I’ll be at the demonstrations against Atos. I’ve seen WCAs first hand.

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On February 19, protesters will gather nationally outside Atos centres to peacefully protest the inhumane treatment of people receiving employment support allowance, and its predecessors incapacity benefit and the severe disablement allowance. I for one have accompanied people through utterly bizarre Atos assessments. Stephen here was awarded zero points on his first assessment in a report that failed to mention his schizophrenia diagnoses. On appeal, he was placed in the Support Group – the group people are placed in when they have the highest needs. So he went from being considered fit for work to being considered someone with the most substantial support needs. As I wrote at the time: “That was quite a turnaround. A lot of us who worked with Stephen at that time wondered exactly what criteria Atos was using.” A colleague noted at the time that Atos’ criteria was “whatever we can get away with.”

The February protests will be spearheded by disabled activists who have had to bear the brunt of the cuts made by the government of millionaires.

A key demand of these protesters is that the government no longer uses ATOS to preform these assessments.

Campaigners come from a wide diverse section of society ranging from disabled people who are directly effected by the changes in the administration of benefits to concerned citizens worried about the treatment of the most vulnerable in society.

Protesters are also calling for an apology from Iain Duncan Smith and Thierry Breton, Chairman and CEO of ATOS to the six families of benefit claimants who took their lives following decisions made by ATOS:

Tim Salter, a 53 year old blind man suffering with agoraphobia.

Lee Robinson, 39, of Crawley, Sussex, who was the first person in whose suicide could be attributed to the government’s changes.

Shaun Pilkington, 58, who was sent a letter saying he was to lose his ­Employment and Support ­Allowance, which he got after a long-term illness.

Edward Jacques, 47, of Sneinton, Nottingham, who took a fatal overdose after his benefit payments were stopped. Richard ­Sanderson, 44, of ­Southfields, south-west London, stabbed himself in the heart.

Jacqueline Harris, a 53-year-old former nurse from Bristol, was found dead at her home, likely having taken an overdose of medications after she was pronounced fit for work in November 2012.

These families should get a lot more than an apology if you ask me.

Campaigners are worried this list is set to grow and grow unless urgent action is taken to reverse the perverse treatment and demonisation of benefit claimants.

See the national demonstration website for full details.

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Full blogging will resume next week. Have a lot of interview recordings I’m working through etc.

Young mothers occupy Newham council to demand social housing

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Updated with new video:

Some video from today’s occupations of the East Thames Housing Association building (and showroom) and Newham council’s housing offices by a group of young homeless mothers who are battling for decent social housing in Newham. The fight these young women are putting up is becoming more and more relevant to anyone who does not have secure housing – which includes a great many people:

Video: young Newham mothers occupy Newham council housing offices

Video two: earlier in the day, the women occupied a showhome inside the East Thames housing association building, where they held a party. There isn’t room for parties at the temporary hostel they live in, so they decided the HA would be a good venue:

As one of the mothers says in the video at the housing office:

“Stop making people homeless. Stop making kids miss school. It’s not fair. You get to go home to your nice homes, while people here are struggling. People are here crying (they were – a woman in the office was crying, because she was homeless and trying to sort that out). They’re stressed, depressed. It’s not right. You’ve got a place here where you’re meant to help people. You’re meant to help people. You’re not helping people.”

That’s it in a nutshell, really.

I have been interviewing this group of young mothers for a while. They are all classed as homeless and they are all fighting a bloody battle with Newham Council for decent social housing in the borough for themselves and their small children.

At the moment, these young women live in Newham’s Focus E15 foyer – a hostel which has about 16 flats for young parents and about 210 flats across the complex. It’s supposed to be temporary accommodation. I’ve written about the concerns the women have about the health standards at the hostel – the mothers say there are rats, mice and problems with mould and ventilation. Some of the children in the hostel are as young as three months. I’m having something of a bloody battle with the council and HA myself about this. More on that topic soon.

The women’s options for permanent housing are not good. They are having to deal with so many of the problems that face people who are either on low incomes, or benefits (surely, too, these must also increasingly be problems for people who are on reasonable incomes. Nobody is securely housed unless they own something freehold).

Their options are these:

The women can try to find social housing in a borough which has 24,000 people on its waiting list and recently changed its allocations policy to prioritise ex-servicepeople and people in work over people not in work. So that isn’t much of an option.

Or they they can hope to be housed in private accommodation – in an era where private landlords like Fergus and Judith Wilson are asking their housing benefit tenants to leave because, as Fergus Wilson loftily informed the Guardian recently: “”All the landlords will tell you that there is so much default now with housing benefit tenants that you are just simply better off with somebody working.” Mothers like Jasmin Stone have told me that they’ve run up big phone bills calling around private landlords and letting agents – to no avail. So that option isn’t much of an option either.

