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.

Work programme provider: we know jobsearch & Jobmatch are pointless, but do them anyway

Posted on March 9, 2015 by Kate B

Thought I’d throw this recording out there.

Here’s a little more evidence that the DWP and its work programme providers are perfectly aware that JSA jobsearch and signing-on regimes are not about helping people into work. At all. Those regimes exist only to force people through more and more hoops to keep claiming JSA.

In the recording below (made in mid-2014), you’ll hear a Reed work programme adviser tell me and Angela Smith that Angela needn’t worry too much about the jobs she selected to apply for in Universal Jobmatch, or whether or not those jobs were right for her. (Angela has a Master’s degree and now works as a support officer. She has cerebral palsy. She was signing on for JSA at the time of this meeting). Anyway – the adviser said Angela needn’t worry about the jobs she applied for in Jobmatch, because getting work wasn’t really the point of the Jobmatch exercise. The DWP didn’t care whether or not people got interviews and actual jobs when they selected jobs posted in Jobmatch.

“That’s not part of the remit at all,” the adviser said. All the DWP cared about was evidence that a JSA claimant had fulfilled their jobsearch requirements – that is, applied for an agreed number of jobs every week, or fortnight, or however often it was. You can even hear the guy say that he knew that another JSA claimant applied for a job as a sushi chef just to meet jobsearch requirements. The man had no training, or history in catering, but “he put it on there [chose the job in Jobmatch], because he was at his wits’ end as to what to put on there.” Cute. And you get the picture. It doesn’t matter if the person has a hope in hell of getting any of the jobs they find on Jobmatch, or even a job interview. That’s not the aim of the jobsearch and Jobmatch exercise. The aim of these exercises is to force people who claim JSA to go through the motions of applying for jobs to keep them in fear and in line. Continue reading →

Older and with a sickness history? Is your best hope to lie about it.

Posted on February 19, 2015 by Kate B

Who knows.

Outside one of the North London jobcentres this week, I spoke with woman in her early 50s who signs on for JSA and works for several hours a week as a cleaner (she’s one of the many people I meet at jobcentres who must claim JSA because they need to subsidise the crap wages they’re pulling at low-paid, part-time work). This woman said she once worked as a dinner lady, but had to leave that job, because she has a heart condition (an enlarged heart and an erratic heartbeat, etc). She said that getting up at six o’clock in the morning for the cleaning job was a struggle, because of her heart problems. But hey. That’s us today. Nobody cares about older women with heart conditions. They can still drag a vaccum-cleaner about between pains and palpitations. Needless to say, this woman had been chucked off ESA, because she’d been found fit for work.

She said that a family member found the cleaning job for her. She felt that getting work through family and friends was her only real option, because of her sickness history. She didn’t think that she was likely to land anything substantial through more formal job application routes. Her health and her sickness record worked against her. Anyone who has ever got a job knows that you usually have to give your new employer your sickness record and sign some sort of declaration – and that your last employer can even be contacted by your new one for your sickness history. Depends a bit on where you work and how robust HR is, I guess, but I think we can safely say that it can be hard to leave your sickness history behind. This woman said that she’d even been told by an adviser somewhere that her best shot was to play her sickness record down, or to not really mention it until she had to, or something along those lines. So – that was great.

Does make me wonder, you know. I wonder how many older people out there with health problems are thrown off ESA and into this twilight-y world where they get a bit of JSA, and then a bit of cleaning work and a bit of caring work in places where nobody asks too many questions/will take them on to do someone a favour. I wonder how many people are spending their later years on that circuit.

“Why should I pay for other people’s kids?” Because that’s real social security. Stop whining.

