been let into the mayoral proceedings after all. Pity the proceedings were over.

So. The Focus E15 campaign remains extremely important and will only become more so. These women are pointing up the problems with the private rented sector, the terrible lack of secure social housing and the way that people on benefits and low incomes are treated if they dare to ask for it. Just remember – this is all coming your way, unless you’re rich. Very rich.

Focus E15 young mums’ battle for social housing: an update

Posted on February 3, 2014 by Kate B

Back to Newham now, where the young homeless mothers who’ve been fighting a real battle for secure local social housing have been given an ultimatum by Newham council: they must take 12-month lets in the private rental sector, or they’ll will get no more “help” from the council. The women think if they turn the private-sector lets down, they’ll be considered to have made themselves intentionally homeless. “We have to take them,” the women said on Saturday. “The council says if we don’t, they won’t give us any more help to get housed.” I’d ask the council for a comment on this, except that the press office threw a tantrum a few weeks ago and said it wouldn’t talk to me again. It seems that my earlier stories about the women’s battle for secure social housing and the rotten standards at the hostel they’re living touched some kind of nerve.

Presenting the women with this “short-term private lets” ultimatum is a sneaky move by the council. It breaks the campaign group up by housing the young mothers in far-flung parts of London, away from each other. It also leaves the women and their children very vulnerable to further house moves. In 12 months’ time, when the lets are up, the council can say that the private rents exceed the benefit cap and send the women out of London to live in boroughs where they are not wanted and where there is no work, or family members around to provide childcare. It seems very unlikely that the women will be in private lets in London for the longer term – especially as rents increase and as the benefit cap is lowered even further, as it inevitably will be. If the women have to move again, their kids will have to be moved to new nurseries and schools again. And again and again and again.

This is the problem and future that all renters face – short-term tenancies, skyrocketing rents and no sure place for families to live for more than a few months at a time. That is why the Focus E15 campaign for secure social housing is so important to us all. The Newham quick-fire, private rental solution does not solve a single problem for anyone who must rely on the private rental sector for housing. It does not force the council to build more social housing for all, or to commit to opening up the many boarded-up homes on places like the Carpenters Estate which you can see in the video below. This short-term solution simply breaks up a campaign and shuts down a debate, which is surely the council’s aim.

Anyway. In the video below, you can see some of the many boarded-up flats on Newham’s Carpenters estate and hear the Focus E15 mothers’ views on this:

Residents put up an almighty fight recently to save their flats from council plans to create a UCL campus on the site. Flats on the estate have been boarded up for a very long time though. I asked the council about its plans for those flats and for the estate in general, but as I say, the council refuses point-blank to talk to me about anything. So we’ll have to leave that one hanging and simply look at the video of the boarded-up flats. And make the point again that the real problem here is an absolute lack of will – across the political spectrum – to truly commit to the notion of secure and plentiful social housing for all. Shoving a few campaigners into private lets for a bit won’t change that.

Young mothers occupy Newham council to demand social housing

Posted on January 17, 2014 by Kate B

Updated with new video:

Some video from today’s occupations of the East Thames Housing Association building (and showroom) and Newham council’s housing offices by a group of young homeless mothers who are battling for decent social housing in Newham. The fight these young women are putting up is becoming more and more relevant to anyone who does not have secure housing – which includes a great many people:

Video: young Newham mothers occupy Newham council housing offices

Video two: earlier in the day, the women occupied a showhome inside the East Thames housing association building, where they held a party. There isn’t room for parties at the temporary hostel they live in, so they decided the HA would be a good venue:

As one of the mothers says in the video at the housing office:

“Stop making people homeless. Stop making kids miss school. It’s not fair. You get to go home to your nice homes, while people here are struggling. People are here crying (they were – a woman in the office was crying, because she was homeless and trying to sort that out). They’re stressed, depressed. It’s not right. You’ve got a place here where you’re meant to help people. You’re meant to help people. You’re not helping people.”

That’s it in a nutshell, really.

I have been interviewing this group of young mothers for a while. They are all classed as homeless and they are all fighting a bloody battle with Newham Council for decent social housing in the borough for themselves and their small children.

At the moment, these young women live in Newham’s Focus E15 foyer – a hostel which has about 16 flats for young parents and about 210 flats across the complex. It’s supposed to be temporary accommodation. I’ve written about the concerns the women have about the health standards at the hostel – the mothers say there are rats, mice and problems with mould and ventilation. Some of the children in the hostel are as young as three months. I’m having something of a bloody battle with the council and HA myself about this. More on that topic soon.

The women’s options for permanent housing are not good. They are having to deal with so many of the problems that face people who are either on low incomes, or benefits (surely, too, these must also increasingly be problems for people who are on reasonable incomes. Nobody is securely housed unless they own something freehold).

Their options are these:

The women can try to find social housing in a borough which has 24,000 people on its waiting list and recently changed its allocations policy to prioritise ex-servicepeople and people in work over people not in work. So that isn’t much of an option.