The other option is that Newham will house the women many miles out of the borough – miles away away from the family members who could provide childcare while the women worked. Places like Hastings, or Birmingham, are often suggested as possibilities. Except I wonder if they are. I spoke to Jeremy Birch, leader of Hasting council last week. The facts are that Jeremy Birch is not keen on taking people who are benefits generally. He can’t stop London boroughs housing people in Hastings’ private rental sector, but he made it very clear that he wasn’t happy to know that was happening:

“We’re a deprived community in the south east, who are trying to reduce the amount of benefit dependency in our own borough. While we welcome anyone who wants to come to Hastings to move here, we are not happy that we would be taking further people who were benefit dependent. That is putting extra pressure on the services that we’ve got in the town.”

He also said – and this is important – that the council had specific housing projects which excluded people who were not in work.

I’ve got a lot more to post on this, but I’ll say for now that this is a very important campaign. We all deserve housing – and this campaign is proving that people are going to have to put up a hell of a fight for it. This is an era of monumental inequality and the political class is thumbing its nose at anyone who isn’t part of that class. MPs happily house their horses in heated stables courtesy of the taxpayer and expect taxpayers to fund their tennis court repairs and housing upgrades and sales. They watch a show about people with nothing and encourage the world to laugh. Clean, warm, decent housing is a right – and not just for horses. Councils and Housing Associations should not be surprised to see people turn up in their offices who refuse to leave without an answer.

Another important point: At the occupation, a lot of people who were waiting in the housing offices to hear about their own housing options joined in conversation with these mothers. Connections were made. One woman who’d been waiting in the queue even started to cry – she revealed that she was homeless. Another woman who had a young baby with her said she’d been told she’d be sent to Birmingham, miles away from anyone she knew.

Other people who were waiting in the queue cheered and applauded when the protestors arrived and explained their campaign for housing. So many people are affected by this. People everywhere, with nowhere secure to live.

Council: unemployed people will not get places in our improved housing project

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As readers of this site will know, I’ve been posting recently about social housing landlords (councils and their HAs) who prioritise people in work ahead of people who are not in work for social housing. I have found this worrying, to say the very least. It’s bad enough to know that filthy rich private landlords like Fergus and Judith Wilson are closing their doors to people who are on benefits. It is REALLY bad when you hear that social housing landlords – the landlords who you’d think were supposed to help people who are in real financial straits – are excluding people as well.

I wrote about Newham’s employed-people-are-our-priority housing policy last week. Here’s another example. On Thursday, I spoke for a while with Jeremy Birch, who is leader of Hastings borough council. I rang Jeremy to talk about his views on Hastings’ role as a place where London boroughs send impoverished tenants to live. As you are likely aware, London boroughs are using the private rental sector in Hastings to place tenants who are affected by the benefit cap and/or supposedly can’t be found appropriate housing in London. I’ve been speaking with a number of young women in Newham who are facing that sort of “move” to Hastings, miles away from parents and childcare.

Anyway – Jeremy Birch made a startling revelation during that conversation. He told me that Hastings borough now had housing projects from which it actively excludes people who are on benefits.

We were talking about the effects of rent pressures on rent and house prices when he said this:

“We have a project in one of the wards where houses of multiple occupation are particularly prevalent. We have a project where we’re buying up, with the housing association, some of the worst of these properties and renovating and improving them. The social landlord [that] is responsible for the running of them. The lettings agreement is that they will only take people who are in employment (my emphasis). The reason for that is to try and rebalance the nature of those communities, so that they are more settled and more stable communities.”

In other words – people who are in situations that Birch described as “benefits dependent” will be excluded from those improved homes. I have spoken with a couple of lawyers who think such an exclusion/discrimination could warrant legal challenge.

I’ve got more work to do on this – I want to know more about the definition of “benefits-dependent” in that context and I want to know more about the places that excluded tenants will be sent to, if they’re sent anywhere. Jeremy Birch says that exclusion policy only applies to that housing project at the moment. Elsewhere in the borough, people are housed according to need. You take my point, though. We’re in a messy and very unpleasant environment here. It seems that some people are allowed housing and others are not. It seems that some people are thought worthy of improved and renovated housing, while others are not (which is doubtless why these young mothers and their children are living in this sort of cramped and dirty place). It seems that social housing landlords are taking those decisions blatantly. It seems that private sector landlords are not the only ones who are thinking Cull when it comes to people on benefits.

Jeremy Birch is not keen on taking people who are benefits generally. He can’t stop London boroughs placing London tenants in Hastings private housing, but he makes it clear that he’d like to. “We’re a deprived community in the south east, who are trying to reduce the amount of benefit dependency in our own borough. While we welcome anyone who wants to come to Hastings to move here, we are not happy that we would be taking further people who were benefit dependent. That is putting extra pressure on the services that we’ve got in the town.”

I will be doing more on this. The point to note for now is that this “we’re taking these people, but not those people” rhetoric is the sort of line which ends with people on benefits being chucked in the workhouse, because all other doors have shut. You can find yourself on a benefit for all sorts of reasons – job loss, illness, disability, domestic violence, sickness. Just remember that as all this carries on, it won’t just be private landlords who want you gone.