Posted on February 9, 2015 by Kate B

A few thoughts on the modern world’s fear and loathing of single mothers:

A couple of weeks ago, I went to see a woman who we’ll call Becky. She was in her early thirties. She and her six children (aged seven and under) were living in a one-bedroom flat in a temporary accommodation hostel in South East London. The whole family (the family included an 18-month-old baby) slept in that one bedroom. You can see the beds and bunks in the photos below. The kitchen was tiny. There was just enough space for two adults to fit into it if neither of them moved around very much. Cockroaches rattled across the floor. Becky had plugged holes in the walls with foam to stop the cockroaches from getting into the flat and into the baby’s cot:

Apparently, Becky’s local council had told her the family might have to stay in the one-bedroom hostel flat for months. Big houses for large families were in short supply. Becky had 11 children altogether, but the eldest ones had been removed from her care and adopted into other families (Becky said that the council adopted out her white children. The six children she still had living with her were mixed race). One of her older sons lived with her sister. So, Becky was living in this one-bedroom hostel flat with her six youngest children. Her school-aged kids had to sit on the bunk-beds to do their homework while the littler ones raced around the room. This overcrowding was yielding exactly the results that you’d expect. Becky showed me a health visitor’s letter which said that her kids were falling badly behind in their milestones, at least in part because of their living conditions. That in itself is reason enough to find and finance decent accommodation for this family. Every kid deserves a chance.

Anyway. I’ve thought a lot about Becky and her kids in the couple of weeks since I saw them. Mainly, I’ve thought about the shit that hits the fan whenever somebody writes about mothers who ask for state support. We all know how this one goes in our punitive age (read a few of the comments under this story if you don’t). Why, people will ask, did Becky have these children if she couldn’t afford to look after them? Where are the fathers? Why should this woman and her children be found a decent home? Why should taxpayers pick up the tab?

And on it goes. For myself, I have to say that I find this sort of dismissal – this slamming of doors, particularly in children’s faces – harder to handle as time goes on. It solves nothing and helps nobody. You find in it one of our era’s most poisonous political ideas: that you can sort a situation out simply by insisting it should never have come to pass. As it happens, there are – as there usually are – many reasons for complex situations: ill health, mental health, domestic violence, manipulation and a host of other forces that are beyond my perception and grasp. I don’t need to know the details and neither do you. Knowing the details doesn’t change the facts. Either everyone is entitled to basics like housing, or nobody is. That is social security. All that matters is the need at the hour of need.

“Worried about my 10-year-old daughter being safe in a B&B.” More homelessness stories from Newham

Posted on November 25, 2014 by Kate B

An update on this story: Candice, one of the homeless women I’ve been talking with in Newham and who is quoted below, was offered a place in Canning Town by Newham council today. Yesterday, she was told that she’d be sent out of London to live in Liverpool and that her case would be closed if she didn’t accept a place there. That would have been very difficult for her, because her family live in Newham and help her look after her 17-month-old daughter as you’ll see. Anyway, things seemed to change today when Candice went back to the housing office with a few people from the Focus E15 campaign. Canning Town it is.

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Yesterday, I spent several hours at the Newham council housing office at Bridge house with a number of women who are homeless.

Two things were noticeable right off: 1) that by the time I arrived at Bridge house at about 11, the waiting room was already full of people who had housing problems and 2) there were a lot of kids in the room. Some of the children were very young: in prams, or pushchairs. Some of the children were schoolage, though. I hadn’t thought about this aspect of things before – that instead of going to school on Monday morning, some kids go to council housing offices and wait while their parents try to sort out emergency housing. That’s surely got to put kids at a disadvantage as far as their schooling goes. I pretty sure there wasn’t a school holiday in Newham yesterday. I certainly asked around.

So. Below are a few interview excerpts which will tell you a bit about life for people who spend a lot of their time at housing offices asking for help because they don’t have a secure place to live.

