Don’t know how to put this without sounding like I’m overdoing the drama:
I’ve talked with a couple of street homeless people recently who are so badly affected by ill health and homelessness that they look as though they’ve turned up from penury circa 1850.
Dirt, sores and decay: if it wasn’t for people’s modern (if rotting) clothing, you’d wonder which century you’d crashed in.
I find this timewarp disturbing. You see a human corrosion that belongs in historical photos.
On Wednesday morning, I talked to a youngish woman on Fairfield Street by Manchester Picadilly.
She was holding a dirty red sleeping bag. The woman was small, pale and had lost some of her teeth. Her thin hair was tied back.
Her hand, though.
I asked the woman how she managed on the streets in winter.
The woman said the cold had been hard. She still had trouble with her hands, because they were always wet and cold.
She showed me her left hand. It was swollen twice the size of a normal hand and covered in sores and yellow scabs – obviously infected.
I said, “oh my god.”
“I should go to the hospital,” she said.
“You need some antibiotics,” I said.
We talked.
Like everyone you speak with on the Manchester streets, the woman was hoping to raise the £17 or so that people need for a hostel bed for the night.
The woman said that she was banned from going into Picadilly station. The transport police moved her and others on from the station if they got too near.
She said that grating had been put up around some buildings so that people couldn’t sleep under them.
Transcribing a lot of interviews atm which takes me a long time. Should be back with posting soon.
A couple of things to think on:
I have an interview that I’m working on with a housing officer. This officer said that the council they worked for was placing more and more people in Travelodges for emergency accommodation. It isn’t news that homeless families are placed in Travelodges, but it did make me wonder how much hotel chains collect these days in housing benefit/Universal Credit and if hotel chains built or set up new hotels to cash in.
this officer said that there was concern in some council officers about councillors responding in a knee-jerk way to bad publicity about housing. If a homeless family received publicity about their housing problems, some councillors would tell staff to prioritise that case and to find the family decent local housing. If a homeless family didn’t have publicity and/or a lawyer, they wouldn’t get any such treatment and would languish for years in emergency or temporary accommodation – if they were lucky to get even that far. Backlogs of such cases piled up on officers’ desks. Variations on this theme have long been the case, of course. It was just that officers were getting mightily pissed off about it. In times of extreme housing crisis, systems that are supposed to be in place go to pieces.
Back to homelessness in East London – where Newham council tells Maya and Rakib, a homeless couple with two very young children, that a flat with smashed and broken storage sheds and no floor coverings, or stove, or furniture is perfectly adequate for (the likes of) them.
The couple is homeless. That means they have no rights and no voice. They must live wherever authorities tell them to live. They must be grateful. They must understand that they’re at the bottom of the pile – and that’s how everyone else sees things.
Truly, homeless people are disenfranchised.
Says Maya:
“The council officer said they often rent flats out as shells and that was okay.”
This is important. It shows where the official mindset is at.
Windowsills in the flat
We’ve reached a point (we’ve been at it for a long while) where officers and politicians genuinely believe that it IS okay to shove homeless families into shells and hovels – and that homeless people who are offered a shell, or a hovel, don’t know they’re born.
I think that a lot of officials genuinely believe this. After years of austerity, this institutional contempt is rife.
“At least you’re inside,” the argument goes. In the bureaucratic mind, sleeping on an uncovered floor under a roof is better than sleeping on a park bench – because that’s the choice. That’s where the line is now. We’re all meant to accept it. Homeless people no right to expect the basics, let alone a healthy environment, or anything so romantic as comfort.
Homeless people who hope for the basics are felt to have a scandalous sense of entitlement.
I wrote about 67-year-old Paul in Oldham, who was told by officers at First Choice Homes that the filthy, tiny and rotting static caravan that he lived in counted as adequate housing and he’d make himself intentionally homeless if he left it. I attended a meeting with him where an officer actually said that.
Paul in his caravan
I wrote about Marsha who was shown a place in Woolwich with stained mattresses, a broken, filthy oven and broken doorframes. She was told to accept the place, or else.
Oven at the flat Marsha was shown
Homeless people must accept all of this, or risk a council discharging its duty to them – that is, refusing to help them any further.
Their “choices” come down to – “do you want to live inside, or outside?” and “live in this hovel, or else.” Continue reading →
Posted below are excerpts from a transcript of an interview with homeless Newham woman Marsha, 30.
I post this as an example of homelessness as so many women I interview these days experience it.
Marsha talks about common problems that homeless women with children are always up against now: the lifetime of housing insecurity, the debilitating anxiety and depression, and the public authorities that invade a homeless woman’s privacy and keep her in her place by never letting her forget that they could take her child.
Marsha talks about being trapped forever – in rotten housing and low-paid work.
Few people on the ground believe that this will change soon.