Don’t forget that councils want rid of housing tenants on benefits too

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Much discussion at the moment about megatwat rich landlords Fergus and Judith Wilson asking their housing benefit tenants to leave their lets because, as Fergus tells us: “”All the landlords will tell you that there is so much default now with housing benefit tenants that you are just simply better off with somebody working.”

Says the charming Fergus to the Guardian today:

“If I am heartless all the other landlords are heartless, because we’re all doing the same.”

And yeah – Fergus is right about being heartless. He sounds heartless. He sounds quite the heartless prick. The point I want to make here, though, is that he’s an accurate prick. He’s right when he says he’s not the only one who is at it.

The shocking truth (probably not that shocking tbh – I wasn’t surprised) is that even people who are supposed to provide social housing for people with no money are at it.

For example – Newham council is at it. Newham council is seriously at it. Readers of this site will know that I’ve been writing in details about a group of young Newham mothers who are on benefits and live in this rathole. But they’re struggling to get anything better and one of the reasons for that is Newham council recently changed its housing allocation policy to prioritise people who are in work over people who are not.

Which I’m sure you’d agree is all very Fergus.

The council decribes this change as its groundbreaking “resilience approach” – which is another way, I guess, of saying “tough shit if you’re on benefits.” Said Robin Wales, Newham’s glorious mayor:

“Our resilience approach is all about supporting residents to help develop the skills they need to live independent and successful lives. The housing allocations policy has been reviewed with this in mind. Our scheme is about giving something for something.”

Eat your heart out, Fergus.

Said the council to me:

“The way social housing been allocated previously has created a race to the bottom where people are encouraged to emphasise their vulnerability.” Nothing much there about helping people who are ARE vulnerable and in need of housing. Just that, you know “we don’t really do vulnerability anymore.”

So. Fergus is not just telling us where the market is at. He’s telling us where the political class is at. Nobody wants people who are out of work. Even councils are eliminating people who aren’t in work from their considerations. That means we’re heading towards a point where people on benefits simply won’t be housed. And remember – you might be one of those people one day. I might be. Anyone might be. We’re in a very insecure jobs market at the moment and have a fast-disappearing social security safety net. I certainly talk to people who have worked, then found themselves out of work, then found that they were not eligible for benefits. Take Clifford Poole here, a man who worked for years in the Liverpool shipyards before having to leave with an industrial injury. He was only entitled to a year’s contributions-based employment and support allowance – that 365-day eligibility limit was only recently introduced. So now, he and his wife must live off the small salary she makes at her job in a betting shop.

So you know… if you had some idea that you’d be housed and fed, even in a basic way, if you were knocked out of work – well, you need to start thinking again.

Just. Saying.

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

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Update January 21 2014

In the post below, I described some of the problems that young mums at the temporary Focus E15 hostel have with their accommodation. (These young women are campaigning for decent social housing in Newham borough. You can read more about their fight here). They talked about rubbish, mice and even rats in the Focus E15 hostel that they live in and I saw photographs of trash in the halls and broken sinks as you’ll see below in the original post. The women said that mould was a real problem at Focus E15, as was a lack of ventilation. That concerned me, not least because there are very small children living in that hostel. I could not leave things there.

So, I contacted the East Thames Housing Association, sent them the link to this post and asked if I could have a tour through the hostel with them to see things for myself and discuss some of these issues with them. If they cleaned things up and dealt to problems in anticipation of that visit – then even better. They agreed to that visit, which was good. A meeting was set up for this Monday – me and several officers were due to attend. But then last Friday, East Thames emailed me to say that they were cancelling the visit. I could no longer enter Focus E15. They’d found out that I’d been at the Focus E15 mothers’ occupation of the HA and the council on Friday and had reported on it and that they felt I was part of the campaign. That being the case, they would not take me through the hostel. They thought I’d be biased.

There are a couple of things here. The first is that there were a number of journalists at Friday’s action. Attending a protest does not make you part of a campaign, or allows you in any way to own it. This campaign belongs to the young mothers. Attending a campaign makes you a reporter who is attending a protest and who follows a story closely and who gets to know people who are involved and the things they’re doing. I have certainly spent hours over the past month with the young women of the Focus E15 campaign and gone to meetings and talked to the women as they’ve leafleted and organised – which is what you do when you’re talking to people and getting an understanding of their issues. Once upon a time, when I started out in journalism, that’s exactly what you did. Nobody saw anything strange about it. You spent ages with people affected by policy, rather than with people who wrote policy. Unfortunately, journalists today tend to spend their time with policymakers, not the people who have to live with the fallout from policy decisions. Think about the endless hours that Westminster journalists spend hanging out with MPs, rather than the people who are affected by policy. I’ll be writing a much longer essay about the whole campaign in a little while and that essay will reflect the fact that I’ve spent time with the Focus E15 people through their campaign.