One of the women with a child at the housing office yesterday was Charice Thompson. Charice said that she had been in the housing office with her ten-year-old daughter since about 9am. She had her belongings and extra clothes in bags with her. She had a plastic clothes rack with her as well – that was leaning against the back wall in the housing office. Charice said she’d been evicted from the revolting flat she’d been living in for three years for complaining about the standards in the place. She said that the flat had no hot water a lot of the time and that it was so badly infested with bedbugs that she’d ended up with a blood infection from the bites. She was clutching a letter from MP Stephen Timms which asked the council to house her and outlined her health problems. (I rang Timms’ office while Charice was waiting to see a housing officer, because she was concerned that she wouldn’t get to see someone and she and her daughter had nowhere to go last night. Someone from his office did ring me back yesterday afternoon). Charice and her daughter were given an emergency room in a hostel in Ilford at a charge of £196 a week. Her housing benefit would cover a lot of that, but she would still have to meet some costs. Continue reading →

How about we send Robin Wales out of London. Who wants him. #FocusE15

Posted on October 2, 2014 by Kate B

From the Focus E15 campaign:

“Despite Newham Council’s attempt to evict us, we can today confirm that the E15 Open House occupation will continue until 7 October as planned.

We called Newham Council on the first day of the occupation to negotiate with us. The plan was never to stay indefinitely. They refused to speak to us. Instead they chose to use draconian and expensive legal procedures, threats and dirty tricks. They cut off our water and vandalized the water mains, served an unlawful court summons with only two hours notice and they have repeatedly misled the public.

If Newham had come to talk to us we could have agreed to leave within two weeks. Instead, they refused to enter into a dialogue. We would like to know how much taxpayers’ money has been spent on taking us to court, and how many people that money could have housed.

Our demands to the Council continue to be:

– Repopulate the Carpenters Estate with secure long term council tenancies now
– An immediate end to the decanting and evictions of existing residents
– No demolition of the estate
– The management of Carpenters Estate by the residents, for the residents, no third party or private management

This experience has shown us that there is a broad based movement for council housing in London. There are empty homes in every borough, every town and every city in the country. Focus E15 show us that there are simple, community based solutions to the housing crisis.

We will continue to fight displacement and evictions and to campaign for secure, council housing through direct action, mobilisation and legal means. See you on the streets, in the courtrooms and in our future actions.

This is the beginning of the end of the housing crisis.”

More articles on Focus E15:

Open Democracy article: Why is middle class feminism so disinterested in women hit by austerity? (interviews with the Focus E15 mothers on their campaign to date)

Newham council runs out of meeting to avoid Focus E15 mothers’ protest

Focus E15 mothers take their petition for social housing to Boris at City Hall

International women’s day…yeah, right

Focus E15 mothers’ battle for social housing: an update

Young mothers occupy Newham council housing offices to demand social housing

Rubbish, mice and mould – good enough for young mums without money

Put this on a banknote: young mothers without money abandoned by the political class

More work programme provider shamelessness…

Posted on October 2, 2014 by Kate B

Sharing this story, because I love it so much:

Angela Smith is a woman with a Master’s degree and a long history of working in policy and disability support. She also has cerebral palsy and uses an electric wheelchair to get around. I’ve been accompanying Angela to her compulsory fortnightly Wembley jobcentre signons and meetings with the Reed Partnership, her work programme provider in Harrow. We’ve shown how difficult London buses can be for disabled people to use. We’ve also shown how pointless those fortnightly meetings at the jobcentre and the work programme really are when it comes to finding work.

Anyway. Angela has a new job. She got it without any help whatsoever from the jobcentre or the Reed Parntership. She found the job advertisement, filled in the application form, went to the interview and got through.

She did the whole thing entirely by herself. But that hasn’t stopped the work programme provider from trying to claim the result for itself. I went with Angela to her final meeting there a couple of weeks ago and saw this in all its glory. Her work programme adviser – a pleasant enough woman – congratulated Angela on finding a job. Then she said something along the lines of: “look, I know we haven’t helped you get this job at all – but would you be prepared to be featured in our Success Stories poster campaign? We could get your photo done and get a poster made. That would be really good.” There were posters on the office walls of people working at various jobs and saying things like: “I’m now running a successful business.” Angela and I decided that they must have been a bit short on successful-placements-of-disabled-people-in-work stories so they’d figured they’d have hers. Pity they had nothing to do with it.

