Placed miles away in temporary housing and can’t afford the commute to work? Too bad.

Posted on April 26, 2016 by Kate B

My first outing on the Sentinel news blog:

Homeless mother of two Alicia Phillips explains how the housing crisis and an expensive commute from Boundary House – an isolated temporary accommodation hostel in Welwyn Garden City – are destroying her work and training options.

Alicia says that Waltham Forest Council told her she’d have to give up her job as a nursery nurse in London if the commute from Boundary House was too expensive and difficult.

This is how single mothers are punished in austerity. They’re actively relegated to a poverty trap. So much for Stephen Crabb’s fantasies about the government’s commitment to getting women out of that trap.

Read the rest here.

The one where the council officer hangs up the phone on a homeless woman…

Posted on February 17, 2016 by Kate B

SIGH.

Here’s an example of the struggle that people who are on the rough end of austerity have even to be heard. Thought I’d throw this one up there as just another example from the many I’m working through:

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to go in for an experiment of a kind. I sat with two women who live with their small children in temporary accommodation in Boundary House, a cramped Welwyn Garden City homelessness hostel, and called the Waltham Forest Council press office so that the women could respond directly to a press statement that the council had sent me about standards at Boundary House.

Waltham Forest Council sends homeless families to live in tiny, one-room hostel flats at Boundary House, sometimes for a couple of years at a time. Some families live four to a single-room studio flat. There are and have been all kinds of difficulties at Boundary House. Residents talk about overcrowding, problems with a lack of hot water, problems with security in the building – so, when I first wrote about the place, I sent questions about these sorts of issues to the Waltham Forest council press office. “We will investigate this further if full details are provided,” the council said in a line about the hot water. I saw that line kind of beaming out at me and I thought – Okay. I’ll read that as an invitation and take the council up on it. The hell with it. I’ll call the press office while I’m sitting with Boundary House residents and hand the phone to residents so that they can provide the press office with those “full details” to pass onto the housing department for resolution.

Some might say that it was unorthodox to ring the press office in that way, but I can’t say that I gave or give much of a stuff about that. Residents were saying then that calling the housing department with problems yielded poor results and I personally long ago reached the point where I’ll try anything to get any officer’s attention on these sorts of issues, so in I went. I thought residents might as well give the press office invitation to investigate “full details” further a whirl.

Alas, this idea tanked: the press office didn’t want to speak directly to Boundary House residents. It seemed the office would take details from me, but not from the residents, even though they were a) better acquainted with their own details than I was and b) sitting right there next to me and available to speak. I argued this toss backwards and forwards on the phone with one bloke for about ten minutes. And then, the kicker: when I handed the phone to Alicia Phillips, a young mother who’d been stuck living in one of these tiny, single-room flats in Boundary House with her two young children for two years and who wanted to pass on “full details” of her problems at Boundary House to the council, the press office bloke hung up the phone. I rang the council and ask for a callback, just in case the hanging-up had been some kind of terrible technical mistake. Alas, that callback never came. The press office emailed me after a while, saying that it was probably better if we stuck to their format for communications. Boo.

Here is a recording of the hanging up:

I thought that the hanging-up was off, to say the least. I thought it was off, even knowing the way that press offices operate. I had the pleasure (ahem) of a job as a council press officer back in the day, so I am familiar with the workings of the role therein: an officer takes questions from a journalist, seeks a response from the relevant council officers and councillors, polishes that response until it is beautifully smooth and about 98% meaningless, and then sends a final, finessed result to the journalist. You’ll hear the council say in the recording that I don’t understand how the system works, but I do. I really do. Been there, etc. I understand perfectly well that press officers don’t resolve problems, as such. They collate council responses to problems.

For what they’re worth. As a rule, these responses are completely useless (certainly, most of the ones I sent over the years in the job meant nothing to anyone. They were paper printouts and faxes then, too. I bet people just used them to line the bottoms of budgie cages). It’ll be news to nobody that press office statements are almost entirely concerned with defending a council’s actions and reputation, as opposed to prioritising and addressing the worries of service users. They’re almost admirable the way that they shine no light whatsoever on the situation that you’re trying to get to the bottom of. You really might as well stick a jpeg of a horse’s butt on the end of your article. Still they come, though, and still we ask for them. I vaguely remember being told at journalism school that you must always ask for a council or government department’s view in the interests of “balance.” I’ve stuck with that instruction for reasons that increasingly escape me. I find that as I age, my patience for some of the garbage I’m sent is wearing thin (you should see some of the drivel that the DWP press office has poured into my inbox over the years).

