Category Archives: Housing

Stories related to public sector housing

Can’t use your toilet because of sewerage and water leaks? Have a bucket

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Portloo in Newham council flat

On the subject of actual shit repairs:

Visited a part-council block in Newham on the weekend, to take pictures of mould, water and sewerage running down the walls (more on that soon).

Went into the flat of a woman who was no longer keen to use the toilet in her bathroom because of the water/sewerage which drips onto the latrine occupant. You’ll see in the photo below that she’d tried to get around this by stringing a black plastic bag over the toilet to re-route the streams.

This had all been going on long enough for her to make a formal complaint to the council, with a view to approaching the ombudsman.

Rubbish bag over toilet to protect user from water and sewerage coming through gap.

Rubbish bag over toilet to protect user from water and sewerage coming through gap.

Here’s the incredible bit though. The council appears to have countered by giving her a portaloo – a bucket with a little seat. The bucket was very little too. You could definitely only have one guest around and not for very long. Emptying it was also going to be a challenge. We had a few suggestions about possible council and government sites, but all of those involved potentially tricky rides on crowded public transport, so maybe not one to try unless you had really good balance.

Needless to say, the woman had not tried the portaloo out yet. She was using other people’s toilets. They’re not at the portaloo stage. Yet. In the meantime, we rock on with council repairs. While you’re waiting for repairs, you can either wear crap, or handle it. Probably go for wearing it myself.

 

Good news: the council found a flat for you. Bad news: disabled people such as yourself can’t get to it

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Haven’t decided if this one is council pratfall or farce:

We return to N, the homeless, disabled, single mother of 2 and domestic violence alumna whose hopes of liberation from her one-room homelessness hostel hovel I’ve been writing about for nearly a year.

Given that absolutely nothing ever changes for N, I do think I’ll be writing about her situation for whatever timeframe constitutes forever these days – until we’re all taken out by the next cantering microbe, or the sun brings the incineration timetable forward, etc. Can’t say I want the world to end as a climate-blasted fireball, but on the bright side, that would break a few stalemates.

N has been stuck in that one shabby hostel room – beds, “living” area, personal belongings and the family all crammed in it – for 3 whole years. Councils leave homeless families in these dreadful places for aeons now. I think the basic government idea is that at some point during a family’s incarceration in them, one-room bedsit/cage hostel arrangements like N’s will evolve from emergency accommodation to coffin, thus ending a massively-underfunded council’s duty to that particular family and freeing up space for the next doomed group. You do hear people in these places say they’d prefer death to another day in their hutch.

Buggy wheels against a lift wall

Image: double buggy absolutely not going to fit in the lift

Unfortunately, N has longer to go in hers. She’s just had another good news-bad news week on the liberation front.

The good news was that her council said it had a flat for her to move into. The bad news was that she couldn’t get to it. It wasn’t on the ground floor and the lift was too narrow for her buggy, or her walking aid. She took the pictures that I’ve posted in this article.

N can’t walk without the buggy to lean on, or her walking aid.

A friend went upstairs and took pictures of the corridor-balcony outside the flat (see video). This balcony was very narrow indeed. There was no room for the buggy or walking aid there.

Councils are meant to check places out before offering them to homeless people, but as housing officers have told me, we’re long past the golden age when councils had staff, time and money for handy initiatives for homeless and/or homeless disabled people. The curtain has drawn on those slightly more favourable eras. Another few years and there’ll be nobody around who actually remembers them.

So – back to the hostel N goes, for another stint of winter captivity and watching her own mental health tank, etc. Such is housing in our glorious modern world. Not too many at the renting end are winning. Even people who aren’t homeless can’t find places to rent unless they hand all their money to a letting agent for superior position in the stampede.

Meanwhile – adequate government funding for councils for housing is a dream you can get tired of trying to have. Jeremy Hunt gears up for Austerity 2 and you find yourself struggling to feel it. More and more people will be asking councils for housing help as the renting and cost of living crises crack on. You kind of hope that people don’t know what awaits.

 

Austerity the sequel: how to rub out sick and disabled people who survived the first round

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Another morning at Stockport jobcentre! – and straightaway, a reminder that energy companies have been trying to freeze some groups of people to death for a while – ie before this year, when energy companies decided to line up the rest of us.

