A Christmas Carol too far
Record numbers of children will be homeless this Christmas because promises to protect tenants in England have been broken
I make no apologies for re-printing, in full, this article from last week’s Guardian, written by my erstwhile colleague and veteran campaigner, Polly Toynbee:
‘This is where the housing pressure-cooker explodes. This is Manchester’s civil court, like others all across England, where people are made homeless, hundreds every day. Those unable to pay rocketing mortgages have houses repossessed here. Tenants unable to cope with stagnant incomes lose their homes here when budgets no longer cover rising rents. From here, court bailiffs are sent to remove them.
‘The great scandal is the spiralling number of tenants evicted on “no-fault” Section 21 orders: these allow a landlord to turn someone out even if they have always paid their rent on time, however many years they have been there, however well-behaved they have been. The 2019 Conservative manifesto contained a promise to abolish this power, finally introducing the renters’ reform bill. But then abruptly, in October, the government suspended it indefinitely, with no timeframe, only a hazy statement that it would wait for “reforms” to court delays – sometime never, given the state of the courts.
‘Here’s Jane, in her late 50s, on crutches, with a degenerative spine disease: she’s on personal independence payment, a benefit that is hard to claim. She has lived in her home for nine years; her grandchild was born here, she says. Now the landlord wants her out, on a section 21. She always paid her rent, and got repairs done herself. Many tenants dare not complain for fear of triggering a section 21.
‘Her housing benefit has been frozen for four years, so it doesn’t pay all her rent, leaving a monthly gap of £140 she pays out of her sickness benefits. But all she wants is to stay near family, with friends, in the street. She’s been on the council waiting list for eight years, bidding every time a one-bedroom flat comes up on council lists, but she knows she has next to no chance. Once she is evicted, the council will offer her a temporary B&B on account of her sickness, but she’s told it will be miles away. No chance of getting another private rental when you look at local prices. Her deposit, when it is returned to her after nine years, won’t be enough for a deposit on a new flat, given record rent rises.
‘A Shelter solicitor, Kirsty Almond, is there to help whoever turns up – to advise, comfort and sometimes slightly delay eviction by finding errors in the landlord’s paperwork. The judge has virtually no leeway: a landlord can evict on two months’ notice, and Jane’s has expired. She does get an extra six weeks, the maximum allowed for “exceptional hardship”, owing to her health. The landlord demanded court costs; Shelter got them slightly reduced, to £481.75. But that’s it.
‘The court lists are now so packed in Manchester that Shelter can no longer cover them all. In many of the country’s courts, people are left with no one to advise them (duty solicitors are compulsory only in criminal courts). On Wednesday, yet again, extra lists had been added due to the backlog. Almond says the rate of evictions and the suffering is the worst she’s ever seen in her 15 years in this Shelter job, with incomes no longer covering rent and mortgage rises. The last year has seen nearly 40 per cent more Section 21 no-fault evictions in England. Some are because landlords themselves, unable to pay their mortgages, have had property repossessed.
‘A father turns up. He and his wife and four children are due to be evicted from a small two-bedroom flat. He shows pictures of mould and decay: Almond says they can threaten a counter-suit and hope the landlord backs down, but it’s doubtful. The rent has risen £200 a month, beyond what this tenant can manage on his wages. She has recently seen “a run of nurses and teachers” who can’t pay their rent, surviving on food banks. She talks of all the cases where children are moved and moved again by section 21 orders, several bus rides from their schools, but there’s nothing that can be done.
‘While I spent the day with Almond and her colleagues, watching the express through-put – reaching an astonishing 10 section 21 evictions an hour – Keir Starmer was telling PMQs that a record number of children, 140 000, would be homeless this Christmas. He spoke of an 11-year-old boy whose letter to Santa requested “a for ever home”, and no new toys, “just my old toys out of storage”. Sunak sneered that this was “typical shameless opportunism”. Perhaps the prime minister should spend some time in a court like this.
‘On the same day, Michael Gove was relaxing his house building targets again, under pressure from nimby MPs. Even the right-wing Centre for Policy Studies says 500,000 new homes need to be built a year after a decade of missed targets.
‘Politicians prefer talking about first-time buyers when the pressing need is for social housing to replace the two million council homes sold off since the 1980s by Thatcher’s right-to-buy scheme. The government still prevents councils using the full receipts from those sales to build new council homes.
‘Though nearly 80 per cent of pensioners own their own homes, the number facing Jane’s plight, as private renters constantly vulnerable to eviction, is rising and will increase faster as lucky boomers give way to a younger generation, many of whom will never be able to own. These are the families now bringing up their children in private rented insecurity. Piling on subsidies for first-time buyers only pushes up prices: it’s lifetime secure social housing that will make the difference. Labour’s housing shadow, Matthew Pennycook, says the Tories have presided over the net loss of 14 000 social homes every year since 2010.
‘Labour promises 1.5 million more homes in its first term – affordable homes, social housing and new towns – with planning reforms to stop nimbys blocking building. The Tories are on their 16th housing minister in 13 years, so it’s no surprise that policy has gone nowhere, backing off from planning reform for fear of losing home counties seats.’
‘Shelter says 40 000 more people will be homeless in England this Christmas than last: many will have come through eviction courts such as this one, where some will end up among 26% increase in people now sleeping rough.