Continue reading →

Wonder how many women in austerity worry about their kids being removed

Posted on February 15, 2016 by Kate B

There is a quote below from one of the women I’ve been interviewing at Boundary House, a hostel for homeless families in Welwyn Garden City.

I’m publishing the quote here, because it’s the sort of comment that I’ve heard a lot in the past few years from women who are homeless and/or who are really struggling to make ends meet. They worry that their children will be removed if a council knows that they are struggling financially, or if they break down because they are under pressure and living in poor circumstances. I’ve written about this before: as I say, women have made this sort of comment to me over the years. People clearly believe that the threat of losing children is there. It is a thought and concern that they factor in:

“Like me and my children, we never had a house which is not overcrowded. Never. It has basically been like this a lot, but there was no support from council… Then, if I’ve gone crazy or something, then they would have taken my children away. That’s what I am saying. They draw you into this kind of situation, into this madness and then they say “Oh, you’re not a suitable mother. We’re going to take your children.”

I think about this a lot. I wonder how many people have this thought and concern in their heads. I wonder how many people decide never to challenge a council about their poor living conditions, or to never apply for, say, a discretionary housing payment to help make up their rent, because they don’t want to draw a council’s attention to their problems. For every woman I meet who has decided to protest about her living conditions, there must be plenty who have decided not to. Fear keeps people pretty quiet.

Posting here will less frequent for the next few months while I work on a case studies project. There will be more from this article in that project. You can still get in touch here.

March against the housing bill: Saturday 30 January

Posted on January 29, 2016 by Kate B

From Lambeth Housing Activists:

On Saturday 30 January 2016, thousands of people from across Lambeth and beyond will march on 10 Downing Street to oppose the Government’s Housing and Planning Bill.

The march, called by Lambeth Housing Activists, who are part of the Radical Housing Network, is the largest locally organised demonstration against the bill. The legislation will make finding and keeping an affordable house in London even more difficult for ordinary Londoners, and put and ends secure social housing.

The legislation:

· Abolishes new secure lifetime tenancies in social housing, replacing them with 2 – 5 year tenancies.

· Hits social housing tenants with a combined income of £40,000 or more (about two living wages) with a ‘pay to stay’ tax, to bring their rent up to market levels – in Waterloo this would be £26,000 per year on average.

· Forces local authorities to sell ‘high value’ properties when they become empty (this will apply to many Inner London homes).

The march will start from the Imperial War Museum at 12pm (Kennington Rd/Lambeth Rd SE1 6HZ). March to Cameron’s publicly funded home in Downing Street for 2pm.

This is how you and your kids can expect to live if you lose your home

Posted on January 24, 2016 by Kate B

These pictures were taken last week at a temporary accommodation hostel called Boundary House. The hostel is in Welwyn Garden City.

London councils like Newham and Waltham Forest send homeless families to live in this squalid place (I spoke with people from both places). Families with small children are packed in together in one room. We were showed around by Elina, 38. She lives in one room with her three young children. Two of the children are in school. Her youngest child is three. In that one room, there are four beds, a small kitchen, a table and everyone’s clothes and belongings hanging or lying where there is space. This is overcrowding to a very unpleasant degree. Five minutes in one room with that clutter closing in is all you need to understand why people in these chaotic, too-small spaces start to climb the walls. Claustrophobia doesn’t begin to describe it.

Photo credit: Snapsthoughts http://photos.snapsthoughts.com/

Elina was sent here to live by Newham council 18 months ago. “They said it would be for three weeks.” I spoke to another woman who lives in one of these rooms with her husband and two of her children. Her two elder children live in another room across the hall. They let us see their flat. Another person who lives in a room on the top floor said the family has a sick child who has had three operations. That person said there was no hot water in the flat. “I have to boil the kettle and lift it through my children to have a bath… I told them and they said because I’m on the top floor the pump doesn’t reach up to the top floor… My child is sick.”

Picture: used and stained mattresses dumped in a storage room. Elina said that she was told by building managers to choose one of these mattresses when she needed a new one.

Photo credit: Snapsthoughts http://photos.snapsthoughts.com/

The costs for living here are prohibitive. These letters show that the cost for one of these rooms gets up past £1300 a month if you include the service charge.