I’m speaking to Chris, who is in her 50s. Chris has heart problems, diabetes and COPD. She has spent time in homeless hostels in the last few years.

Like many people at the jobcentre at the moment, somewhere in her mind, Chris lives on tenterhooks wondering who will finally rub her out: her energy company, or the DWP. Could be a dead heat, of course. They’re both putting a lot into it.

Chris’ energy company is currently hoovering money out of her paltry benefits for arrears repayments that she ran up when she had a place to live. Energy prices have long been out of Chris’s reach (I’ve written before about people in this situation) – upshot being that Chris is used to approaching winter in the crash position.

Which is exactly what she is doing now. “I’ve got no gas at the moment, because they’re taking £10 a week arrears off me, as well as it [prices] going up. So, I can’t afford gas.” Can’t say this bodes well for someone with a serious lung condition, but I can absolutely say that news of Chris’ situation will be music to Tory ears. This winter is their big chance to finish off a few of the poverty-stricken sick and disabled people who’ve somehow managed to cling on through Austerity One. Infamous leaky bumzit Jeremy Hunt knows perfectly well that these people are not going to survive Austerity Two and energy price rises, even if they’d really like to. But there we go. Such is austerity in the Tory mind. What’s a few more bodies on the pile.

For now, we can all surely agree that Chris and everyone at her end of late-capitalism’s great washout starts the new price cap era absolute miles behind. After that, I guess it’s just a matter of how long her lungs last.

Of course – the DWP is also busy lining Chris up for a hearse. She was getting sickness benefits, but then some wag in the department sent her for a work capability assessment and the DWP decided she was fit for work. Genius.

Chris didn’t appeal this decision, because she was worried that she wouldn’t have any money while she appealed. She didn’t know what to do, or who to ask, so “I just took it… I was in a homeless unit and if I wasn’t getting money, it wouldn’t be paid for, because they are large amounts, the rent.” So, now Chris spends her days coughing her way up the street to the Restart building for various useless back-to-work courses. Things are definitely going to end well for her.

BRING ME MY GUILLOTINE.

Homeless and being tortured by your council? Great, isn’t it.

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Today’s post is an update on N, a homeless disabled woman with an abusive ex partner and 2 little kids. I’ve been writing about N’s situation for most of this year – key takeaway being that I’ll need to write a lot more if we’re measuring success by the speed with which N’s council has pulled finger to help her.

N and her family have been stuck living in a single room in a London homelessness hostel for 3 years – beds, living area and things, belongings, and N and her kids all crammed into one room. You can imagine how agreeable these living arrangements are. Even if you really like your kids, you would probably decline an offer to spend eternity caged in one room with them.

Compounding N’s undesirable setup, though, is her council’s odd taste for mental torture. N was placed in the hostel by her council 3 years ago, because she was homeless. They should have at least moved her to a temporary place with an extra room or 2 a few months after that, but she is still in the hostel.

That means it has been years now – day in and day out, living in that room, with nothing ever changing. To be fair, the council did break up the monotony late last year when they sent the then-pregnant N a letter to tell her they were going to chuck her onto the streets – ie evict her, etc. We can probably agree that that bit wasn’t boring. The council was going to evict N, because she had balked at accepting a temporary housing offer. She did that because the place the council showed her wasn’t secure enough to keep an aggressive and pissed-off ex-partner out. The council said they’d evict her for turning the place down. Long story short: after a torrent of pointed activist emails cc’d to the mayor, the council decided to park the eviction idea and leave N and her kids (including newborn) in the hostel for the time being.

Continue reading →

Disabled? Your council has decided you’re not any more. Praise the lord! and find your own housing.

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Today we’re taking a brief break from DWP ballsups to talk about council ones.

Readers of this site may remember a story I posted earlier this year about N.

N is disabled, homeless and a mother to 2 very young children. She’s another domestic violence alumni – domestic violence being a problem that the world probably needs to get round to addressing with something closer to urgency. Bet plenty more more women get smacked over as massive energy bills land. Problems like that inevitably end up being our fault.

On with the story. Several years ago, N’s London council placed her in one of its notoriously bad homelessness hostels and there N has languished. She has one shabby room where she and her kids live (“live” is the romantic word for it), eat and sleep. These single rooms in this hostel are the sort of cramped, airless and often baking hot places that you’d be fined for leaving a dog in, but are entirely acceptable for poor families for years on end.