The political and media classes are completely consumed by Brexit.
There’s no time or space for people who rely on the public services that our imploding politics can’t provide.
That is disgusting. I can’t tell you how upsetting it is for everyone involved.
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Housing
For 18 months, Marsha has lived with her 6-year-old daughter in a single room in a Newham homelessness hostel.
The two share a bed in that room:
Marsha and her daughter in their one-room temporary homelessness hostel accommodation
Before they were placed in this hostel, Marsha and her daughter lived in temporary shared accommodation in a Newham hostel called Belgrave Court.
The two had one room. They shared a kitchen and bathroom with other hostel residents.
Marsha has lived in a lot of places like this. She grew up in shared accommodation.
Marsha’s mother migrated to England from Jamaica. She worked long hours as a cleaner. She brought Marsha to England when Marsha was 12. The two lived in shared housing.
They often had to move. Stability is a privilege that not everyone enjoys.
Marsha says:
“…when you’re renting a room… you’re sharing with all different people and there’s always issues, so we’ve always had to just kept to kept on moving, so as a teenager coming up into my adult years, I had to move…”
Marsha says that she was abused when she was younger.
She hates talking about these issues (“I don’t want all my business out there”), although council and jobcentre officers insist that she talks – again and again and again:
“The medical assessment officer, he asked if I had any issues. My issues growing up is not something I’m comfortable talking about, so I just said to him, “bottom line, I suffer from depression. I don’t need to go into the things that make me depressed, because it is uncomfortable to relive certain moments…”
Relentless interrogation by authorities
Marsha is forced to relive her past and present problems, though. Homeless women must repeatedly justify their need for housing and income help to strangers by explaining their backgrounds and experiences again and again. They must tell their stories from the start to each new officer who interviews them – council homelessness officers, MASH (multi-agency safeguarding hub) officers, jobcentre advisers and social workers.
They must tell officers everything: mental health histories, family histories, relationship histories and abuse histories. There’s no letup. There’s no privacy. There is no autonomy. Officers want details when they are deciding if a homeless woman is in need.
They want graphic details, even. Does the woman have panic attacks? How often does she have them? How serious are they? How bad is her depression? Is she medicated? Was she abused? Who was her abuser? What did her abuser do? How has her experience affected her kids?
Officers want to rate a woman’s story. They want her to prove that her problems are genuinely serious, whatever that means.
Marsha says that her medical history of depression and panic attacks (she’s been hospitalised in the past) has sometimes been dismissed in the past, because officers say that panic attacks are run-of-the-mill these days:
“They said to me panic attacks is a common thing, [that] lots of people go through it. [They said] “just find coping mechanisms and you will be all right.”
Officers say that even when Marsha is clearly unwell:
“…the sort of depression that I had at the time – I was always washing my hands. I was always doing stuff. I couldn’t take light. Even now, I can barely stand light. That’s why I put stuff over the window.”
Marsha still drapes sheets and blankets over windows to keep the light out. I visited her at about midday on a Saturday and her hostel room was in shade.
Sheets and blankets draped over the hostel window
Officers know these things, but ask about them repeatedly all the same.
Councils keep detailed files about homeless people, but don’t refer to them, apparently.
Marsha says:
“I said to him [the officer], “I’ve got my housing file in my drawer. It’s this thick. I have been complaining since I moved into this property that I have panic attacks at least two to three times a week.”
At a recent meeting with social services, Marsha had to remind the social worker of her name, because the officer wasn’t sure who Marsha was – even though she had called Marsha to the meeting.
The social worker hadn’t looked at Marsha’s file. She just brought Marsha in to question her.
Regular readers will know that I recently published a story about the letter on this page – a letter that threatened a Newham hostel resident with homelessness if she didn’t attend a meeting.
Lukia, the woman who received the letter, has serious mental health issues.
She’s recently been in the care of a mental health unit.
The note said that Lukia would be thrown off the council homelessness list and evicted from her hostel room if she didn’t attend a meeting that day.
Needless to say, Lukia found this note upsetting in the extreme.
When I first posted the letter, some readers here and on facebook felt that it couldn’t be genuine – that staff couldn’t have issued such a rough note on an unheaded piece of paper in such unprofessional way.
I understood that. Nobody wants to think that council and hostel staff professionalism have collapsed to such a point.
Except that professionalism has collapsed – at councils, at the DWP – all over.
In the two recent videos below, Newham mayor Rokhsana Fiaz apologises for that letter. She says that there’s been an investigation into the note and that the person responsible has been sacked.
I’ve heard the same thing on the grapevine, so we’ll go with it for now.
Thing is – what next? – for Newham, for councils generally, for the whole of the public sector?
The political and media classes couldn’t care less that the public sector is actually anarchic a lot of the time. Brexit is their one interest and fatal obsession. You’d be better off asking Santa for housing than putting in a request with that lot.