The other point I’d make, though, is that campaigners are exactly the people who should be permitted through the hostel. If you ask me, these hostels should be opened up to regular inspections from housing campaigners – of whom there are a good number in East London – and the people who live there should be allowed to take whoever they like through to raise issues. I really don’t care if the HA wants to call me biased. Fine. I get called plenty worse. And who gives a damn if I am. None of that changes the fact that people have raised serious issues about the living standards little kids are having to tolerate in that hostel and that this needs looking at. Mould and ventilation problems – those things are dangerous. Infants should not be exposed to things like that. At Friday’s occupation, the young mothers raised again the issue of space at the hostel – they say rooms are so small at the hostel that little kids can’t move around and cry to get out. The hostel is only supposed to be temporary accommodation, but some of the mothers and their children have been there for years. There are little kids involved here. Can’t just leave things there.

One suggestion I would make to East Thames is that we reschedule the meeting at Focus E15 and film it. That way, everyone would have an individual record.

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Original post: January 5 2014.

Since everyone’s talking about single mums and Cameron’s help-to-buy scheme, I thought I’d post a little something about the living conditions of a group of young mothers I’ve been meeting with recently. I thought – let’s just take a moment to inject a bit of reality into this. Let’s take a moment to look at the awful way that politicians of all stripes really treat single mothers who have nothing and need help. Let’s look at the way politicians behave towards young mothers who serve no useful political purpose – young women, say, who’ve had a baby early on, but have no money, no connections and none of the fancy schooling or (publicly-funded) expenses budgets enjoyed by so many of the MPs who judge these young mothers and who encourage everyone else to judge them and even to dob them in to authorities if they want. These mothers are some of the people on benefits who are taking the rap for a recession caused by the financial sector and for the slaughtering of social security that is so championed by politicians across the board. So – let’s take a moment to look at the way that some of these young women and their children live.

The fact is that the young women I’m talking with live in unpleasant places – dirty, mouldy places which, the more I hear about them, sound like the sort of places where small children’s lives are actually at risk. Something needs to be done about this. Probably eff-all will be, given that commentators widely hold that Cameron has won the welfare debate (they say this for all the world as though a two-sided debate has been had) and politicians across the board are too frightened to speak up for the welfare state and/or people who need it. Nonetheless, we press on. We must press on. The group of young mothers I met with yesterday – all classed as homeless and all broke – are fighting a bloody battle with Newham Council for decent, clean housing in the borough for themselves and their small children. Many, apparently, will think they don’t deserve that housing, or housing at all – but that line is rubbish. From MPs, it is monumental rubbish. This is an era where MPs happily house their horses in heated stables courtesy of the taxpayer and expect taxpayers to fund their tennis court repairs and housing upgrades and sales. This is an era in which a career ego like Iain Duncan Smith is permitted to trash whole chunks of the exchequer via his useless Universal Credit “project”. So – the hell with the “scroungers” rhetoric. Clean, warm, decent housing is a right – and not just for horses. It is certainly a right as far as small children are concerned.

Anyway, at the moment, these young women, who I’ve written about before, live in Newham’s Focus E15 foyer – a hostel which has about 16 flats for young parents and about 210 flats across the complex. It’s supposed to be temporary accommodation. Some of the women and their children have lived there for several years.

And what a charming place it sounds. Last time I met with them, the women said it was “like a prison” – visitors must show ID before going in and visiting hours are restricted. Rooms are very small with folding-out beds and damp is a real problem. And there’s more. Yesterday when we met, I was shown pictures of rubbish piled up outside one woman’s front door and of sinks hanging off walls under which small children crawl.

Here are some of the pictures – they’re a bit dark, but fairly clear.

Here’s one of the sinks in the room coming away from the wall:

Image of sink coming away from the wall

Here’s the gap between the wall and the sink in more detail:

Gap between sink and wall

Here’s some of the rubbish piled up outside one young woman’s front door.

Rubbish piled up at door

Of even greater concern is the damp, mould and rodents the women describe. Says Rachel, who is 20 and the mother of a three-month-old son who has already had colds and a chesty cough: “There’s no ventilation in the toilet… there’s mould upon mould. We’ve had mice and [we’re] constantly getting damp. There are even rats. [The rubbish ends up by my door] because of where the bin chute is. Half the time they never unlock it, so people just pile their rubbish outside. My door is here and the bin chute is there.”

“The smell is disgusting and it is really, really hard to live there. We try and stay out all day,” says 19-year-old Jasmin Stone.