Still, hanging on even to this hovel has been a challenge for N – an unfair one, needless to say. At the end of last year, the council informed a then-pregnant N that she’d be evicted from the hostel, because she’d turned down a temporary flat the council had offered. N had good reason to turn the flat down – it was a ground floor place with a flimsy front door and an overgrown yard in which a pissed-off ex could lie in wait for the woman who’d dared to get a non-molestation order against him. N was too scared of her ex to tell the council any of this. So, she was still facing eviction when she gave birth. She was also whatsapping me and another housing activist about it from the delivery suite. Seemed a new low to me, but I can be slow to move with the times.

Anyway, we can probably put that unpleasantness behind us, because the council has since moved into a new field – miracle healing. Until now, as a lifelong atheist, I have tended to take the long view of this corner of the action, but maybe this will be the time when things finally take off.

Last week, an officer rang N (who is still languishing in the hostel) to say that N would have to accept a 2nd-storey flat with no lift if nothing else was available – this is even though N can’t climb stairs. Continue reading →

Do letting agents discriminate against benefit claimants up north or are they as shite as in London

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Well.

A month or so ago, I rang some East London letting agents to ask if they would let flats to N, a single mother who’d pay her rent with universal credit. I explained that N was homeless, living in an emergency hostel with her 2 very young children, and in need of a 2-bedroom flat in the local area.

Readers of this site will know that I had high hopes which were met a bit lower. It is illegal now for letting agents to refuse to take benefit claimants onto their books, but letting agents also know very well that their landlords would rather bulldoze a flat than see a benefit claimant in it. When a benefit claimant calls, they must achieve a delicate straddle.

Gives them a good stretch anyway. The London agents I called were enthusiastic – one almost bodily from the sounds of it – about tenants who claim benefits. They said that N absolutely could register at their agencies.

Things peaked about there, though. The feeling among these agents was that after N registered with them, her best option was absolutely to give up. Hand on heart, these agents said – they would never reject N themselves, but as for asking their landlords… well, probably not worth it even for the laugh, really. Landlords demanded rich guarantors and upscale tenants, and would generally only let a single mother into one of their flats to mop it. What could you do, etc, etc.

Which is not to say these London letting agents were totally out of helpful suggestions. Far from it. Sure, London and London landlords might be a stretch, but the dream didn’t have to end there. Wouldn’t N be perfectly suited to a gumtree landlord and a flat in one of those out-of-London, up-North hellholes where the standards and hope are as meagre as the gene pool? – one of those timeworn places where everyone’s still paid in salt or buttons.

As luck would have it, I live in a such a place myself and I am always buoyed by a London endorsement, so I sat down straight away to ring up some Stockport and Manchester letting agents.

Continue reading →

Do letting agents still discriminate against benefit claimants? Of course not! Well – kind of. Well – yes.

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One way to piss away a half-hour if you’ve stalled on your pandemic hobbies: ring a few letting agents and ask if they take registrations from people who claim benefits.

It is unlawful now for letting agents to discriminate against people who claim benefits – a ruling which presents awesome chances to get agents on the phone and listen to them try to get round it.

I did this on Friday afternoon on behalf of N, a homeless mother of 2 whose story I’ve been documenting. N is the woman who in earlier this year was trying to stop her council from evicting her and her 2 kids from their homelessness hostel even as she was in hospital giving birth to her second.

The good news is that the council seems to have parked the Let’s Evict A Woman And Newborn Into the Snow idea. Probably a good shout.

The less good news is that this returns N to the part in the Ask Your Council For Housing Help process where homeless people must impress council officers by performing useless self-help homefinding activities.

Chief among these, of course, is the inevitable council instruction to the homeless person to ring around local letting agents to find ones who accept benefit claimants onto their books and who have properties that claimants can afford. I imagine that current statistics show that benefit claimants have a better chance of winning a house than finding a private landlord who will rent them one, but through the motions we must go.

And went.

I rang 3 East London agents on Friday afternoon and am happy to report that there has been a degree of evolution since discrimination against benefit claimants became illegal. In the good old days – pre 2020 – letting agents would just tell you to piss off the second you said “benefits.” Things have advanced to the point where they start with an enthusiastic Yes, You Can Register! before they ask you fuck off to Gumtree.