Politicians like Fiaz do a good line in apologising (google “Rokhsana Fiaz apology” for a look), but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re still overseeing a housing catastrophe. The national housing disaster is going nowhere even faster than Brexit. Sadly, unlike Brexit, it isn’t live-blogged by mainstream press outlets in real time.
The best you can hope for now with local politicians is a kneejerk response that goes in your favour.
I know for a fact how things “work” behind the scenes at certain council offices at the moment, because I’m in contact with officers here and there. Campaigners and welfare advisers bring individual housing cases to the attention of a mayor or a council leader. That mayor or leader rushes down to the housing options team in that council and tells staff to find housing for that individual pronto.
Staff do as they’re told and money is somehow found to meet a local rent (this part always intrigues me), but staff seethe. Some leave. There’s no system as such – just reflex reactions from sensitive politicians. The thing really is lawless – like Brexit, if you will. Sign of the times, I suppose.
If you’re campaigning with people who are homeless, that sensitivity is your main way in. Problem is – not everyone who is homeless knows that, or is in a position to pressure a council.
I’ve posted below an extract from a PIP assessment recording I made.
Paul’s caravan – exterior
It shows that some Personal Independence Payment assessors have no idea what extreme poverty in our so-called modern era looks like.
It shows that some PIP assessors don’t know – or don’t believe – that such poverty and need exists.
That is a problem. These assessors make judgments on sick and disabled people’s eligibility for much-needed benefits.
They’re at a dangerous remove, because they carry out these assessments behind a desk.
They judge people’s needs by reading through a computer checklist in a room in an assessment centre.
As poverty worsens, that remove tells more and more.
I attended this PIP assessment a bit over a year ago in Rochdale with Paul, who was in his 60s.
Paul had a serious heart condition, chronic kidney disease and mobility difficulties. He’d had a pulmonary embolism.
He was also homeless. He lived in a tiny old caravan on a concrete site in Oldham.
Paul in his caravan
The problem? The PIP assessor had NO idea what such homelessness meant. I was struck by this. You can’t judge people’s needs if you can’t fathom their lives. You certainly can’t judge people’s needs if the assessment system you’re using doesn’t account for poverty.
Two things:
– the assessor expressed straight-out disbelief about Paul’s accommodation (“a caravan?” you’ll hear him ask with surprise in the audio below)
– the assessor showed a startling lack of imagination about the limits of such a caravan. He asked if there was a shower in the caravan.
He kept asking Paul what disability adaptions and aids he had in the caravan. You can see from the photos that the answers were No and None. Paul barely had four walls.
So.
I find this too often with so-called professionals who assess people in poverty for much-needed sickness and disability benefits.
Bottom line is that assessors think that people in poverty have more than people actually do. They give every indication of thinking that people are better supported than people are. There’s a sense that the default position is that people are coping.
There was certainly a sense here that people who were sick or disabled and homeless simply couldn’t fall below a certain line.
Stove in the caravan
The fact that Paul didn’t have adaptations because he was literally living in a tin can without even a bucket for a toilet in it wasn’t on the radar.
Made you wonder if PIP assessors asked the same questions of homeless people who lived in tents.
The PIP assessor even asked if social services had been around to see Paul’s caravan could be adapted.
I think the assessor wanted to see an occupational therapy report – he wanted proof that Paul needed help and should get PIP because of that.
Assessors are obsessed with formal reports and pieces of paper – the certificates and reports that cost money, require ID and are harder and harder to get for people who are pushed to the fringes.
Paul’s caravan was as basic as caravans get. It was old, tiny, broken down and cramped. The caravan was so small that Paul couldn’t stretch out on the interior ledge that served as a bed. You couldn’t lean on the walls, let alone fit a handrail to them.
The caravan had no toilet or shower. There was a toilet and shower block on the Oldham site where the caravan was parked. Paul had to use that.
I realise that questions about adaptions and aids are usually asked at PIP assessments, but I wondered what the assessor was seeing in his mind: Paul living in a nice two-deck Winnebago in which you might fit a wet shower and a stairlift?
Here’s the conversation:
Assessor: The home that you’re living in – what would you describe it as?
Paul: I’m homeless…
Assessor: Homeless. Right. You do not live in a house at all?
Paul: I actually live in a caravan.
Assessor: Caravan. Caravan…? Caravan. Now, in the home do you use any aids or adaptations that are there for you…? What are they?
Paul: If I lived in a house, then I would be needing preferably a bungalow so there are no stairs…if I lived in a bungalow, I need a walk-in shower and preferably a seat to sit on…
Assessor: Yeah, but in answer to the question that I asked. Do you have any aids at the moment…
Paul: I have elbow crutches…
Assessor: Elbow crutches. Anything else?
