Category Archives: Women

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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If austerity really is over (ha), everyone must benefit. That includes people we’ve been told to hate.

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Have been thinking about the much-discussed end to austerity and public sector cuts ever since the politically-resuscitated (regurgitated?) Michael Gove floated the concept: “we…. need to take account of legitimate public concerns about ensuring that we properly fund public services,” blah, blah, etc.

An end to austerity would be tremendous, of course. Can’t wait, etc. I only hope that EVERYONE gets to share in the largesse. The time has come to throw out poisonous notions of Deserving and Undeserving poor. God knows that’s achieved nothing apart from division. Everyone is deserving and must be seen as such. When I say “everyone,” I mean even people who successive governments have made very sure are unpopular with taxpayers. “Everyone” must include the people that the Daily Mail et al like to dismiss as dead weight – the single mums, the people with drug and alcohol problems and people who don’t, for whatever reason, work (or vote). I tend to feel that when the political class talks about righting austerity’s wrongs, the recurring themes are stagnant pay, and funding the NHS, the police, social care, education and housing. Fair enough. Those services are vital.

There are other people, though. There are people whose lives have been wrecked by public sector cuts – particularly because the DWP and council frontline services they must use have been outsourced, reorganised, and/or cut past function – but who are less electorally pertinent than, say, nurses and the police. These are the people who have been abandoned to our era’s most spectacularly callous and defective bureaucracies. These are people who are judged harshly for their circumstances and often left with nothing to live on as a result. I trust our new wave of Tory austerity-relaxers will throw them a lifeline as well. Bit more carrot and less stick, and all that.

It is with this in mind that I take you towards Oldham now, to the South Chadderton foodbank where I spent several hours last week. I talked there with people who’d come in for food parcels because they’d run out of money.

I spoke with two women at length. One woman had lost income through benefit sanctions. The other had no income, because she’d failed a sickness benefit assessment, was mired in appeals and had no idea what to do next. Both women were having a hell of a time trying to make sense of the endless letters, cut income and confusing instructions that people are given by the DWP in our punitive and unhelpful austerity age. These people could have been anyone, really, in the sense that I see this confusion and incomprehension all the time.

The first woman was a young mum called Emma.

Emma was 31. She had three kids aged 13, five and six months. She told me a story I’ve heard variations on before. Emma said that her Income Support payments had been reduced, because she’d missed two work-related interviews at her jobcentre. I found out later that these interviews may not even have been mandatory. This sort of thing happens, though. People are told by jobcentre staff that they have to attend work activities or courses when they don’t. I’ve seen that more than once over the years, as I say. It’s the sort of thing I mean when I say that DWP systems are a shambles.

Emma said she’d missed the workforce interviews because she didn’t realise they were taking place.

“They’re every three months now (the work-related interviews at the jobcentre). They used to be every 12 months. It’s if you miss the appointments, that was why…

“I thought they were going to sanction me. I thought they were going to stop all my money, but they haven’t. They’ve just reducted [sic] so much money off of my benefits.”

Emma said that she hadn’t appealed the decision to cut her benefits, because she didn’t know that she could appeal.

“They said when I went to the jobcentre, when you’ve attended your workforce interview, they [the payments] will go back to normal.”

Emma doubted these workforce interviews would lead to work. I’ve attended enough of these work-related meetings to doubt the point of them myself. At best, work-related interviews are box-ticking exercises: proof by jobcentres for the DWP that people who sign on have been encouraged to look for jobs. At worst, they’re a means of keeping benefit recipients on a short leash – of making people return repeatedly to their jobcentres where they know they’re being watched. Here’s a story I did about such pointless demands being put on people who signed on at the North Kensington jobcentre: a place that was harsh on benefit recipients in my experience and that is in the mainstream news re: signon demands at the moment after the Grenfell disaster.

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

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

Image: dead mouse in the bathroom

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

Image: dead cockroaches in the flat

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

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

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

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

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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 →