Some ok chat between those points, though, and as I say, the approach to rejection has really improved. Letting agents have certainly learned to say the right thing before moving onto the reasons why they’ll have to do the wrong one (main reason: the landlords on their books say Absolutely Not to universal credit in as many words. They don’t say those actual words, because nobody is allowed to, but there’s more than one way to say No, as we’ll see. You do come away with a feeling that landlords would prefer to torch their property than see someone who receives universal credit on it).

But as I say – 10 points for agent attempts to find a line on this side of the law.

First agent I spoke to could not have sounded keener on the idea of signing up people who he knew his landlords would shoot him on sight for presenting.

“We do indeed!” he trilled when I asked if his agency accepted universal credit claimants onto its books. “In all honesty [I bet] – us, as a company, we got no problem…”

Sadly, what the company did have was a lengthy roster of landlords with a problem. In as many words, the agent conceded that he’d have a better chance of homing a carcass than someone who signed on. Landlords on agent books were just less likely to consider universal credit tenants, “for various reasons… [can’t get] insurances things on their mortgages, blah, blah, blah… but yeah.. happily take your details…”

Continue reading →

Begging a council not to evict you as you’re about to give birth. Behold! – the war against women

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Nobody wants to overblow these things, but there are times when council abuse of homeless women really goes next level.

You really do get standout moments.

Here’s the one I want to talk about: An activist friend and I in a whatsapp chat about emergency housing with a pregnant homeless woman while she was lying in a hospital bed waiting to be induced.

That’s how far homelessness goes these days. You can have a situation where a homeless woman lies in a delivery room wondering how she’s going to house the new baby in the weeks after it arrives. Thanks to whatsapp, people can still try to message about sorting things out while they’re starting labour, or counting contractions, or whatever it is. You see this and wonder if the basic human dignities for women are things of the past.

Probably, we never had them.

On with this story:

Before she gave birth, the woman, N, had been told by her council that she and her toddler would be evicted from their emergency hostel place at around the time the baby was due. Her husband – for those who feel that this is their business – was not contributing much. His main job in recent times had been to keep to terms outlined in a non-molestation order. I have a copy of the order here.

After a few taut emails with housing activists, the council agreed to put N’s eviction date back a month or so until her baby was born and then a bit perhaps. Good to find out there was a line, I suppose – that a council wouldn’t throw a woman with a newborn onto the streets. Useful intelligence, but it didn’t change the fact of the eviction, or N’s panic about being homeless and on the street with a toddler and a newborn baby.

Membership of our whatsapp group of 3 (me, the housing activist and N) put that panic into real time. Distanced by digital and disease we may often be, but we also have front-row seats to it all. You can join a homeless woman in her last weeks of pregnancy and then in a delivery room on your phone. She, in her turn, can message about a new application for homeless help from a council even in hospital.

N spent time in hospital before she gave birth. Stress caused by her pending eviction put her there. The week before her baby was born, N’s midwife sent her to A&E because the stress was affecting N’s blood pressure and her baby’s heartrate. It was somewhere around here that someone should have called time.

Here are some of our whatsapp messages:

January 2022:

Shall I start to do new Homelessness application while I’m here so they can process in time during my delivery as they (the council) r not agree to change there decision. Also make sure they will provide me with further temp accommodation.

Friday I have midwife appointment.

 

January 2022

Hi Kate this is for u, as I told u last Friday I went in emergency…

(“Triage today for review of hypertension, maternal and fetal tachycardia,” read N’s hospital notes. “High risk pregnancy.” “Very stressed with limited support at home.”)

 

January 2022

Can u send it please (an email to the council to ask for an urgent zoom meeting to talk about N’s nearing eviction). I’m in hospital. Induction. Soon I will deliver baby.

Tell you what.

———————————————————-

I talk as though whatsapping about council meetings with a homeless woman who is hooked up to heart machines and/or in labour is extreme. It isn’t extreme. What else would anyone expect. This is what it is like. There are people all over who can’t find and/or pay for a home.