Or they they can hope to be housed in private accommodation – in an era where private landlords like Fergus and Judith Wilson are asking their housing benefit tenants to leave because, as Fergus Wilson loftily informed the Guardian recently: “”All the landlords will tell you that there is so much default now with housing benefit tenants that you are just simply better off with somebody working.” Mothers like Jasmin Stone have told me that they’ve run up big phone bills calling around private landlords and letting agents – to no avail. So that option isn’t much of an option either.

The other option is that Newham will house the women many miles out of the borough – miles away away from the family members who could provide childcare while the women worked. Places like Hastings, or Birmingham, are often suggested as possibilities. Except I wonder if they are. I spoke to Jeremy Birch, leader of Hasting council last week. The facts are that Jeremy Birch is not keen on taking people who are benefits generally. He can’t stop London boroughs housing people in Hastings’ private rental sector, but he made it very clear that he wasn’t happy to know that was happening:

“We’re a deprived community in the south east, who are trying to reduce the amount of benefit dependency in our own borough. While we welcome anyone who wants to come to Hastings to move here, we are not happy that we would be taking further people who were benefit dependent. That is putting extra pressure on the services that we’ve got in the town.”

He also said – and this is important – that the council had specific housing projects which excluded people who were not in work.

I’ve got a lot more to post on this, but I’ll say for now that this is a very important campaign. We all deserve housing – and this campaign is proving that people are going to have to put up a hell of a fight for it. This is an era of monumental inequality and the political class is thumbing its nose at anyone who isn’t part of that class. MPs happily house their horses in heated stables courtesy of the taxpayer and expect taxpayers to fund their tennis court repairs and housing upgrades and sales. They watch a show about people with nothing and encourage the world to laugh. Clean, warm, decent housing is a right – and not just for horses. Councils and Housing Associations should not be surprised to see people turn up in their offices who refuse to leave without an answer.

Another important point: At the occupation, a lot of people who were waiting in the housing offices to hear about their own housing options joined in conversation with these mothers. Connections were made. One woman who’d been waiting in the queue even started to cry – she revealed that she was homeless. Another woman who had a young baby with her said she’d been told she’d be sent to Birmingham, miles away from anyone she knew.

Other people who were waiting in the queue cheered and applauded when the protestors arrived and explained their campaign for housing. So many people are affected by this. People everywhere, with nowhere secure to live.

Council: unemployed people will not get places in our improved housing project

Posted on January 12, 2014 by Kate B

As readers of this site will know, I’ve been posting recently about social housing landlords (councils and their HAs) who prioritise people in work ahead of people who are not in work for social housing. I have found this worrying, to say the very least. It’s bad enough to know that filthy rich private landlords like Fergus and Judith Wilson are closing their doors to people who are on benefits. It is REALLY bad when you hear that social housing landlords – the landlords who you’d think were supposed to help people who are in real financial straits – are excluding people as well.

I wrote about Newham’s employed-people-are-our-priority housing policy last week. Here’s another example. On Thursday, I spoke for a while with Jeremy Birch, who is leader of Hastings borough council. I rang Jeremy to talk about his views on Hastings’ role as a place where London boroughs send impoverished tenants to live. As you are likely aware, London boroughs are using the private rental sector in Hastings to place tenants who are affected by the benefit cap and/or supposedly can’t be found appropriate housing in London. I’ve been speaking with a number of young women in Newham who are facing that sort of “move” to Hastings, miles away from parents and childcare.

Anyway – Jeremy Birch made a startling revelation during that conversation. He told me that Hastings borough now had housing projects from which it actively excludes people who are on benefits.

We were talking about the effects of rent pressures on rent and house prices when he said this:

“We have a project in one of the wards where houses of multiple occupation are particularly prevalent. We have a project where we’re buying up, with the housing association, some of the worst of these properties and renovating and improving them. The social landlord [that] is responsible for the running of them. The lettings agreement is that they will only take people who are in employment (my emphasis). The reason for that is to try and rebalance the nature of those communities, so that they are more settled and more stable communities.”

In other words – people who are in situations that Birch described as “benefits dependent” will be excluded from those improved homes. I have spoken with a couple of lawyers who think such an exclusion/discrimination could warrant legal challenge.

I’ve got more work to do on this – I want to know more about the definition of “benefits-dependent” in that context and I want to know more about the places that excluded tenants will be sent to, if they’re sent anywhere. Jeremy Birch says that exclusion policy only applies to that housing project at the moment. Elsewhere in the borough, people are housed according to need. You take my point, though. We’re in a messy and very unpleasant environment here. It seems that some people are allowed housing and others are not. It seems that some people are thought worthy of improved and renovated housing, while others are not (which is doubtless why these young mothers and their children are living in this sort of cramped and dirty place). It seems that social housing landlords are taking those decisions blatantly. It seems that private sector landlords are not the only ones who are thinking Cull when it comes to people on benefits.

Jeremy Birch is not keen on taking people who are benefits generally. He can’t stop London boroughs placing London tenants in Hastings private housing, but he makes it clear that he’d like to. “We’re a deprived community in the south east, who are trying to reduce the amount of benefit dependency in our own borough. While we welcome anyone who wants to come to Hastings to move here, we are not happy that we would be taking further people who were benefit dependent. That is putting extra pressure on the services that we’ve got in the town.”