The service charge intrigues me. All these costs intrigue me. I wonder how much property management companies are paid for running these places, or whatever it is that they do? Boundary House residents say that nobody takes responsibility for problems or repairs. This hostel is apparently managed for councils by Theori, a property management outfit of some description (you’ll see that Theori is described in the letter above as “The Proprietor of the accommodation.”) Residents say that nobody seems to be doing much by way of managing or propriet-ing: all they’re aware of is a monumental backwards and forwards exercise in Council-Theori finger-pointing. “You ring the council and you ring Theori. Nothing gets done.”

I get where they are coming from on that. I rang Waltham Forest Council and Theori on Friday for responses to the problems raised by Boundary House residents. This didn’t go too well. Theori said they couldn’t find a manager to talk to me right then. I left my number in case they found one later. I presume they didn’t, because nobody called back. I also rang the Waltham Forest Council press office and spoke to an officer there. He told me to email my questions through and gave me an email address. I sent the questions. The council didn’t respond, or even acknowledge the email. As for Newham Council – sadly, the Newham Council press office stopped talking to me a while ago when I was writing about the Focus E15 mothers’ campaign (“the Council’s communications team will not be continuing an ongoing dialogue with you”, etc, etc) so there wasn’t much point trying to make contact there. Boo.

A Newham council officer did attend a meeting with Boundary House residents on Thursday, though, after pressure from the tenants. I sat in on that meeting. Residents were furious and depressed, really. The officer said that their tenancies (or licences or agreements – whatever they’re called) at Boundary House were to end and that people would be rehoused. He obviously didn’t hold out much hope for decent housing options, though. He talked about a near-impossible private rental market and said that the council couldn’t house people in places that they couldn’t afford.

Okay. A few points for now. The main one is that this is the way a lot of people live now – families with little kids stuck in one far-too-small room in dirty, unkempt and unsafe hostels. Anyone can walk into Boundary House from the street (and people do walk in off the street, residents say. They’ve come in and found drinking parties taking place on the stairs). There are kids of different ages sitting on beds in one cramped room trying to do homework. Little kids have to try and sleep while older children are still wandering around. Clothes are damp and rooms are littered with belongings. There’s nowhere to store things properly. People can’t get basics like decent hot water.

I’ve seen this sort of thing a number of times recently and I keep thinking – there must be a whole generation of little kids living and growing up in places like this now. You can blame the families for poverty if you want – and plenty of people want to do exactly that – but that is getting none of us anywhere. The fact is that housing is getting harder and harder to afford. Pointing the finger at people who can’t afford housing doesn’t change that central fact. Government may insist that it’s up to individuals to Work Hard and Take Responsibility and provide for themselves and their families and all the rest of it, but on we go anyway and people keep turning up with no place to live. Some people in this hostel are in work. Others are studying and volunteering. Some receive benefits. It hardly matters. Nobody has money. This is how the safety net looks when you find yourself without money. This is how it will look for you and your kids if you ever lose your job and the place you’re living in.

People need to start thinking about that and about the future we are creating. For all of us.

More photos here.

Update 27 January:

An email turned up yesterday from Waltham Forest council which said:

“In recent years Waltham Forest has placed an increasing number of homeless applicants in other areas. This is due to the acute shortage of available properties in inner London, caused by shifts in the housing market and changes to the welfare system. We work closely with managing agents on any issues that arise, and can offer specialist support to residents where necessary.”

and also that Boundary House:

“is not a hostel, but an apartment building.”

which made me laugh. I get this from time to time from councils and others – a huffiness about certain language, because that language doesn’t help to draw the picture that a council wants to. I think I will probably continue to refer to Boundary House as a hostel, if it’s all the same with WFC.

I’ll go back to residents with some of the other points in the council’s response. Much of the rest of the council’s response was a defense of the current arrangements. It occurs to me that the council only needed to send a one-line reply to this, really – something along the lines of “we’d better head up there and keep heading up there until people feel comfortable talking to us and things are sorted out.”

Join the march against the Housing Bill this Saturday 30 January. Start from Imperial War Museum 12pm (Kennington Rd/Lambeth Rd SE1 6HZ) and march to Cameron’s publicly funded home in Downing Street for 2pm. Find out more here.

Posting here will less frequent for the next few months while I work on a case studies project. There will be more from this article in that project. You can still get in touch here.

Join the Focus E15 campaign this Saturday: March Against Evictions!

Posted on September 17, 2015 by Kate B

From the Focus E15 Mothers’ campaign:

“It’s the second birthday of the Focus E15 campaign for decent housing.