The point is that there is no break from it. There’s no night off with a box set, or civilised day of wind-down and rest if, say, you’re about to give birth. There’s no way to keep the world out. People who are homeless don’t get time off from it, even when they’re in hospital with a baby crowning. There’s no such thing as a breather – not in low-income land.

All day every day people are filling in forms to try to prove to councils they have nowhere to go, or they’re searching for landlords who will rent to people who claim benefits (good luck with that), or they’re trying to find places with rents that they can meet with universal credit (good luck with that as well).

And during all of this: people must navigate a delicate relationship with the council that they hope will help them with emergency housing and then, if they’re lucky, something longer-term.

It’s a delicate relationship, because councils are always looking to end it. That’s because stone-broke councils can’t afford to house everyone who turns up homeless at the real or virtual town hall. They just about can’t afford to house anyone who turns up homeless at the real or virtual town hall. The maths is simple from there. Councils cut costs by cutting the number of homeless people they have to help. They do this by tripping people up with the rules. People who don’t know the traps fall into them.

Which was exactly what happened to N. Her “mistake” was to say No to a temporary flat that the council said she should move into from her hostel. Councils can say that they don’t have to help you if you say No to a reasonable home.

N had a good reason to turn this flat down. It seemed a place that her ex could get into. The flat was on the ground floor and the front door wasn’t strong. The building was ringed with thick scrub and grass. N told me that she didn’t feel it was secure. You could say that it looked a good bet for a man who might want to lie in wait for his ex-partner and then shoulder through a flimsy front door to tear a non-molestation order up in her face.

The problem was N didn’t tell the council about that. People fear fallout if they drop others in it. N did tell the council when her relationship broke up. It doesn’t seem that anyone asked for more details. Even if they did, this is hardly a scene where trust abounds and people feel they can open up. Councils have neither the time to draw people out, nor the resources to protect them. They don’t generally ease women into a homelessness office and slowly build up trust over a fortnight’s coffee afternoons.

There’s also the general fact that women with children worry about telling councils that things have become dangerous on the home front. Absolutely everyone you speak to worries that councils will send social services in to take the kids into care if councils think the children are threatened. That can be as much of a concern as the aggressive partner.

Whatever the case, this council stuck to its decision to evict N when the baby was born.

And how. “Stuck to its decision” doesn’t begin to describe this council’s ardour for this eviction decision. They literally couldn’t be prised from it. As time went on, the council’s commitment to eviction seemed to move from the procedural to the sadistic. The council refused to back down even when N began to beg.

Fearing eviction, N said that she’d take the flat after all (and, by definition, the fears that went with it). Too Late, the council said. N asked the council for a formal review of the decision to cut her loose. The council did that and stood firm.

The council did throw N the earlier-mentioned small bone just before she gave birth – they said they would delay the eviction for a bit. They also told her she could take comfort in the fact that eviction takes a while to go through the courts, so she could enjoy a few months in the hostel with her new baby before they were chucked out.

From an officer email:

“I have spoken to the service and it is clear that delaying possession proceedings until after you have given birth provides a much longer period of adjustment than it seems as the Council will need to obtain a possession order from the County Court which is currently taking more than three months.

In the interim the Council will provide appropriate support for you to investigate your housing options…

I hope that the above provides some reassurance…”

So, that was nice.

————

N’s baby was a girl. She had to spent her first week in a hospital on a monitor. Which was somewhere to live, I suppose.

From our whatsapp group:

January 2022

Just delivered my baby… (picture). Have you heard anything from council…

 

February 2022

I’m still in hospital. My baby on monitor (picture)

I asked:

Is she ok?

N said:

I don’t know

Link to download of my book

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People have been asking for copies of my book as the previous pdf link has expired.

Have set the pdf here for download. Many thanks to everyone who has downloaded and read it. The response has been incredibly encouraging.

The book collects interviews with people who have relied on the benefits system in austerity and goes behind the scenes to jobcentre & homelessness meetings to show people’s experiences of the austerity state.

 

 

 

Homelessness: the plague that voters are happy to live with

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They say that you should keep to your routines in lockdown, so I’ve been getting at Newham council about standards in temporary housing for homeless people – and going nowhere much.

Habit aside, there has been a point to this often-pointless exercise: to ask what the council was doing to protect homeless families from coronavirus in crowded temporary housing such as the Brimstone House homelessness hostel in Stratford.