‘As she copes with the rising torrent of eviction cases, Almond says after so many years she is mostly hardened to the daily tragedies, but once in a while a case brings tears to her eyes. It might be children, evicted over and over, in appalling temporary accommodation far from school and relatives.
‘But recently it was an older woman, in her 60s, who had run a local bar for years and lived above it. She had always paid her rent. The court gave her just the statutory two weeks, and she had nowhere to go, no one to help her move her stock, and nowhere to put it. Almond’s inability to help enough is what gets to her, as she is only ever able to delay for a little while something that is cruelly inevitable.’
Then this is this from Andy O’Rourke, who is a support worker for Crisis:
‘There was a time when I was sleeping rough when you could get sandwiches out of a bin round the back of the local supermarket. We would climb over the wall after closing time, take them out of the skip, then pass them around. There weren’t a lot of places you could get food back then, but eventually the security guard came and told us we couldn’t be there. I was a teenager at the time, and we explained that we weren’t stealing anything, we just wanted to feed ourselves; but after that, the guards started to throw blue ink all over the sandwiches.
‘This didn’t deter us. We kept coming back, to fish around at the bottom of the bins for the ones the ink hadn’t reached. So they responded by replacing the ink with bleach – opening the packs first and pouring it on, so we couldn’t tell which ones had been affected. It seemed a pointless sort of cruelty to me, but that’s the reality facing people experiencing homelessness on the streets.
‘On another occasion, I was attacked while I was sleeping, in a doorway. Kicked awake. That’s what would happen if you were sleeping out in the open – you would be at the mercy of people who had had too many drinks. I was 15 at the time.
‘Sleeping on the street is terrifying. You feel vulnerable anyway, but for that to happen, and for people to be laughing – it makes it hard to maintain your sense of self. It becomes easy to believe that you are just some rubbish on the street, for people to treat however they want.
‘My experience was frightening, but it was far from unique. And although my homelessness ended years ago, new research released by Crisis shows these sorts of experiences remain common. Based on interviews with more than 150 people who all slept rough within the last two years, the study represents the most detailed survey of street homelessness in years. Worryingly, it shows that for people who sleep on the streets, life is only getting more dangerous, with the proportion of those surveyed who have experienced violence having risen from 48 per cent in 2016 to 61 per cent in 2023. The proportion of people who have had belongings stolen has risen from 54 per cent to 75 per cent.
‘Overall, nine in ten of those surveyed reported experiencing violence or abuse – up from 79 per cent. Half have been physically attacked – up from 35 per cent. One in five had someone urinate on or next to them (up from nine per cent) and 53 per cent have had items – including bricks and beer cans – thrown at them. In the vast majority of cases (86 per cent), the perpetrator of these last attacks was a member of the public.
‘Violence, abuse and danger. Unfortunately, as the survey shows, that is the reality facing more than 3,000 people sleeping rough in England. And, most worryingly, as Crisis opens its Christmas services – providing support to more than 7,000 facing homelessness, including almost 600 sleeping rough in London – rough sleeping numbers are likely to rise even further. Official statistics show there has already been a 14 per cent in rough sleeping in England in the two years to autumn 2022 – and it is up by 74 per cent since 2010. As rents soar and the cost of living crisis goes on, it’s likely we will see that growth continue.
‘More people are being forced to sleep on the street, and when they do, they are facing greater risk. Yet instead of offering support, the government ramps up its rhetoric – announcing plans, set out in the criminal justice bill that would criminalise rough sleeping and push people further away from support. This is backed by the prospect of fines of up to £2,500, a month’s imprisonment, or both.
‘None of this will help. It will simply mean more fear, abuse and harassment. Because that realisation that you have nowhere to go is frightening in itself, even before you consider the risk of assault. A group of lads piling in and kicking me was actually, in some ways, not the worst thing. I understood the pain would pass, but that feeling that you can’t protect yourself remains every night.
‘I’ve been thinking a lot about it, these past few weeks. I left homelessness behind years ago – I work in frontline support now, to help others end theirs – but that feeling stays with you. It’s strange but I can still feel it, in the pit of my stomach. There is a level of cold that stays with you. I still feel it sometimes, in my bones, even now. It’s a despairing cold, as though no matter what happens, you won’t get warm again. We can’t allow more people to feel the same thing in decades to come. We can’t allow more people to live in fear. And with the right political commitment, we won’t have to.
‘We can end homelessness. It will take work, and cooperation, because resources are tight. But if we work together, and if the government listens and commits resources, then we can end all forms of homelessness. It won’t be a quick fix. We need more social housing, and we need a social security system that treats people with dignity.
‘My own route out wasn’t straightforward. It took a number of years, and I needed support and access to stable housing, but my story shows it is possible. I never tell the people I work with that it’s going to be easy, because it won’t be. But there’s a route there, and we know it works. I am proof of that. Ending homelessness altogether is the same. It won’t be easy, but there’s a route there, if we want to take it.’
Have yourselves a merry little Christmas: each and all.
This week: Tim finally watched Wes Anderson’s newest offer, Asteroid City. It’s utterly compelling, quirky, off-beat, funny, romantic (in the Anderson way), with an absolutely stellar cast (Tom Hanks, Scarlett Johansson, Margo Robbie, Tilda Swinton, Willem Dafoe, Live Shreiber – I could go on and on). Some years ago, I had supper in Anderson’s Kent house, just saying, a quirk of my personal – one relative by marriage would grimly say (he’s so totally wrong) – ‘rackety’ history.