Why writing off the #FocusE15 campaign is dangerously lazy behaviour from Labour

Posted on September 30, 2014 by Kate B

A few thoughts and interviews:

I’ve spent some time in the last week talking to people in Stratford who are not involved in the Focus E15 campaign, but who also have housing problems. Some of the transcripts from those interviews are posted below and I have more to add. The views of these people are important. They will give you some insight into the extent not only of the housing problem in this part of the world, but of the fury those problems have generated. They will give you an idea of the mistake Labour makes in running from the Focus E15 campaign (as it did last night again at a Newham council meeting) and pretending that its current problem is merely a “bunch of trots,” or “agitators and hangers-on.”

As it happens, I hear chilling talk when I speak with different people about their housing and income problems. I hear anti-immigration talk. I hear concerns about racism from people who worry that they will be treated badly if they are moved from the places they live in now to areas where they feel they will not be welcome. (“My daughter-in-law was sent to Brentwood and they put her next to a lovely man,” one Newham woman told me last week. “Racist as anything, he was. She wants to come back.”) I hear from new immigrants about the problems they face.

I took the three interviews below at a coffee morning on the Carpenter’s estate last week. One of the back rooms at the community centre is open for several hours on a Tuesday morning and people who are homeless, or needing food, or support come in for sandwiches, coffee and tea. I talked with people for a while. Not for the first time, it occurred to me that the likes of the Focus E15 campaign might just prove a sort of buffer against less positive tides: fascism, out-and-out racism and the aggression I always see when there isn’t enough to go around. Because I can tell you this – Labour isn’t providing that buffer. So. I’d imagine that Ukip is on Labour minds at the moment: certainly as you head towards Clacton and a byelection. I wondered of those sorts of issues were in Robin Wales’ mind when he took a moment during his recent ice-bucket challenge to implore council staff to vote Labour:

Anyway. A housing shortage and austerity generally does not bring out the best in people. Keeping so many properties in the Carpenter’s estate closed for so long was a bad move on the council’s part. People now know that a number of flats there were perfectly fine to live in. Exposing that has been the great achievement of this part of the Focus E15 campaign. Politicians can write a group of young housing campaigners off as a bunch of trots if they want and even drive through them in the mayoral auto, but that’s the lazy approach when you get down to it. It’s a dangerously lazy approach. It will not change the fact that many people now know that serviceable homes on that estate were closed. Nor will it change the fact that social fallout from a housing crisis and rising inequality is inevitably unpleasant.

It already is.

I’m going to add more interviews to this post as I go along. These three are to start:

Tony, 57, unemployed. Lives in Plaistow in a council flat. Angry and reluctant to talk in the first instance.

“Immigration is the problem. There’s too many immigrants. Housing is the problem and jobs. It has changed a lot here. Not for the better, either – no work. I want to get into the CCTV [to work as a security guard]. I’ve got my [security guard] certification, but I haven’t heard back from them.

“I’m 57, nearly 58. It’s hard now. I have to pay council tax now. It’s £10 a month what I wasn’t paying before. My rent went up 30p and the benefit rise was only 70p. I have to pay £2.50 in council tax. I live in a council flat. It’s okay. There are druggies upstairs, but it is okay. It’s not bad. It’s somewhere to live.