So. I put it to you that such conditions are dangerous for young children – extremely dangerous, even. I also put it to you that nobody has the right to impose those dangers on infants – particularly MPs who blow wads of taxpayers’ cash on horses’ paddocks and upgrades to flipped homes, or even, say, Newham councillors who piss £111m away on new office buildings which served primarily as Olympic vanity projects. You will understand why Austerity has become synonymous with Elimination in many minds. Before Christmas, I asked East Thames housing association (the HA which manages Focus E15) if I could visit the hostel. I wanted to see the place and conditions for myself. The answer was a resounding No, because staff and residents were under pressure. I’m raising these issues, though, because they need to be raised. They were raised with me before Christmas and again with supporters and campaigners yesterday. I post the details here, because a real response is required. Not a defensive response – a constructive response that everyone can work with is needed. Continue reading →

Keep running, MPs. You will be caught in the end

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Have been thinking about videos and stories that sum up the fight against the political class and austerity cuts this year – and decided on the video below. This video shows Roy Bard from the Mental Health Resistance Network user-led protest group reading a letter of complaint about the dreadful fallout from the ESA work capability assessment for people with mental health conditions. A friend of Roy’s had committed suicide last year.

Roy read the letter outside the fancy Tower Bridge restaurant at which Simon Hughes, glorious member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark, was apparently holding his plush end-of-year Lib Dems bash. For months, the MHRN had tried to secure a meeting with Hughes to discuss their concerns about Atos WCAs and to ask generally why the Lib Dems continued in coalition with satanic Tories. Unfortunately, Hughes had consistently failed to respond to the MHRN’s requests for a meeting. Members of the MHRN had decided, as you do, that waiting a year or so to get five-eighths of fuck-all back from their MP was probably enough, so they turned up to the restaurant to scream their concerns at Hughes through a loudspeaker.

The MHRN asked me if I’d come and film this event. I was pleased to. The event showed exactly the point that dialogue between people who make policy and people who have to live those policies has reached. It shows a group of chronically unwell people who live difficult and uncertain lives in poor conditions, (I know what I’m talking about here, because I’ve spent time in one MHRN member’s rundown flat) standing outside in the freezing cold winter air, screaming about grossly unfair and dangerous government policies, while their political representatives hide out and party down in some warm pile. Cheers.

There was no sign of Hughes at the restaurant (rumour had it that he’d been spirited round the back to avoid the protest). Still, the protest yielded some decent results. Restaurant managers kept running out to the protest to say that they’d call the police if the MHRN didn’t push off (the police never showed up) and a number of Lib Dem partygoers came down to ask what it was all about.

One woman – she was wearing a Lib Dem badge which read “I’m sticking with Simon” – insisted that Hughes championed sick and disabled people. “He is on his own with all of this and all I hear you do is attack him and put him down,” she kept saying (you can see a bit of that in the video). MHRN members observed that nobody whose party was still in a coalition with these Tories and at this point in history could begin to claim to be a champion of sick and disabled people. A note for Simon here: if you’re reading this, Simon, and feel that you have another view of the situation – well, by all means give us a shout and I’ll come to your office and film you responding to people’s concerns about the work capability assessment and the Lib Dem coalition with the Tories. We’re all hanging out for the punchline on that.

Anyway – that’s where we’re at as 2013 sputters out. And maybe it was just as well that we didn’t see Hughes and/or have to listen to him talk that night. The truth is that as we head into our fourth year with this foul government, a lot of us are sick of hearing MPs and councillors talk. I’m especially sick of hearing MPs and councillors talk evasive and non-committal garbage. I don’t know why I keep going to places where they do it. I attended two House of Commons sessions recently and heard the collective intake of breath as Kate Green, Labour’s shadow minister for disabled people, revealed that her main advice for disabled people affected by funding cuts (like the government’s attack on the Independent Living Fund) and funding challenges and problems was for disabled people to “continue to have a dialogue” with MPs about their concerns.

“With all due respect,” one severely disabled Independent Living Fund recipient told Green tersely when she rolled that one out, “we’ve been having that dialogue for the last 30 years.” Precisely. There’s only so many times and ways that people can say things like “please fund our 24-hour care service, because we’ll die without it.” There are really only two answers politicians can give to that, too. There’s either “Yes, we’ll fight to the end for your funding and protect it if we get into government,” or “No, social security’s hour has passed. Goodbye to you and tough shit.” For all the talking that MPs and councillors say they want to encourage on these issues, there’s not all that much to say.

Back to the barricades, then. See you in 2014.

Put THIS on a banknote: young mothers without money abandoned by the chattering classes

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This is a story about the struggle that young mothers without money have for the basics in an era where they and their children are stereotyped, written off as scroungers and not considered deserving – across the political spectrum. The women in this story are fighting for decent places to live.

The young woman in this video is Jasmin Stone. She is 19 and the mother of 17-month-old Safia.

Jasmin is also (this will sound patronising, but here it is anyway) an impressive organiser and a determined one. She needs to be and so she is. Neither she nor her daughter have a secure place to live. Jasmin and a number of other young mothers in Stratford are fighting for decent local housing for themselves and their babies. They’re doing it in the face of supreme indifference from the political class. They say that local councillors have been unhelpful and even dismissive. Their feeling is that Newham council wants them out of the borough.