Paul: No
Assessor: Have you been assessed by social services… or anyone that has been around to your caravan to see if there’s anything that they could do for you…
Paul: No
Assessor: When you wash, is there a shower in this caravan?
Paul: No…There’s a shower on site, there is a shower block…
Assessor: All right. There’s a shower you use in the shower block.”
—–
Etc
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The post below is an excerpt from a series of covert PIP and ESA recordings I’ve made in austerity.
The transcribing of these recordings will form part of an interview and assessment collection made possible thanks to a Barry Amiel & Norman Melburn Trust grant.
To twitter, then! – where Universal Credit director general Neil Couling (or the hapless minion who runs Neil’s twitter account) tells me that Universal Credit works brilliantly for people whose incomes vary.
People who are self-employed often earn different amounts from month to month. They must report their earnings each month. The DWP is meant to adjust their Universal Credit entitlements accordingly and pay people the Universal Credit that they’re owed.
Neil seems to think that this actually happens.
I’d asked twitter what should happen to a Universal Credit claim if people made money one month, but not much in the next two (I was trying to understand if Universal Credit claims stopped if people earned over certain amounts):
#UniversalCredit: if you have a variable income and, say, earn in one month enough not to be entitled to any money – you have to make a new UC claim if in the following two months you don’t earn enough?
It’s in effect a rapid reclaim process. Treated as continuous, simply reconfirming details (assuming nothing else has changed). Light touch, simple and quick
“Light touch, simple and quick” – like a 2 in 1 shampoo! Sounded absolutely fantastic.
Pity it’s tripe.
I say it is tripe, because I keep meeting self-employed people outside the jobcentre who tell me that trying to claim Universal Credit while on a variable income is a nightmare – a nightmare that they’ve given up trying to wake from.
They say that the DWP can’t calculate their entitlements correctly and/or never pay their Universal Credit entitlements on time. In fact, this was the reason that I asked twitter about Universal Credit and variable incomes in the first place. I was trying to work out wtf was meant to happen, so that I could compare that with the shambles that was actually happening.
In February, for example, I posted a discussion with a woman outside Stockport jobcentre who said that trying to claim her family’s Universal Credit entitlements each month was “a nightmare.”
She said that her self-employed husband declared his earnings to the DWP each month as instructed. The DWP had not once managed to calculate the amount of Universal Credit that the family was owed and pay the money on time.
She was not happy about this. At all:
“They [the DWP] never pay us on time… Me husband works for himself, so his earnings are up and down at the moment, so we have to declare them every month…even when he’s declared his earnings, they suspend our account, we still haven’t got paid a week later and then we still have to ring up [the DWP]…
“He declares them [his earnings] on the 16th of every month, because the payday is the 23rd. He declares them, which reopens our account, but then a week later, we should get paid – on the 23rd – but every month when it gets to the 23rd, we’re never paid, so I have to wait 40 minutes by ringing them up and getting through to them… and I’ve got a three year old and a two year old as well as the baby and it’s a nightmare.”
The note says that if she doesn’t attend a meeting that day, she’ll be thrown off the council homelessness list and evicted from her hostel room.
In an email last week, councillors said they and the mayor were horrified by the note and would investigate.
Apparently, the mayor repeated that concern at a council meeting last night.
That was all very well, but I want to know the outcome of that investigation. It’s been over a week.
How many people have received such letters?
Why is it that councils (and other so-called service providers such as the DWP, just btw) allow such contempt for people who are most in need to flourish?
Update 28 Feb: the council says that it is investigating this situation – to find out how someone living in one of its homelessness hostels came to receive such a letter.
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Original post:
Seriously.
I wrote a fortnight ago about Lukia, a woman with serious mental health difficulties who lives (if “lives” is the word) in a Newham homelessness hostel.
Lukia has previously been in the care of a mental health unit.
She is battling Newham council for permanent housing.
Lukia came home last week to find this note under her door:
The note says:
“You are request [sic] to come into the office in Victoria Street today by 3pm. Failure to do so will lead to you being removed from the homelessness list and you will be asked to leave your home.”
I post this to show you again the way that people with no clout are addressed by authorities.
Every contact is a threat.
People aren’t invited to meetings with council or hostel staff. They’re told to attend, or else.
The “or else” part can be the threat of being thrown off the homelessness list and out of a hostel room, as in this case.
It can be the threat of street homelessness and child removal. Whatever form the “or else” takes, these threats are heavy-handed, dangerous and unjustified.
It’s high time that councillors and MPs addressed this. A shortage of housing does not justify a shortage of decency and care.
Lukia, as I’ve written, has a history of serious mental health difficulties and of being placed in temporary accommodation so vile and substandard that she’s been moved out of it.
She feels that permanent accommodation is her only chance at the stability that might lead to an improvement in her health.
Threats of homelessness hardly help people achieve that.