I recently wrote about Marsha D, a 30-year-old homeless woman who lives with her 6-year-old daughter in a single room in that hostel. The two share that small space and one bed in it – a living arrangement that is replicated across the hostel and across emergency and temporary housing everywhere. They have their own tiny bathroom and kitchen. It’d be hard to isolate in those. Theirs is the sort of cheek-by-jowl setup that would have any contagion licking its lips. Even in so-called normal times, people feel entombed in such places. When there’s a plague on and a stay-at-home lockdown in place, people in these hostels talk about being buried alive.

You should hardly pin hopes on a virus, but I have wondered if this one might spark new sympathy (or even some sympathy) for people who must live in these hellholes.

If covid doesn’t do it, god knows what will. For a very long time now, the problem has been to convince the wider world to give a damn about homelessness, or, even, to convince the wider world to give enough of a damn to change things – to really change things, that is. For all that homelessness is seen as a plague in its own right, it still feels like one that the world is happy to live alongside – certainly one that Tory-voting members of the world are happy to live alongside and even enjoy. You don’t have to be too plugged in to know that this is because that for generations now, many voters have felt that homelessness and poverty are beneath sympathy: the individual’s fault. End of.

Government knows that all too well. There can be no doubt that Boris Johnson and his cabinet of sociopaths have felt tremendously comfortable about losing interest in homeless people who must live sardined into tiny spaces as a killer virus rampages through cramped populations. A whole month has passed since government said it would publish new covid guidance for providers of homelessness hostels and day centres, so I think I’ll stop looking for it. They’ve either hidden it really well, or not bothered to write it.

As for government funding for councils during the outbreak crisis – do me a favour. The bits of money and advance payments that government has chucked at councils to sort out a morass of covid-era housing, homelessness and council tax problems barely amount to a fistful of change when you remember the billions that Tory-led governments have removed from councils in austerity (pdf) – a carnage of cost-cutting, mass redundancies (often of experienced staff) and anti-social-security policies which caused the homelessness problems for people in Marsha’s situation in the first place. As everyone on the scene knows, housing and support needs caused by welfare reform have skyrocketed as funding to meet those needs has disappeared.

The most you can say about this government’s last-minute covid-inspired overtures to councils is that they’re less shit than government’s most recent foul insult to covid-era careworkers – the one where Matt Hancock actually tried to sell the idea that the careworkers who government have left working for poverty wages in a swamp of covid and corpses, and with no PPE, would enjoy the day more with a badge. It was hard to imagine how government could top that for repulsive empty gestures, but there have been attempts. One must be last week’s thanks-for-housing-the-1000s-of-rough-sleepers-that-government-created letter to council homelessness managers from Dame Louise Casey, the government’s homelessness “spearhead” (whatever the f that is). What an absolute pile. I can only imagine how thrilled council staff were to see that in their inboxes. Oddly, Casey’s letter didn’t mention the billions wiped from council budgets since 2010, or the experienced staff lost in that blitz, or the LHA caps, benefit caps, out-of-control market rents and Universal Credit delays that have pushed people out of their homes and into the gutter and the hostels where many still sit, waiting for covid. If lockdown lifts, let’s see Casey deliver those letters to frontline staff in person.

As for Newham and councils in general: I could get very sick of the charades on that front, too. I can tell you how those charades go, though, so let’s do that.

The whole moribund process usually starts with me interviewing a homeless family who have been living in a one-room hostel, or some temporary-housing hellhole for month, or a year, or 2, or 3 years, or whatever it is. Next, I’ll email Newham mayor Rokhsana Fiaz and Newham housing lead John Gray and ask what the council plans to do for that homeless family and how much longer the family should expect to languish in temporary housing squalor, etc. Next, there usually comes a lagtime, which Gray and I sometimes use to bitch at each other over email, or, on a couple of memorable pre-lockdown occasions, in person. At some point in this farce, I’ll usually throw in a question about the empty flats on Newham’s Carpenters estate. Carpenters estate residents were kicked out of their homes years ago to make room for a planned University College London campus which never materialised due to a host of planning and financial screwups. The fallout from that shambles goes on. Flats on the estate continue empty while people in Marsha’s situation grind on in Brimstone House. Continue reading →