Media coverage of this sort of issue has been intermittent at best. It has certainly been intermittent in comparison with coverage of other “women’s” campaigns this year. I think here of the extraordinary coverage given to middle-class feminism’s campaign to have a face printed on banknotes that will surely soon be obsolete anyway. The coverage that campaign got ahead of some of the monumental problems women that are dealing with in austerity amazed me. Sure – cover that campaign and the threats campaigners received, but what about the horrors that women who aren’t on twitter, or who aren’t on twitter all the time, are dealing with? Why aren’t their wars being fought with that kind of backing? Where’s the outrage for them? I realise that criticising the banknote campaign and coverage is about as socially acceptable as piddling in the altar wine – but really. I long for the day when the likes of the young women on the Stratford mothers’ campaign are gifted that sort of blanket coverage. I guess it is harder to win political and media love when you’re young, a mother, on benefits for now, needing a bit of help to get things on track and politically useful to nobody. If you’re a mother and want a warm place to live, be a horse with a foal and move in with Nadhim Zahawi.

Anyway.

The Stratford women have a problem. They have a real problem. Young, on benefits, wanting work and classed as homeless, they’re fighting eviction from the hostel they live in. They’re also fighting to convince Newham council that they and their children deserve housing in the borough – not hundreds of miles away. As I understand it (I’ve asked Newham council for a statement on this, but four days later, I’m sick of waiting) Newham council has said that a lack of local social housing means they may be moved out of the borough to places like Hastings – absolute miles and an expensive train journey away from friends and family childcare support in Newham (most of the women I’ve been speaking to for these stories were born and raised in the area).

Let’s start at the beginning. At the moment, Jasmin and her fellow campaigners live in Newham’s Focus E15 foyer – a hostel which has about 16 flats for young parents. There are about 210 flats in the whole complex and a variety of people living in them. They’re not just young parents. The women say that they were only supposed to be living in Focus E15 for around six to eight months, but that some have been there for several years. Life in the hostel doesn’t sound particularly easy. I know that we live in an era where anyone who isn’t rich and connected is supposed to be grateful for any home and/or state help at all – and the fact is that these women do express gratitude for the accommodation – but it is still a place they have mixed feelings about.

One of their number describes as “like a prison.” As I understand it (I asked East Thames Housing Association for a statement on this as well, but four days later, I’m sick of waiting) Focus E15 is a “foyer” – a variation on a social experiment-type idea where people get a place to live if they attend mandatory lifeskills programmes (whatever they are).

But – “it’s horrible,” Jasmin says. She’s lived in the hostel for about 18 months. Before that, she was homeless and sofa-surfing when and where she could. She was given a place in Focus E15 about a month before her daughter was born. Her daughter is nearly 18 months old now. She worries about staying there as her child grows. “It’s not fit for a mother and a baby. Its really small and there’s no space for them to move around. There’s damp and repairs don’t get done. There’s other people there that haven’t got children. There’s 24-hour security. You can only have people visiting you after 12pm in the day and they have to leave by 10pm.”

“You’ve got numerous problems,” says Rachel, 20. Rachel has a three-month-old son. “You get limited hot water. I have to wash my dishes up in cold water, because if I wash up in hot water, then I won’t get a bath even with a baby.” All the women I speak to say that dampness is a problem. “There’s mould,” Rachel says. “[My son] had the flu and he’s had a chesty cough, so it’s not good.” (I asked the East Thames Housing Association, which manages FocusE15, if I could go in and have a look around as I wanted to see things for myself and expand this crucial part of things out, but the HA said No because “the staff and residents were under a lot of pressure.” That was the only question I asked that they were able to respond to immediately).

So. Those are some of the perceptions people have of the place . Small. Damp. Cramped. Rigid. Still, Focus E15 has become a home of sorts for these young mothers. That’s why, earlier this year, they were horrified to receive eviction notices. Earlier this year,(again as I understand it – see earlier notes) Newham council made a decision to cut about £41,000 from Supporting People funding for the women’s flats. Apparently, East Thames HA said that the funding cut meant that they couldn’t afford to pay for support services for the women anymore. That being the case, the women would have to leave.

The notice could not have come at a worse time for some. “When I first got the phone call, I was eight months pregnant,” Rachel says. “I just got a phone call saying – can you come to a meeting to discuss you moving on?”

But here’s the problem. Where would they go? Where is a very young mother with an eviction notice and no money likely to end? As I talk to the women, I find that the answer from the council seemed to be “private rental if you can find it and/or miles away from Newham.” Miles Away From Newham seemed to be key here. In Patrick Butler’s story here, Newham council seems to claim that a shortage of social housing the borough (I’ll be looking into whose fault that is over the next little while) means that the mothers may be housed as far away as Birmingham, Manchester or Hastings (a trend that doesn’t thrill Hastings worthies, as you can read here). Patrick’s story also indicates that Newham council recently changed its housing allocation policy to give servicepeople and “working” families housing priority – ahead of single mothers (an issue one mother of one on of the Focus E15 women raised with me as well). That tells you plenty about the place that young mothers now occupy in political minds – and of the political view of motherhood as “non work” and of children as fripperies. As for private rental – forget it. You’ll see Jasmin saying in the video that she spent several days ringing round a list of landlords and rental agents the council gave her – to no avail. She repeatedly came up against a No DSS line. And when she got one property, a working couple was able to undercut her, because they came in and paid the deposit.

