Category Archives: Women

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or what? I thought.

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

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

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

The very personal information you must give in public if you need state help

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A short post on the state and petty humiliations:

Posted below is a list of questions taken from a recorded conversation between a woman affected by the recently-lowered benefit cap and a Basildon council housing options officer last week.

This woman is already in significant rent arrears because of the lowered cap. She went to Basildon council to ask what would happen if she couldn’t pay the arrears (the answers, which you probably can guess already, are at the end of this post). I went with her.

Basildon has an open-plan public services hub: council services, the library and the jobcentre all in one enormous ground-floor room. Security guards roam the place. You take a ticket and wait for your number to come up on a computer screen.

“There’s no privacy,” the woman I was with said when we got there.

She was right. There wasn’t. There were a few private rooms off to the side here and there, but you weren’t invited to use one. There were open cubicles all over the place across the floor. You could hear absolutely everything that was going on in the ones around you. At one point, we sat next to a guy who was explaining to an officer why he was struggling to pay his council tax. We might as well have been attending his appointment with him. We could hear every single word that he said. Continue reading →

Benefit cap arrears and eviction threats for women and children. Already.

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Another short post on impossible situations:

Here’s a rent arrears demand recently received by a woman who lives in a Basildon flat with her three young children (the arrears have increased since she received this letter).

It appears these arrears have come about because of the recently-lowered benefit cap.

This woman’s benefits exceeded the Out of Greater London limit of £384.62 by about £100 a week. As a result, at the end of last year, her housing benefit was cut by about £100 a week from about £188 a week to to £87 a week (think the sums are correct, looking at the paperwork. Give me a shout if you think the totals need looking at. Maths problems with these things are not at all uncommon).

Basildon council recently gave this woman a discretionary housing payment of £20 a week to cover some of the rent shortfall. That helps a bit, but only a bit. She only gets the DHP for the short term, too. After that, she either finds the full whack each week, or moves house again (this time with a serious arrears history) and takes the kids out of school again (she was recently in temporary accommodation in another borough)… or she ultimately gets evicted, I guess:

“I don’t know what to do,” she says.

I don’t really know what to do either, if I’m honest. Which is not particularly helpful.

What I do know is that I spend an awful lot of time these days with people in different parts of the country who show me demands for rent money they can’t pay and/or which say court and eviction are on the cards. As I write this, an email about a looming eviction in Haringey has landed in my inbox. I go to foodbanks and foodbank-lunches and inevitably end up talking to at least one person who is clutching a folder of letters about rent arrears.

Continue reading →

How the Universal Credit bureaucracy can screw your chance of paying rent

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This story will give you an idea of some of the reasons why people can end up with rent arrears when they’re trying to set up a Universal Credit claim.

It should also give you an idea why some jobcentre meetings drive me to the brink.

So.

I recently attended a meeting at Croydon jobcentre with a woman who has been trying to sort out the housing component of her Universal Credit claim for several months (I’ve posted a short transcript from the meeting below).

You’ll see from the transcript that the meeting was ludicrous.

The problem was paperwork, as it often is.

The jobcentre had told the woman to bring in her tenancy agreement and bank statements to make her Universal Credit housing component claim. The woman did exactly that. She had all her papers ready to go. We were expecting plain sailing from there. Unfortunately, that wasn’t quite what we got.

The jobcentre adviser began by accepting the woman’s tenancy agreement and bank statements.

Then, the adviser suddenly decided that the jobcentre couldn’t accept the papers. The whole thing was utterly bizarre.

The problem was that the name of the rent recipient on the bank statements did not match the landlord’s name on the tenancy agreement.

The explanation for this was simple. The names were different because the rent was paid to the letting agent who managed the property for the landlord. The agent’s name appeared on the bank statements. The landlord’s name appeared on the tenancy agreement. This happens from time to time. I’m pretty sure that it’s happened to me in the past. There was another small problem – the agents hadn’t written the monthly rent total on the tenancy agreement.

None of this seemed a major obstacle to start. The jobcentre adviser could see from the bank statements that rent was being paid each month – a point the adviser happily conceded at first.

“I’m going to accept [the bank statements], because you’ve got a standing order… you wouldn’t be paying the money for any other reason.” (The woman who was applying for the housing component has been paying the rent with the help of a friend. That was the only way she could stay housed and avoid arrears. She’d waited weeks for her UC to begin, as people must).

Then suddenly, the adviser decided that the jobcentre wouldn’t accept the papers after all.

“We can’t progress the housing payment until all the documents are in order. They are not in order at the moment.”

“This says…[a different name for the landlord]. No, this is not going to be good enough.”

“I’m really sorry about all of this, but this isn’t ….the details you provide us have to be precise and they have to agree with what’s on here.”

“I’m going to have to make you another appointment.”

Continue reading →

Giving up on a PIP application – the useless application process is just too difficult

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Here’s a situation I’ve dealt with a couple of times now:

I’ve just got off the phone with a woman who has a schizophrenia diagnosis. She has struggled with her mental health condition over the years and has been sectioned in the past.

She told me that she’d cancelled her Personal Independence Payment face-to-face assessment this week because she was too frightened and stressed to attend. She didn’t know what to do next.

