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.

Doncaster careworker: I had to leave my flat because #CareUK wage cuts made paying rent impossible

Posted on August 27, 2014 by Kate B

Update September 1: More careworkers to take strike action – workers at the Your Choice Barnet company on September 8 and 9:

Video I took last year: people with learning difficulties and their families yell at the Your Choice Barnet board as the board refuses to discuss attacks on careworkers’ wages and walks out of a meeting:

Unison careworkers who work for the outsourced Your Choice Barnet company will take strike action on September 8 and 9 with another four days of action to follow.

Your Choice Barnet careworkers are fighting a harsh 9.5% pay cut imposed by private sector management. Like the striking Doncaster careworkers in the video below, the Barnet Your Choice careworkers provide services to people with learning difficulties. Those services were transferred into a local authority trading company by Barnet council in 2012.

Last year, Alan White and I wrote a detailed story for the New Statesman about that failed Barnet privatisation of services for people learning difficulties.

Your Choice Barnet was originally set up by the council as part of the so-called Barnet Group – a trading company which would “provide” housing and services for adults with disabilities. The council had the wild, and entirely unsubstantiated, idea that the company could make a profit and that people with learning difficulties would pay to come from all over London to use this Barnet service.

John Sullivan, the father of Susan Sullivan, a woman with Down’s Syndrome who relied on Barnet services for people with learning difficulties, told us that the name Your Choice was very ironic indeed:

“There was no consultation. We expected letters and so forth: in fact we never got a single phone call to tell us what was going on… The first meeting for residents was a disaster. It was clear there was no structure – Susan would be dragged around a series of shops and garden centres [for something to do]. She needs two things – continuity, and her friends: the people she’s been friends with since they were kids.”

John described the company’s claims that it could make a profit as “mental masturbation.” He was absolutely right. The promised profits never materialised. Instead – true to private sector form – Your Choice Barnet presented staff with plans to slash their wages last year. Your Choice Barnet said the wages cuts were necessary to keep the company competitive.

The Doncaster careworkers below are hearing the same thing from Care UK, their private sector employer. The Fremantle careworkers, another group of Barnet careworkers who I wrote about in detail here, were told the same thing. They lost their weekend enhancement pay – the extra money that made carework possible to live on as a job – and had their sick leave reduced to the statutory minimum.

This is why carework is in such dire straits. Services are outsourced to the private sector, which sets about grabbing cash by slashing careworkers’ wages to amounts that are too small to live on. We live in an era where already-low-paid workers and people with learning difficulties are considered acceptable collateral in that cash grab.

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Orginal post with striking Doncaster careworkers 27 August 2014:

Have more to add to this, but here’s a short post for those who are wondering why it is becoming impossible to make a living at carework:

Today, I spoke with Doncaster careworkers, including Mags Dalton, 44, who were protesting outside Bridgepoint Capital about charming private firm Care UK’s massive cuts to Doncaster careworkers’ wages. The careworkers work with people who have learning difficulties. Bridgepoint is the private equity company that owns Care UK – Mags’ employer.

Mags has lost about £400 a month as a result of those wages cuts and has been on strike for days this year in protest. Now, she’s had to give up her flat because she couldn’t afford the rent any more. She will move back to Newcastle to live with her parents. She will start another job and try to save up to move into another flat of her own at some point.

Mags is one of a number of Doncaster careworkers who have (and are as we speak) taken lengthy strike action in protest at the pay cuts of up to 35% being forced through by Care UK. Careworkers were transferred from the NHS to Care UK when the service was recently outsourced.

True to private sector form, Care UK quickly turned its attention to careworkers’ wages and conditions – wages and conditions which were hardly generous in the first place. Sick leave has been cut to the statutory minimum (the first three sick days must be taken without pay) and weekend and night pay enhancements slashed. New starters begin on £7 an hour – which means, of course, that workers won’t stay if they can find work elsewhere that pays even a little bit better. The pay cuts have hit hard. Mags’ rent was £465 a month and her £400-a-month wage loss put the rent beyond her.

So now, at age 44, she’s got to head home and live with her parents while she tries to save for a new place. She has lived in Doncaster for years: “I made a life for myself in Doncaster with friends that I love and a job that I love. I only signed up for the house a year ago. I moved in on the 26th of June last year and the 25th of June this year, I moved out. How did that happen.”

This is exactly what happened to the outsourced careworkers at Fremantle in Barnet, who I talked with over the course of their months-long strike action several years ago. People who provide (as in work as careworkers) and use social care services are being destroyed by privatisation and it’s been going on for a very long while. Under governments of a variety of stripes, may I add.