“With the work – I want to get into security. I passed all the courses. I got the badges in security, but they don’t want to know, because I got no work experience. It’s that I’m getting older now. I’m 58 this year. I got four children. I can’t give my kids money. I’m on the dole and that. It’s about £72 a week. About £144 a fortnight. You can’t do anything. You know what I mean. You can’t have a night out, or even go down the pub. So, you know. What can you do.” Continue reading →

Video and report from today: #FocusE15 mothers reopen boarded-up Carpenters’ estate flats

Posted on September 21, 2014 by Kate B

Update 27 September:

Big day yesterday. To begin with, the council turned up at the Carpenter’s estate to turn off the water at the occupied flats. Jasmin Stone told me that she was sworn at when she asked why people were there to cut the water:

“We just asked them what was happening and the response we got was “don’t fucking record me or I’ll smash your camera on the floor.”

I’d ask the council for a comment on that, except that the council has refused to talk to me since the start of this year. Suffice to say for now that those of us who’ve spent time with this campaign have come to expect aggression and a not-so-latent misogyny from those who oppose it. There has been something nasty and unnecessarily confrontational about the council response from the start. I’ve often wondered why the council and its PR advisers didn’t make a better attempt to work with the women, at least at various junctures in their campaign. It would have been smart, for instance, for a councillor or two to have accompanied the women when they took a petition for social housing to Boris Johnson earlier this year. There have been chances like that which a Labour council might just have taken.

That hasn’t happened and it’s hard not to conclude that the council made a mistake by not opening things up for discussion, rather than trying to close them down. The women told me months ago that Robin Wales told them he was annoyed at their campaign. I saw that fury again earlier this year (here on video) when the council rushed from a council meeting to avoid the women and again when Wales rushed from me to avoid questions about his attendance at a property fair in Cannes. The upshot of all this is that the council now has a problem. People all over the country are watching this campaign and responding with enthusiasm. As Jasmin told me yesterday – people starting donating bottles of water as soon as news of the water being cut started to circulate on social media. I noticed a man distributing further bottles of water outside the court yesterday, too. As I said yesterday on twitter, I’m starting to get the feeling that half of Newham has been waiting for the chance to subvert Newham council. Chickens do come home to roost. I’ve spoken to residents on the Carpenter’s estate, as you can read below, and noted their enthusiasm for the campaign. They are not securely housed themselves.

As for the council’s botched attempt to fast-track an eviction yesterday – well, we all know what happened there. I spoke to Ravi Naik, one of the attending lawyers, who said:

“We were only instructed about an hour before the hearing so I had to rush to get there.

“The Council had made an application for an interim possession order – which means asking for possession of the building which would have had the effect of ending the protest. For this to be lawful, they have to give three days’ notice to the group. Obviously, the group would want to have that time to consider the position and properly defend themselves. The council wanted to shorten that time period to two hours – that’s from three days to two hours. This would have undermined any hope of legal representation.

We made the point to the judge that we’ve got all these complex legal arguments, but we haven’t had any chance to consider them with the group or look at the Council’s evidence; we only met the clients about an hour before. We didn’t have any chance to consider this with the group. The judge agreed with our position. In the rules governing civil procedure, the key rule is the Overriding Objective. This means that cases must be considered justly and fairly. The judge said that there was no chance that this case could be considered justly and fairly in the circumstances. I don’t think they expected the group to put together a legal team so quickly.”

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Update 23 September: more perfectly serviceable flats on the Carpenters’ estate:

This is a video I took a couple of weeks ago of another of the flats in the Carpenters’ estate tower block. The film is a little jumpy as I couldn’t see what I was doing – had to stick my hand with the phone camera under one of the metal security doors to film this. I believe this is one of the flats used by the media during the Olympics. Would ask the council about this to confirm, except that the council refuses to talk to me. Boo. Anyway – again, you can see these are of a good standard. There’s a video of another of these flats at the end of this post.

Another update: September 23 2014 – the many people in Newham who are struggling for housing:

Every week at their Saturday stall on the Stratford Broadway, the Focus E15 mothers have asked local people to write their own housing stories on sheets that the women taped to the pavement.