Join campaigners this weekend as they march against evictions:

12pm Saturday 19 September 2015 at Stratford Park, West Ham Lane, London E15 4PT

Bring whistles, horns, sound systems, drums and pots and pans! We will not be cleansed and not be silenced!

The Focus E15 campaign was born in September 2013 when a group of young single mothers were served eviction notices after Newham council cut its funding to the Focus E15 hostel for young homeless people.

To make matters worse, Newham council had recently decided to prioritise access to social housing for people in work – a decision that effectively discriminates against single mothers and their children, who are being especially hit hard by the government’s public spending cuts and welfare reforms. When they approached the council for help, the mothers were advised that, due to cuts to housing benefit and the lack of affordable housing in London, they would have to look for private rented accommodation and were likely to be moved as far away as Manchester, Hastings and Birmingham if they wanted rehousing.

This attempt by Newham council to displace the mothers from London, removing them and their children from their families and local support networks, is just one example of a city-wide process of social cleansing, with low income people being forced to the fringes of London and beyond by soaring rents, benefit cuts and a shortage of social housing. This prompted the mothers to form the Focus E15 campaign, demanding access to decent ‘social housing not social cleansing’. Continue reading →

What exactly is the planned endgame for people in poverty? Permanent homelessness? Debtors’ jail?

Posted on August 7, 2015 by Kate B

I wonder.

The letter that you see on the page below is a demand for rent arrears money received recently by a very young Stratford woman I know. This young woman has been through the wringer on the emotional and domestic fronts this year. I’m not giving details here, but her situation has been very difficult. She’s had an experience that nobody would envy.

Financially, things are in tatters. Earlier this year, her benefits were stopped for a while and then reduced. Her housing benefit doesn’t cover her whole rent, there were payment problems a while back that nobody at this end entirely understands (I’ve looked through the relevant papers and I don’t get it), and she falls further behind in her payments each week. She will be evicted and made homeless unless her council and landlord can be talked around.

It seems unlikely that the council and her landlord will be talked around at this stage. You can see from the letter that her landlord wants £66 a week in payments towards her rent shortfall and arrears, and that eviction and homelessness are very much on the cards. That £66 is an impossible amount for someone whose weekly benefit payment is not much more than that. There’s more, too. Apparently, this young woman just heard that the DWP will start deducting money from her benefit each week for a loan repayment. She recently had a bailiff threat hand-delivered through the door for £746 for an old travel fine that she says wasn’t hers (you can see that demand below). It never stops – demand after demand for money, costs and god knows what else.

Needless to say, this young woman stopped coping with this situation a long time ago. She can’t respond to the torrent of mail, so she ends up responding to none of it. I see this time and time again. The problems get so big that people try to ignore them. The endless post goes unopened, calls are ignored and people fall further behind each day. I don’t know what the planned end game is for people in these situations. Permanent homelessness? Debtors’ jail? The workhouse? Can’t be anything good:

The point of this post? – to remind the world that people in these situations exist, even though government insists that they shouldn’t. Doesn’t matter if the electorate – or parts of it – voted for austerity and against social security. Doesn’t matter if government and the so-called opposition insist that people simply need to pull themselves together to get out of holes. Here people are all the same. Debts pile up, the bailiffs are always circling, court action is always on the horizon, and threatening letters cascade through the door. You either have the money, or the means, or even the mental health, I guess, to drag yourself out of breakdown, or you don’t. If you don’t, you sink. I suppose that’s the idea.

Support the Sweets Way occupiers as they resist eviction in court today

Posted on March 30, 2015 by Kate B

Update from Sweets Way campaigners:

The judge has just ruled against us! Full possession AND injunction! Property trumps people in court! Dangerous ruling! We won’t stop!

— Sweets Way Resists (@SweetsWayN20) March 30, 2015

BUT – It ain’t over yet. A new social centre has been set up just outside the injunction zone. Rock on.

So our social centre disappeared after court ruling, but a new 1 appeared just outside injunction zone! #StillHere! pic.twitter.com/ZBDt5LYjB4

— Sweets Way Resists (@SweetsWayN20) March 30, 2015

Well done those campaigners.

———————————————————–

Original post:

From Sweets Way Resists:

“We’re in court this morning fighting Annington Homes for our right to housing! They are not only demanding we leave our homes, but also trying to obtain an injunction to prevent us protesting on the estate.”

Come and show your support this morning (Monday 30 March):

9.30am
Barnet County Court, St Mary’s Court,
Regents Park Road, London N3 1BQ

Then afterwards with the residents…

https://www.facebook.com/events/433124830197068/

You can read more here about ways to support the protest.