Newham council to me: you are foul mouthed and aggressive. #Result. A #FocusE15 update

Posted on August 14, 2014 by Kate B

To Stratford again! where career mayor Robin Wales continues one of London’s leading Pillock of the Year campaigns…here he is at the recent Newham Mayor’s show running from the Focus E15 mothers and their kids when the mothers asked him again about social housing in the borough.

Video from the Focus E15 mothers:

“This [event] is a family day!” Wales barked at the mothers as they walked around the event with their – err, families. I wonder if I should even bother outlining the ironies in that one. I guess we can take it that when Wales says “families,” he means “families who are not campaigning for social housing for families.” For nearly a year now, the Focus E15 mums have been fighting for secure social housing for everyone who needs it, which is most people. The women want decent, secure social housing for all – places where people can settle for the long term and raise their families. It is actually hard to think of a more family-orientated campaign. (For more on the financing of Newham’s family days and other short-term crowd-pleasers, read Mike Law’s excellent blog on that council’s likely borrowing legacy here). Wales is under investigation now – a complaint was made about his behaviour towards the mothers at the mayor’s show.

So. Perhaps the real problem here is that Wales, Newham council and the political class generally find assertive, persistent women difficult. I thought about that again this week when I found a letter that Newham council sent to the NUJ about me earlier this year. I’d forgotten about this letter, so thought I’d share it with you before I throw on my pile of Fuck Off Kate correspondence from councils. All good.

Earlier this year, I asked the NUJ to complain to Newham council when security guards stopped me from attending a public council meeting. I’d completely forgotten that the council had sent a response, but remembered this week and hauled it out. In the letter, the council said I’d be denied entry to the council meeting because I was foul mouthed and aggressive to security guards. OUTRAGEOUS. Conveniently, I have a recording of the interchange between me and the security guards that evening. You can hear me challenging the guards – as well I might, seeing as they were denying me entry to a public meeting and pushing my press pass aside – and that I actually sound quite sweet, because I am. I am in person, anyway. Generally. I like to swear all the time on social media, not least because that’s an excellent way to let off steam after exposure to a twat like Wales. Anyway – I thought about all of this when I saw Wales racing away from the Focus E15 in the video above. Not for the first time, I wondered about Newham’s two-fingered salutes to assertive women. I’ve posted more videos of those salutes at the end of this article. The Focus E15 fight is a feminist fight, all right. These female campaigners have been dismissed categorically – by Newham, by Labour, by the political class and the press. They’ve kept going, though, and generated a great deal of interest and support. It is not easy to keep things going, but they have. Continue reading →

London evicts. Women and children first, thanks

Posted on August 4, 2014 by Kate B

One development (if you can call it that) I’ve really noticed in London this year is the increase in calls and contacts from people who are facing eviction, or trying to stop an eviction right then and there, or worried that they are being pushed out of their their estates and homes by planners and developers. I decided to start to collect the stories of some of the people affected. The first two are below in this post. They’ll form part of a longer piece I’m writing on these evictions.

A few thoughts on this –

The more I talk to people, the more obvious it becomes that the real problem is the terrible lack of decent, secure, well-maintained, well-managed social housing people can easily afford. Long-term lets are especially crucial. The expensive, wildly insecure private rental sector is a challenge for most of us who rent. It can be particularly challenging and unforgiving if you have support needs. If people had secure social housing with long-term lets, a lot of the problems they’re reporting now simply would never come to pass – problems like being forced to move because a landlord wants the house or flat back, the stress of uncertain short-term tenancies, having to live in single, tiny, dirty rooms that private sector landlords pass off as flats to collect housing benefit and all the rest. I’ve spoken with people who have serious mental health problems and who simply can’t handle the idea of moving home, or to an unfamiliar environment. They are offered other places in the private sector, but that’s neither here nor there. They don’t want to move. They can’t move. But they’ve been evicted – forcibly – because the landlord wants them out.

Unfortunately, social housing waiting lists in some boroughs run into the tens of thousands – about 24,000 in Newham, 28,000 in Camden and 20,000 in Lambeth, to give a few examples. The truth is that people’s chances of securing a place that way are non-existent. (There’s another point, too – with a bigger social housing stock and better security in it, people in social housing wouldn’t be facing eviction in the growing numbers they are now, either).