Her partner, who has an Asperger’s diagnosis and severe depression and anxiety, has had a terrible time as he’s gone through the PIP application process this year (you can read that story here and here). His PIP face-to-face assessment was stopped by a Capita assessor who could decided that the applicant couldn’t cope with the face-to-face meeting. No adjustments were made for the applicant’s mental health and no alternatives were put in place so that he could get PIP. His Disability Living Allowance was stopped before a decision was made about his PIP application. Six weeks later, he found out that his PIP application had been denied – on the grounds that he didn’t comply at the face-to-face assessment. This was ridiculous. Then, his Mandatory Reconsideration – the DWP’s review of its own decision to deny him PIP – was carried out without his input or knowledge. His partner was worried about having the same experience and meeting with the same assessor who stopped his assessment (she was told to attend the same assessment centre). So she cancelled her appointment in a panic this week. If things can’t be fixed with a home assessment, or a paper-based assessment if that’s even doable, she’ll lose money that she can’t afford to lose. She’s worried about asking her GP to support a home visit application, because the letters she needs cost £15 a go.

This MUST happen all the time now – people pulling out of benefit applications because they can’t handle the process and they haven’t got the money to pay for the medical paperwork that they need. Another real problem is that there’s nobody really left to help people navigate these terrible benefit applications and the endless calls and paperwork that form such a large part of the application shambles. The CAB is almost impossible to use in the part of the country that these people live in (it’s difficult to use in other parts of the country too, as I’ve reported before). Appointments are scarce, queues are long and ongoing help for complex situations is hard to land. The local welfare advice centre is about to stop supporting cases because the Housing Association that funded the service is pulling the money. This woman did not have anyone to accompany her to the PIP face-to-face assessment she was meant to attend this week. Not so long ago, she might have had some help. A few years back, these two people had a social worker and a local mental health support facility that they could attend. Those services have disappeared.

Their already-small income is disappearing too. I realise that is the government’s aim, but that hardly improves things.

Pity Labour can’t pull its finger out and get on with being some sort of opposition. All these situations drag on and on while that party amuses itself with leadership contests, or whatever the hell it is doing. People in need have been abandoned to a benefits application system that they can’t use. Nobody seems able to stop it.

Nobody believes anybody now, even on DV issues. More stories from the jobcentre.

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This one got sorted out in the end – but talk about having to work to get there.

The story below should give you an idea of the way that women who say they are threatened with domestic abuse can be treated. It should also give you an idea of the contempt that some advisers feel – and show – to some benefit claimants:

Not so long ago, I attended a jobcentre with a woman who had missed her JSA signon meeting that week, because she’d been at court to try and organise an order against a threatening ex-partner. She had to report to the jobcentre to explain the missed meeting and to find someone to sign her on.

The adviser we saw really did seem to want to make things as difficult as possible. Her attitude was hard to fathom, even allowing for the fact that there can be considerable dislike and mistrust between some advisers and some claimants. From the start, the jobcentre adviser presented obstacles, not solutions. Her tone was unpleasant. She may have been very stressed (she mentioned that she had to cover the whole floor that day), but still. Things should not operate this way. The tone was personal and dismissive. If someone comes in talking about court orders and injunctions, their benefit signon problems should really be addressed as a matter of priority. The jobcentre can sort out any details and paperwork it needs at a later date. That ought to be the system, no matter who an adviser is dealing with.

Continue reading →

The future will be wrecked for generations while women and little kids live like this

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Think this fractured society will be healed soon? It won’t be while women and little kids live in the rotten conditions described below, and with no way out. Nobody builds a united future when young families must live in chaos and when the social security systems that should support them have been destroyed:

On Monday last week, young mothers who live with their kids in cramped single rooms in the Welwyn Garden City Boundary House homelessness hostel protested at Waltham Forest Council about their living conditions. All the women are homeless. All were placed in the Boundary House flats by Waltham Forest Council. The accommodation at Boundary House is horribly cramped and isolated. Placements at Boundary House are only meant to be short-term. Most of the women I’ve spoken with this year say their councils told them that they’d be in Boundary House for a couple of months at most – but some have been stuck in Boundary House for more than two years (Newham council used to place homeless families in Boundary House as well). The rooms look like this:

flat_interior_

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

It will surprise nobody to hear that relations between Boundary House residents and Waltham Forest council have reached breaking point. In the video below, you can see the women and council officers yelling at each other as the women descend on the council’s housing office to demand better housing and to make the very valid point that their living conditions are intolerable and that they need better housing:

Things are not generally good at places like housing offices and jobcentres these days, whether there’s a protest on or not. Furious homeless families and overstretched frontline staff have been abandoned to fight it out with each other in austerity. Shouting is not unusual. Desperation is certainly not unusual. Security guards are not unusual. When the mothers arrived, the housing office was already very busy. Some people who were waiting to be seen even had their suitcases and belongings with them. I’ve seen that in a number of housing offices in the last year or so. This is how a lot of people live now, if “live” is the word:

Bags__

Bags_

There was a heavy security presence, as there often is at housing offices and jobcentres now. I’ve attended enough meetings at frontline offices to know that you get guards at these places whether there’s a protest on or not.

The Boundary House women have two major problems. The first is that their accommodation is unpleasant, but they must raise their small children in it. The second is that they know their chances of getting money together for anything better start to evaporate as soon as they arrive at Boundary House. The Boundary House women live with their children in small, single-room flats in the hostel. The families only have that one room. Beds, kitchen, clothes and belongings are all crammed into that single space. Each flat has a small, separate bathroom. People complain about cockroaches and woodlice – you can hear the women talking about that in the video above. The building itself is isolated. Boundary House is down a suburban side street. The walk to Welwyn Garden City train station takes a half-hour and from there, people face an expensive (around £300 to £400 a month) commute to London. Continue reading →

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

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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…

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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

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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.