The real scroungers: landlords hoovering housing benefit for disgusting places like this

Posted on March 26, 2015 by Kate B

Update 27 March: the state of this flat has been reported to Brent council. They said they will arrange an inspection.

————————

Look at the mould here:

This is a picture from the tiny “studio” flat currently occupied by Eddie (name changed), the 51-year-old man with learning difficulties I’ve been attending jobcentre meetings with. He’s being evicted from this place – a couple of us went with him to Brent council on Monday to start his homelessness application. Eviction or not, he needs to get out of this room fast. I understand that the council is organising properties for him to look at. He may end up out of the borough.

God only knows how many other people are living in places like this. Here’s the mould on the ceiling in the little entrance-bay in the flat:

This studio flat is purely revolting. It’s very small – there’s a bed and a small, filthy kitchen all shoved into one room, with a shower and toilet sort of clipped on at the back. There are mice. There are cockroaches. The mould you can see in the pictures. I took the pictures today when I went to meet Eddie to walk to his jobcentre signon appointment.

But here’s the thing. Eddie’s landlord is collecting £1000 a month in housing benefit for this place. I’ve seen Eddie’s housing benefit settlement papers for this year – £250 a week, which his papers confirm is paid to the landlord. Remember this next time you hear George Osborne yapping on about scroungers. It ain’t guys like Eddie who are taking the piss with their miserable weekly jobseekers’ allowances of about £71. The people who are having a very big laugh on the taxpayer are the landlords who hoover up thousands of pounds in housing benefit for crapholes like you see here. This is the kind of mould that causes serious health problems, surely. The air was rotten. I couldn’t wait to get out of the place. But there we are. This is the kind of environment that is considered perfectly acceptable for people with learning difficulties in our day and age.

Brent council has been in contact on twitter about the photos of the mould that I tweeted, so I’ll be sending a complaint and the photos through. This landlord needs to be taken out of circulation. He’s evicting Eddie and God knows what his plans are next for this flat. I suppose he could decide to put a family with very small children in this place to live with this mould. He could pick someone else on housing benefit who has no choice except to live like this. Who knows.

Video of the flat taken in June last year:

When exactly did it start being okay to treat people with learning difficulties like trash?

Posted on March 24, 2015 by Kate B

I wonder.

Here’s a story about one person who is caught in a sort of three-way systems meltdown. God only knows how many times this sort of situation is being replicated across the country:

Yesterday, I visited Brent Council with Eddie* (name changed), an unemployed 51-year-old Kilburn man who has learning and literacy difficulties. I’ve been accompanying Eddie to his various council and jobcentre meetings for months now. The whole thing has been a right eye-opener, for me at least. It has certainly opened my eyes to the various systemic meltdowns that austerity has left us with, and the people who are on the rough end of the whole shambles.

This guy definitely is at that rough end. Last time I wrote about Eddie, I explained how he’d been shouted at by a jobcentre adviser at his latest appointment. The adviser had signed him up for a work choice course without telling him what it was about, or how to organise his travel to it (it’s on the Caledonian Road somewhere) and then took exception when he started to complain. We’d both sat there as the adviser listed his sins (loudly) as the jobcentre saw them. No concession was made to his learning or literacy difficulties during that unpleasant exchange. The only reason that I’d cut that adviser any slack at all was that she’d been reasonable in the past and looked purely exhausted on the day of the yelling-match. Maybe she’d just been bawled out by some sanctions-happy manager who didn’t think she was hitting targets. I generally wonder where the PCS is at these moments. It’s pretty clear to me that some jobcentre workers are too stressed-out to cope a lot of the time (this adviser told me several months ago that back in the day, she saw about five JSA claimants a day. These days, she sees about 15). There certainly are some sadists working at jobcentres, but there are also people who try to be reasonable. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to be reasonable when you’re working in an utterly unreasonable, punitive, sanctions-driven workplace. Anyway – more on that particular situation soon. We’re picking it up with the jobcentre later this week.

Yesterday, we were at the Brent council offices. We were there because Eddie has another problem – he’s about to be evicted from the crummy studio flat that he’s been living in for a couple of years. He had a meeting with the council to try and get registered as homeless. Eddie isn’t too worried about leaving the studio flat as such and you wouldn’t blame him for that if you saw the place. “Studio” is too romantic a word for it. “Hovel” would be closer to the mark. You can see that in the video here (I took this in about June last year, so the place has deteriorated even further since then):

Continue reading →