Without those places, it’s up to tenants to get by in a hostile environment. Doesn’t matter that many people struggle. You beat the odds yourself, or you go down. Ours is the great era of individual responsibility, after all. Iain Duncan Smith – a man who is himself housed in his rich wife’s mansion – is very big on this Do It For Yourself concept. Individual liability at any cost is one of Universal Credit’s many rotten planks. When UC comes in for all, if it does, the housing element will be paid to claimants, who then must pay rent from it. Anyone who fails to achieve that will be dismissed as feckless. Anyone who argues for direct payment to landlords will be written off as a Nanny State relic (*waves*). No matter that the odds in that game are already stacked against plenty of people. Cuts to council tax benefit and housing benefit mean that many already pay bigger council tax bills and bigger rent demands. Using rent money to cover council tax arrears because your council threatens you with a liability order to deduct tax straight from your benefits, say, would not be irresponsible. But we’ll end up there, anyway. We live in an age where individuals must sink or swim – which usually means a lot of well-off people blathering on about responsibility while they watch other people sink.

“They told us that we have to organise the money,” one very young housing benefit tenant said to me a week or so ago when she reported back from a Jobcentre Plus meeting about Universal Credit. “They said that we shouldn’t be having fun with our money.” Continue reading →

Maria Miller gets a fancy house while women with no money must beg for homes

Posted on April 6, 2014 by Kate B

Video: a person sleeping rough outside legendary tax-dodgers Starbucks in the Stratford Centre on Friday. Hope Newham Council does not slap an Asbo on this person.

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Ok. Today, I will give you an example of our one-rule-for-the-rich-and-one-rule-for-everyone-else society in action:

Almost to the day that Maria Miller gave her non-apology for ripping taxpayers off for a house and her own financial gain, I stood outside Newham council’s housing offices with a group of young people who were there to plead for accommodation. Some of the young people were Focus E15 mothers, the group of young women who lived or still live at the Focus E15 hostel in the mother-and-baby unit and have been campaigning for social housing in the borough. Others were young people who aren’t parents, but who live in other parts of the Focus E15 hostel and are worried about eviction.

So. It was pretty hard not to think about the rank hypocrisy of the political class as I stood with this group of people outside Newham’s housing offices. There’s so much of this hypocrisy around now that you actually find yourself watching it unfold live. You can stand in a London street reading updates on Maria Miller’s meaningless “apology” on your phone while a group of people who have no money plead with council officers for homes. This is the time and place we’re in. We live in a society that is constructed entirely of double standards. Maria Miller has money – a lot of it ours, it would seem. The young people outside Newham housing offices on Friday, on the other hand, don’t have money. They have no money and no connections. Some of them have “problem” histories. They are dismissed because of those things. They are young, but will be dismissed forever because of those things. This double standard will finish us all if you ask me. Maria Miller gets the warm support of David Cameron and Iain Duncan Smith and a wee slap on the wrist for hoovering an incredible amount for her second home (and so what if she is ultimately sacked or demoted. She’ll be back. These people are never sacked). By comparison, the young people campaigning for housing outside Newham council on Friday regularly get called sluts (because some of them have babies), wasters and layabouts and told that they’ve done nothing to deserve a roof.

I’ve heard variations on that theme ever since I started writing about the Focus E15 mothers’ campaign. Worthies at this recent women’s event asked me, for example, if I really thought that the young campaigners deserved social housing. Did I really think that would be the best thing for them? The concern seemed to be that housing these “poor” people securely would awaken the dreaded, so-called sense of entitlement in them. Of course – no mention was or is ever made of the startling (and poisonous) sense of entitlement that people like Maria Miller have. You never hear about that. Ever. You only ever hear about the greedy, grasping, aggressive poor who will take an inch and then a mile and then your wallet. It’s the double standard that gets me. The double standard is unreal.

Continue reading →

Kate Middleton gets a palace. Mothers without money get the home you see here

Posted on April 1, 2014 by Kate B

Time for a rant.

The young woman in this video is Fatima Fonesca, aged 23. She is sitting with her one-year-old daughter in their single room in the Focus E15 temporary accommodation hostel at Stratford. I went into the hostel to film the two last week. Have overlaid some scenes from the hostel room into the video. Think I’ll add more video soon.