The Focus E5 women have collected all sorts of stories about people’s housing problems this way. It’s been interesting to see. There are a lot of sheets and a lot of stories. This is one of the reasons why the Focus E15 campaign for housing is so significant – and the reason that Newham Labour can’t ignore the campaign, even though it is trying very hard to right now, as the women continue their occupation of the Carpenters’ estate. A great many people have housing problems – they’re stuck in B&Bs, or temporary housing, or in the private sector where they can barely afford the rent. Those people and those problems won’t go away, even if Newham council does ultimately decide to drag the Focus E15 women out of the flats they are occupying. (Mayor Robin Wales is speaking at a Labour party fringe meeting on winning back “left behind” voters tonight, which is hilarious. When you read the comments on the sheets, you get the feeling he’s left quite a few voters behind).

You can see some of the comments people have written on the sheets in the pictures below (click on the images for a bigger pic):

“Single mum in B&B – for three years with my children.”

“Private landlord threw all my daughter’s clothes and furniture in a skip.”

“The council sent me to temporary accommodation in Barking. It was so disgusting with mice running around. I was there with my children for two years. The council did not listen to us. My children had to travel far every day back to Newham.”

“I live in a house with 10 people and only one toilet. I pay £500pm.”

On it goes.

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Update to beat all updates September 23 2014 (h-t Clifford Singer): Can Robin Wales – mayor of a borough where young homeless women who’ve been fighting him for housing all year are occupying abandoned flats – REALLY be speaking tonight at a Labour party conference fringe on “bringing insights on community organising and movement building?” What – is he going to talk about the Focus E15 campaign that has wrongfooted him at every turn? Will he show this video – the one where he spat the dummy at one of the Focus E15 mothers (an action for which he now finds himself the subject of an official complaint)? Don’t often say this sort of thing – but that’s a Labour party fringe event I wouldn’t mind attending.

Update September 22: were these abandoned flats originally adapted and made accessible?

I went back to the Carpenters’ estate this morning. On the ground floor of the building that the Focus E15 mothers have moved into, I found these abandoned flats. They have been left to rot. One of them looked like an accessible flat to me – it had ground floor access with an adapted wet-room bathroom. There’s such a shortage of accessible flats in London. Leaving an adapted place to decay does seem criminal. Pretty sure you can still see a bottle on the floor.

I also talked to several of the other estate residents this time – people who’ve been living at the estate for a while. A few residents visited the Focus E15 mothers in their reopened and occupied flats last night. There’s concern among residents about being identified and targeted by the council – but not about the occupation itself, it seems, at least among the people I spoke with. I spoke to four people and they seemed sympathetic to the Focus E15 fight for homes. That surprised me and didn’t surprise me. Not everyone likes an occupation, or a confrontation with council, but a lot of people can relate to a battle for housing.

Said one of the women I spoke to (she’s lived on the Carpenters’ estate for nearly 20 years):

“They [the Focus E15 mothers] should stay. We don’t mind them here at all. They have to stay longer to make it work, though. Tell them don’t do it for a couple of days and then go. Keep it going. I haven’t got a problem with them putting young mums there. Young mums got to have a place.

“I been here for nearly 20 years. It used to be lovely, with all the kids running round on that grass. But then, people moved out and they didn’t move anyone in. That’s all boarded up there. See, I will show you this place here [she walked me up a small path to another home which was sealed with a metal security door]. That has been closed up now for five years. But you don’t want to say anything. You don’t know now how long your tenancy is going to last now. It never used to be like that. It’s in the last few years.

“That’s a housing officer walking around here (she pointed out a woman walking around with papers and a small bag).

“You’ve not got a problem with that [occupation and banners], have you?” she said to another woman who emerged from her flat then.

“Nah,” the second woman said. “It’s for the right reasons. They’re doing it for the right reasons. People do need homes. The council say they haven’t got any homes, but they have.”

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Original post:

Back to Newham today – where the women of the Focus E15 mothers’ social housing campaign took the admirable step of reopening some of the long-boarded-up flats on the Carpenters’ estate. I hope news of this move has reached those Labour councillors and MPs who are all tucked up nice and warm at conference in Manchester.