I will be doing more on this. The point to note for now is that this “we’re taking these people, but not those people” rhetoric is the sort of line which ends with people on benefits being chucked in the workhouse, because all other doors have shut. You can find yourself on a benefit for all sorts of reasons – job loss, illness, disability, domestic violence, sickness. Just remember that as all this carries on, it won’t just be private landlords who want you gone.

The bedroom tax, the northwest and political meltdown

Posted on June 25, 2013 by Kate B

Our latest cuts piece in the New Statesman – this one is a collection of interviews with people I spoke to the week before last about their experiences with the bedroom tax. They’ve been cut loose by politicians, as you might expect. Making sure that people who aren’t very well off are securely housed is not one of austerity’s priorities.

“This tax targets people who know how to fight for improvements and rights as a community – older people like Roach and Jill, who campaigned for better housing and now work in a community centre that runs bedroom tax surgeries and provides hot meals for people who can’t afford them. Many of the people at the largely tenant-led bedroom tax meetings across Merseyside are middle-aged or older. They’ve been in the same homes for many years and have so-called “spare” rooms because their circumstances have changed (often their kids have grown up and left). Because they’ve been around for a while, they have networks in their neighbourhoods, contacts and a lot of experience in seeing off threats. You can see exactly why politicians of all stripes would want to target them with a bedroom tax and break them up.”

Read the rest here.

A few truths about benefits

Posted on October 7, 2012 by Kate B

This is the latest in the transcripts from recorded interviews I’m publishing as I talk to people around the country who are dealing firsthand with fallout from public sector cuts, welfare reform and the recession. I’m posting these transcripts between longer articles and testimonies that are appearing at False Economy and elsewhere.

In this transcript, Michael H, who is 43, from Newcastle and on benefits, talks about growing up on Gateshead’s Springwell estate, his worries for his children in an era and region of high unemployment, his concerns about being moved out of his council flat if the government’s bedroom tax is enforced (he was moved to his current flat years ago after run-ins with gangs on his previous estate) and his own conviction for benefit fraud. Michael has been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, has depression and suffers from anxiety and panic attacks.

“I know that this is going to come across really, really strong but I think that it’s a social cleansing what they [the government] are doing, with people the likes of us on benefits… because he’s [Cameron] turned around, calling us the likes of scroungers.

I go to doctors, I go to groups – I’m trying to get better, but when you’re diagnosed with things like this and you’re on the waiting list… I’m diabetic. I was diagnosed in 2005 – I almost died [in 2000]. I’ve got summat in my hands where they attack down the nerves. It’s affecting me like joints and things and the medication that they put us on, I don’t think it agreeing with us. I’m thinking like more suicidal thoughts. I don’t know if this drug is right for me.

I was a caretaker years ago and I worked with a broken arm, so it isn’t if I haven’t worked or anything. I have done lots of various jobs. Obviously, growing up, I wasn’t brought up in the best world. It was like…really bad times – a very violent household if you get my drift, so I didn’t have the best of the starts in life. [But] I’m doing everything like I’m supposed to be doing…

Bedroom tax its a different way of cutting the housing benefit bill. That’s all it is. It isn’t anything about encouraging people to move on, because they know that there isn’t any one bedroom properties going. My daughter still comes across [to stay in my flat]. She lives at home with her mam and stepdad and she comes across to mine and she has that room as a little sanctuary thing, because she she’s doing 6^th form now. She is going to be a teacher and it’s nice for her to have that sanctuary. In everything, you will get people who will take advantage. It’s doesn’t matter what job you are in – in any walk of life. Look at the Tories with their expenses. Those MPs – in real life, they would have lost their jobs.

I haven’t had an [Atos work capability assessment yet]. I’m on incapacity benefit…I’ve watched the things on the television and seen how [ESA] is decided for people to fail on it. People don’t understand how that plays with your mind, because if your mind is fragile enough now, when you get things like that put on top of you, it just makes you think – what I am good for? The best thing to do would be to end it, because then I wouldn’t be on benefits.

My son and his pals have been on benefits for ages and there is nothing there. He has to go around and hand in CVs to firms in the local areas [as a requirement for jobseekers’ allowance]. They [the job centre] keep asking him to do it and he’s like – if I’ve done every one, how can I go around and do it again? And they are now wanting to sanction people £72 [sic]. That’s their whole benefit, if they don’t meet whatever they [the job centre] wants. Yes, we do know that there is people who do not want to work, because there’s ones that do crime, do drugs, do whatever, but that’s always been there since day dot, but to tar every single person…

The thing is, he [Cameron] claims that it [welfare changes and bedroom tax] won’t have that much impact – but how does he know? He’s a millionaire. He’s not been in our shoes, I would love to have been in his. Because most people round these areas to be honest, they are poor and they accept their lot in life.

At the job centre, they have not got a clue. If they brought in schemes where it wouldn’t affect your benefit – employment training for 12 months, you could go out and train. If disabled people had those rights, if that would then give them the confidence to go back into the workplace and try things out and learn different things. They let the likes of us rot now. We are classed as the worst thing since bubonic plague.

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