This is the kind of living arrangement that gets on my nerves. It’s not just the cramped room that Fatima must live in – the bed and the cot shoved together, the tiny kitchen, the piled-up clothes, or even the tough security you have to go through to get into the hostel and the room in the first place (I had to hand over my passport for photo ID to get in, which made me nervous). It is the fact that women like Fatima must live like this while other people royally take the piss. I have specific royals in mind here, actually. The pictures of Fatima with her baby made me think (and not in a bighearted way) of that recent, pointless-but-much-fawned-over photo of the appalling Kate Middleton and her Prince Forgettable hanging out of a window with their baby. The Duke and Duchess – whose main achievements in life involve simply being born and later producing offspring (things that your average bunny, garden toad or housecat can do without even trying) – have just splurged £1m of taxpayers’ money on renovations to their already-luxurious palace. The fact that they have a palace at all makes me want to punch in a door. It’s 2014 and we still have grasping royals living in palaces and tooling about the world on endless holidays like they need a letup. Continue reading →

Children in mouldy, decaying houses, councillors at property investor fairs in Cannes…

Posted on March 23, 2014 by Kate B

To Manor Park library yesterday and the “Meet Mayor Robin Wales” event yesterday, where there was a big turnout. Housing problems were on many minds.

I spoke to a woman who works as a cleaner and has been in temporary accomodation with her three children for four years. She earns £500 a month as a cleaner and her housing benefit does not meet her whole rent. I went round to her house to film the mould, missing floorboards, uncollected rubbish and peeling wallpaper later on in the day. Look at the mould growing here – the woman has to wipe it off regularly and it keeps coming back. There’s a two-month-old baby living in this place:

There was a woman who said her rundown place was full of mice and an older woman who was there on behalf of a disabled friend who she said was also in temporary accommodation…and that wasn’t the half of it. Decent, secure housing that people can afford is becoming very hard to find, we all know, and people were definitely concerned and angry. You’ll see from the videos that there was quite a turnout for meeting at a small library on a Saturday morning.

Focus E15 Mothers were there to ask Wales if he would back their campaign for social housing. Politicians won’t back these women, of course – young women who have children and who are on benefits for now aren’t thought worthy of that sort of attention. Kate Middleton can make her home over to the tune of £1m, but women like the Focus E15 mothers are regarded with suspicion and sneered at. More than one worthy at this recent women’s event asked me if I really thought that the Focus E15 mothers deserved the local social housing that they’ve been campaigning so hard for. Did I really think that would be the best thing for them? The concern seemed to be that housing the Focus E15 mothers securely would awaken the dreaded, so-called sense of entitlement in them. Of course – no mention was made of the startling sense of entitlement that people like Kate Middleton have.

The Focus E15 women – who were or still are all homeless and living in temporary accommodation in the Focus E15 hostel – want decent and secure social housing for all (you can read their story in detail here). Some of the women have been placed in private lets in London for a year – which means that they’ll very likely have housing problems again when that year is up. Others are still living in the Focus E15 hostel with their babies. More on that soon. The group had trouble pinning Wales down for a chat to start, as you’ll see. When he did speak to them, he said that their argument should be with government, not with the council. That didn’t go down too well. People want councillors to join their campaigns, not tell them to take their campaigns elsewhere. The mothers asked why boarded-up flats at the Carpenters Estate couldn’t be opened for social housing and if homes in the borough’s post-Olympic residential builds would be earmarked as social housing…Wales was a little vague on that, as you’ll see in the video:

The Carpenters estate was to be demolished as part of a Newham Council/UCL plan to build a £1bn campus a couple of years ago. Campaigners managed to stop that plan for the time being and to keep their estate and homes in Newham – they wanted the estate to be refurbished and retained as social housing. At least a year on, flats on the estate remain boarded up and unused. This is certainly a sore point with residents and with people who are on the council’s housing waiting list (there are about 24,000 people on that waiting list). The council’s allocation policy prioritises people who are in work over people who are not in work, too.

In this next video, I asked Wales why he attended a recent property investors’ fair in Cannes and what he did there. There has been a great deal of anger about councillors’ attendance at that fair, as you’ll read in this Guardian story:

“Protesters accuse local authorities at week-long MIPIM of being ‘in pockets of investors’ and ‘selling off’ Britain’s cities…Every year, for a week in March, this stretch of the French riviera is transformed into a global property trading zone, a souped-up real estate supermarket, where whole swathes of cities are put up for sale to the highest bidder.

“This year saw more than 20 UK local authorities taking part, the biggest presence since the 2008 peak.

“Public sector attendance at MIPIM has long been contentious, with budgets for local authorities’ presence at the fair often stretching up to £500,000. The symbolism of council chiefs on a champagne-soaked jamboree, as swingeing cuts bite back home, has not gone unnoticed, prompting most authorities to find private-sector funding and trumpet visible results from the week of networking.”