Video: entering the flats and being welcomed by the Focus E15 campaigners:

The Focus E15 mothers have been fighting for social housing for a year. Newham council was planning to send them out of London to live, but pulled back from that idea when the women complained and campaigned. The women were placed in private tenancies for a year – but those tenancies will end soon. That will leave the women again with nowhere to live. Meanwhile, the Carpenters’ estate sits, partially abandoned and empty, next to Stratford station, with boarded-up flats all over. Newham council’s housing waiting list is 24,000. The women decided that flats shouldn’t be shut off when so many people are homeless, or struggling to find a decent place to live. This is a borough which likes to slap Asbo warnings on rough sleepers let’s not forget. So, the women arranged for a block on the Carpenters’ estate to be opened. They plan to stay for at least a couple of weeks.

And look at the flats they found inside the estate. I was a little shocked and surprised myself when I saw the flats. They looked pretty good. They certainly looked perfectly serviceable. I’d happily move into one myself. They’re carpeted, clean and the second one in particular looked as though it had a new kitchen. How can it be that Stratford’s homeless people are left to sleep in the Stratford centre, or run out of town entirely, when these places exist right next to Stratford station? How can it be that young women are told there’s no room for them and their children in Newham? I’ve asked the council about its plans for the estate – but no answer, alas. That council refuses to talk to me.

There will be mealy-mouthed statements about safety, planning, new builds and homes for all from the council, but the truth is that there is no justification for empty homes when so many people are homeless. It really is as simple as that. When it comes down to it, who’d rather live outside in winter than inside one of these places? The women are right to raise this issue and to force this issue.

Here’s Focus E15 Mother Sam Middleton explaining why she decided to take part in this operation and why she’ll stay in the Carpenters’ estate for a while.

“We know that if there’s the Carpenters’ estate then there’s loads of other estates out there like this. We thought – do you know what? There’s too many boardedup places and they need people to live in. If you look around today, you can see that the flats are liveable. So why not get families in and do what’s right?”

Indeed.

An unmarked car full of coppers began circling at about 5pm. I went over to ask them if they planned to “do” anything. “We’re just keeping an eye on things,” they told me. “Who are you?” Then, they asked me what “they” (the people who were occupying the flat) had inside the flats. I told them that the occupiers had found a bunch of nice flats that should be lived in. As they have.

I also spoke to one of the Carpenters’ estate residents. He wanted to go inside the reopened flats to see how the flats looked. He said he was worried about getting into trouble with the council, though, and so decided against going in.

Inside the flats: sitting room

Kitchen:

Bathroom:

This is a video I took several weeks ago inside the tower block at the estate. It’s jumpy, because I had to shove my phone under the boarded-up door of the empty flat I filmed here to get pictures. You can see that the flat is in pretty good condition, though. It’s empty, though.

This Sunday – #FocusE15 birthday celebration following by a top secret housing action…

Posted on September 18, 2014 by Kate B

The Focus E15 campaign invites you to join a day of fun and music on the almost-empty Carpenters Estate in Stratford….

I’m going to post some photos we took recently of parts of that empty estate. It’s disgusting that the estate lies empty when so many people desperately need homes.

Later in the afternoon on Sunday, partygoers will become activists as they will be led to a top secret housing action in the Newham area…

Join the women as they continue to fight for social housing for all.

Meet at:

Sunday 2pm
Carpenters Estate, Stratford, London, E15

Will post more on this soon. Wifi is a bit average where I am atm. Here’s a video to enjoy in the meantime, though – Newham Mayor Robin Wales running away from the Focus E15 women as they lobbied for social housing at a council meeting. I really like this video. That man is not good under pressure. Look at him run.

Kate Belgrave

Talking with people dealing with public sector cuts.

Category Archives: Women