“They don’t want people on benefit,” Rachel says. “Personally I don’t want to stay on benefits. I want to go out to work, but like it is a struggle because there are hardly any jobs, so we’re kind of in the middle. We want to go to work, but we can’t go to work. Childcare would be so expensive. With me, if I was still living locally, my childcare would be my parents, but if I’m hundreds of miles away, I’m basically stuck.” Rachel wants to be a teaching assistant. She just needs a place to live and some help to do it. She says that she did not plan to get pregnant. We’re returning to a time where women without money are punished utterly for that.

Adora Chilaisha, 19, wants to sort out housing for herself and her son first, and then start looking for a job, “because all of this housing and stuff is just difficult. People need to get a job, but they need a house and a base.”

“We had the meeting on the Monday gone,” Jasmin says, “and they basically said that they don’t know where the properties are. We’ve been to see the Mayor, Robin Wales, and he was really negative about everything. He said to us that he was cross with our campaign. He just didn’t seem to help and he said in reality there’s no housing.”

——————-

So. I’ll be writing more about this in the New Year – and A LOT more in general with women who are fighting cuts and misogyny with little support from the Haves. Suffice to say for now that I find the bias that young mothers and single mothers face disgraceful. Read some of the snide remarks about birth control and “such generous benefits for single mothers” under this story. We’ve all read about the pressures and invasive questions that single mothers must deal with to prove that they are entitled to benefits. Adora says that the DWP insists she is in a relationship with her baby’s father, although she isn’t.

This is all a bit “Fallen Women Have Made Their Beds And Must Lie On Them” for me. All the young women I talked to for this story want to work and get things going. Rachel, as we’ve seen, wants to work as a teaching assistant. Jasmin was studying for childminding qualifications when she got pregnant and she wants to set up a home-based childminding service.

It’s clear that Jasmin has great organisational skills. She set up the fightback campaign when the first eviction notices came through. Now the group has a facebook page, a petition and a weekly stall on the Stratford Broadway. I spent several hours at the stall last Saturday. The women had set up facepainting for kids and Christmas music. They took turns on the mic and approached shoppers with their petition. They engaged a lot of people as they explained their housing problems and got a lot of people to sign their petition. There was something useful and important going on there. It was certainly a lot more useful and important than Zahawi fleecing the taxpayer to warm a stable for his horses. Letting that guy off the hook while other people can’t find decent homes for their children and are living in damp places is criminal in my book. So is Oliver Letwin charging the taxpayer for his tennis court repairs. So is George Osborne’s charging the taxpayer for a horse’s paddock. Those people are the out-of-control scroungers. Pity there’s no politicial opposition to them.

One last observation – it’s not the fact that women should be good enough to appear on a banknote that is the issue here. It’s the fact that appearing on a banknote is ALL that we’re good enough for. We’re obviously not good enough for decent housing, public services, decent places for our kids and equal pay.

Et cetera.

See you in the New Year.

Capita wins tagging contracts – but who exactly do they plan to tag?

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Today, the Ministry of Justice announced that Capita will take over the electronic monitoring contracts that Serco and G4s have lost (ie been sacked from) because of “significant anomalies” in billing practices. A couple of months ago, I tried to find out from Capita how it would generate the £400m that the company claimed it would make from the contracts in an August press release. That £400m represents an awful lot of tagging. Who do they plan to tag in addition to people in the criminal justice system? Capita plans to roll the technology out beyond the MOJ – but to which public sector organisations and why? In the post below, you’ll see how difficult it was to get answers from Capita and how reluctant the company and the Ministry of Justice were to release any further information about Capita’s projected income.

September 2013:

I rarely use the words “fascinating” and “press release” in the same sentence, but:

This fascinating press release appeared on the Capita website recently: “Capita [is the] preferred bidder for electronic monitoring contract.”

So.

It seems that Capita has positioned itself (with three other companies) to take over the dire electronic tagging system run by Serco and G4S for the Ministry of Justice. By “dire,” I mean “very likely fraudulent”: Serco and G4S were recently slammed by PriceWaterhouseCoopers for charging the taxpayer tens of millions of pounds for people they claimed to have tagged, but who turned out to be dead or incarcerated. Serco will participate in an independent “forensic audit” as a result. G4S won’t: according to the MOJ, they told Grayling No and were referred to the SFO. G4S, amazingly, told Robert Peston that it opted to call in the SFO itself. I am not sure what the real situation is there. All I know is that we get to keep paying for it.