I’m always keen to hear Wales trumpet, so I asked Wales what he’d been up to in Cannes. Had to chase him round the corner with the “were you selling Newham?” questions… he wheeled round at that point and answered with an angry No I Wasn’t:

“It’s all paid for by our development partners,” Wales told the Guardian. I find that an even bigger worry if I’m honest. Time for some absolute transparency on all of this – who met with who, when, why, what was discussed, who will be “investing” in what and what sort of money will move between which organisations and people and why – and how the people who turned out to Saturday’s event to try and get their housing problems solved will benefit. I didn’t get a chance to ask about the council’s recent moves to slap Asbos on homeless people in the Stratford centre, or where homeless mothers and babies will go when the Focus E15 mother and baby unit closes down, which the East Thames Housing Association has confirmed it will.

The Focus E15 mothers will be at next Saturday’s 1000 mothers march for justice: 11am Saturday 29 March. Assemble at Bruce Castle Park, Lordship Lane, N17 8NU.

More soon – post will be updated.

Homelessness, Asbos, Operation Encompass

Posted on March 17, 2014 by Kate B

This is the first in a series of posts which feature conversations with people who are street homeless.

This series was inspired, if that’s the word, by Operation Encompass – the Metropolitan police-local council-UK Border Agency “partnership” to “combat begging and rough sleeping across six London boroughs.” Brilliant. They weren’t doing this by building more homes, or anything useful like that. They were doing it by – among other charming initiatives – hitting rough sleepers with Asbo warnings and telling people that they had to accept “help”. A few things appeared in local papers about this earlier this year – charities expressed concern about the operation “aggressively targeting and potentially criminalising some of the most vulnerable people in society” – and then things went quiet. I’ve asked the Met for an update – if it still going as Operation Encompass (the Met’s original press release said “activity” would be “ongoing“) and/or who is doing what and where. You can use Asbos to ban people from certain areas, see. This means that Asbos could be used by politicians to clear streets of people who might not, say, impress the bigshot property investors that council leaders have been hanging out with in Cannes, etc. These things need to be watched.

They’re not pretty. Boroughs like Newham seemed to be running their own Encompasses (I’d ask Newham where things are at there as well, except that the council refuses to talk to me). Only a month ago, we had mayor Robin Wales in the Newham Recorder boasting about cracking down on rough sleepers in the Stratford centre. (Wales, incidentally, seems to have been at last week’s property fair in Cannes. I do keep seeing the same faces at the moment). In his column, Wales said that rough sleepers who refused the council’s offers of “assistance” could not expect to continue to sleep on Newham streets. “I realise that this is a tough message,” Wales said, “and that some people will be instinctively unhappy with it.”

I was unhappy with it. I was very unhappy with it. The part that made me especially unhappy was the nasty, vengeful note in those statements – the “people with problems are not entitled, so they’ll damn well take what they’re given, or else,” line that informs so much of today’s political discourse. There was nothing in Wales’ article about the many reasons why people might be sleeping rough. There was nothing about the fallout from this government’s dreadful social security “reforms.” There was just a magnificent oversimplification of the reasons for homelessess and justification, if you can call it that, for lording it over rough sleepers. There was a real nastiness there.

You find that nastiness everywhere in political discourse on housing, of course. You find it, for instance, in this discussion with Hastings council leader Jeremy Birch, who told me that upgraded estates in his borough would not be open to people on benefits. People like the Focus E15 mothers hear it all the time, too. So do I when I’m out with them. For example: More than one Labour worthy at this women’s event last week asked me if I really thought that the Focus E15 mothers deserved the local social housing that they’ve been campaigning so hard for. Did I really think that would be the best thing for them? The concern seemed to be that housing the Focus E15 mothers securely would awaken the dreaded, so-called sense of entitlement in them. I found this extraordinary and extraordinarily patronising. It seems that young women who think they should have somewhere to live are now considered grossly pushy and grabby. Of course – no mention was made at this luvvies event of the startling sense of entitlement that the well-appointed have. Nobody asked me what I thought about Kate Middleton’s sense of entitlement when it comes to housing, or Nadhim Zahawi’s sense of entitlement when it comes to getting the taxpayer to pay to house his horses in heated stables, or MPs’ sense of entitlement when it comes to flipping and selling homes, etc. The political class never mentions those people. Their big concern in life is that everyday punters are on the make. Continue reading →

Kate Belgrave

Talking with people dealing with public sector cuts.

Category Archives: Women