And paying for it. We now have Capita as preferred bidder for a large electronic monitoring contract. Unfortunately, it is a contract that sets many alarms off itself. Chief among these Capita’s plan to make £400m in its first six years of the contract and its reluctance to explain in detail (to me anyway) exactly how it proposes to do that. I hope that they have decided against targeting the dead. Of even greater concern, though, is the extent to which they apparently plan to target and tag the living. Their press release says that the £400m in those first six years will be generated on the basis of an “anticipated increase in the use of tags beyond the current numbers of monitored individuals.” Early days, I know, but £400m is a lot of money, so we’re surely talking a lot of monitored individuals.

Continue reading →

Machine Guns vs Disabled People: Ministers quake facing the wrath of disabled people

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This is a repost from the DPAC site – be interested to see what response they get to the FOI:

From DPAC:

“For the past few months, we at Disabled People Against Cuts have been receiving emails daily from disabled people and disabled parents with children who are being left without any food or any money for heating. They have had their benefits sanctioned and all money taken away from them for a period of between 2 weeks and 3 months. Disabled people who have never committed any crimes in their lives are being forced into shoplifting simply to be able to eat or to feed their children.

The reasons they are being sanctioned are pathetic, looking for too many jobs, being late to sign on because they were at an interview for a job, having to help a pregnant partner before coming out and being 5 minutes late. Imagine being left utterly destitute in this way by a gang of uncaring, heartless millionaire politicians who think being starved will ‘encourage’ you to find one of the non-existent jobs. It is hard to believe that in a country which is still one of the richest in the world people are being deliberately and callously left to starve and freeze.

Surely democracy, if it exists, depends on government of the people by consensus rather than by the use of force or fear which is tyranny. Yet this week’s appearances by government ministers in front of the DWP select committee only highlights that no such consensus exists in the UK today.

And what of our own minister for disabled people – Mike Penning aka Machine Gun Mike and that DWP henchman Iain Duncan Smith. When the mere thought of being in the same room as a small group of disabled people exercising their democratic right to attend a select committee hearing drives DWP ministers to resort to mass protection by police guards heavily armed with machine guns pointed towards disabled spectators I think it is fair for all citizens to ask just what has this government become. Certainly they really cannot be viewed as democratic or legitimate in any way. Neither can they use the excuse that such ‘vulnerable’ people as us are in any way a threat to them – or are we?

One disabled woman who was there said

“we are being treated like terrorists because we are disabled people –  disgusting!”

and another said

“ A very disturbing sight to se an MP having guns pointed at 3 unarmed people in wheelchairs and about 8 other disabled people and carers who came peacefully to exercise their democratic right to sit in on a hearing.” Continue reading →

One for Autumn statement day: how the #bedroomtax wrecks lives…

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I’m posting this on behalf of campaigners at Leeds Hands off Our Homes, who have produced this excellent report on the effects of the bedroom tax on people in Leeds.

The report draws on evidence from 60 case studies of affected tenants and Leeds City Council statistics (acquired through Freedom of Information requests) to provide a detailed picture of the impact on the bedroom tax. The report demonstrates the awful effects that the tax has had on people’s lives – and the pressure that officials have put on people to pay it.

Winter and fuel poverty will only make this situation worse.

As campaigners say:

“The report shows how the bedroom tax infringes the right to adequate housing in multiple ways. Particular concerns include the way that the bedroom tax constitutes an unaffordable rent increase, targets disabled people and infringes the rights of the child and the right to family life. We also found many incidences of bullying and harassment by landlords and landlords agents (including Leeds City Council) that are causing distress for affected tenants, and evidence that a huge number of tenants are not being informed about their eligibility to Discretionary Housing Payments.”

The report authors observe that the financial hardship caused by the bedroom tax means that the “majority of the tenants in our sample reported cutting back on essentials such as food, clothing and heating. Many tenants suffer from serious medical conditions which make them particularly vulnerable to the cold, and with rising energy prices, we fear their lives may be at risk. The health of tenants is also at risk from poor nutrition. Some tenants have increased debts in other areas or turned to an illegal ‘loan shark’ to pay the bedroom tax.”

The impact on people with disabilities and illnesses has been devastating: “Almost 75% of our sample have one or more significant illnesses or disabilities. The vast majority of mental and physical issues reported were likely to be triggered or exacerbated by stress, and in most cases, the tenant would not have been able to cope with a house move.”

The report also details the impact of the bedroom tax on families and children: “As of August 2013, 3347 children lived in households affected by the bedroom tax in Leeds. Eleven of the households in our sample contained schoolaged children. Many parents reported distress about the impact of financial hardship on their ability to provide for the child’s wellbeing and education, or were sacrificing essentials to do so. Several cited anxieties about the effects on the child’s schooling or social/emotional development if they had to change schools due to a house move.”

It just warms the heart to think of all that money that Iain Duncan Smith has pissed away on Universal Credit. Oh – here’s a video of the amazingly flash house he hangs out in. Just the place to relax while you’re devising policies to make other people homeless.

Read the full report here.