[Ben Reeve
Lewis takes a trip down memory lane …]
Can you believe that when I first decided to write a news round-up column for Tessa I didn’t want to get angry or cynical. I wanted to find the more heart-warming, human interest stories. Report on innovations and exciting ideas.
Actually I am one of life’s natural ‘Glass half full’ types but the more I see what is happening in housing the more I take the view that if a glass is half full, there is room in it for more alcohol.
Looking back to the Spike
I came into housing in what seemed more innocent, even optimistic times by working as a teenager in a 1,200 bed direct access night shelter in Peckham, called the Camberwell Spike.
I’ve written about it before. The residents back then were cartoon “Dossers” as they were known at the time.
Dossers etc
We didn’t think about the pejorative meaning of the word. To us, working in the trade “Dosser” was just a descriptive title, as were the words “Dive Bombing” (Meaning to pick up discarded cigarette ends from the street) ‘Skippering’, meaning to spend a night sleeping rough and, being the days before cheap booze, drinking “Jack”, meths or surgical spirits mixed with Milk or Cider, depending on personal cocktail preferences.
Such were the realities of my day.
The guys weren’t really like today’s street homeless. They were more cartoon tramp-like, almost to a man over 50 and all looked like Blackbeard the pirate. Sort of quaint looking back.
Neighbours complained about our residents passing out in the street and vomiting in their front gardens, so we tried to make amends by bringing in new clothes for them that we bought from bankrupt fashion chains to tart our lads up.
Pink tramps
We once got an assignment of colourful defunct boutique shirts in cellophane wrappers that nobody had checked that we eagerly gave out to Frank and Joe, and Mohammed, only to find when they were all decked-up in their finest and wandering around in the disgruntled community, wearing 70s style pink, cerise, plum and apricot button collared numbers that the word “Tramps” had been stylishly embroidered above the pocket.
What can ya do? Laugh! That’s what. Laugh at the serendipity of life.
But for the third week running I find it difficult to laugh at what is happening to my fellow citizens.
Capping in Croydon
Croydon Council, neighbours to the London borough I work in, got themselves in hot water this week following a Newsnight programme that pilloried them for spending £1.5 million on placing homeless families in a run-down hotel, reported widely but perhaps most accurately on 24 Dash
To be honest, Croydon tells it like it is when they said:
“Caps to the local housing allowance – of between £250 for a one-bedroom flat and £400 for a four-bedroom property – is pricing families on benefits outside the private rented sector.”
Going on to say:
“The amount of new private rented accommodation supply available to the council has fallen from 393 homes in 2008/09 to 31 last year.”
393 – 31??? That is what councils are really facing.
Now I don’t blame PRS landlords for not wanting to take on benefit tenants. Market rents far outstrip LHA levels and landlords have to deal with ‘Computer says no’ Councils if they are going to take them on, but it does annoy me when people in the press and other places get on their high horses about things like this.
I’m going to stand up for my council colleagues on this one. Homelessness is on the increase in no small part due to government policy and their inability or refusal to care about any connections between benefits, unemployment, welfare cuts and housing.
The problem they created then becomes the council’s problem. But councils are dealing with vicious cuts at the same time as having to provide a statutory service.
Who should bear the blame?
The hotel was certainly what we in the housing world would term a ‘Shit-hole’ but nobody is falling over themselves to provide nice clean properties – in fact decent housing providers are pulling away from councils by the day.
So what do you expect? Is it just Croydon being rubbish at dealing with homeless families or does the blame lay elsewhere?
Good old George …
And while we’re on the subject, big news of the week was George Osbourne’s announcement that government is looking to shave another £10 billion off of the welfare budget, again by hitting the poorest among us.
Shelter Blog focussed on how the cuts will impact on plans to cut housing benefit to the under 25s. Author Kate Webb highlighted that such plans are based on stereotypes of young people and their lives:
“Ministers insist that young people should live with their parents, but that’s not an option for those whose parents have died, divorced or downsized, been abusive towards them or simply don’t have the room”.
The only light in all this was the announcement reported in 24 Dash by Tory MP Harriet Baldwin that care leavers and those fleeing domestic violence would be exempt.
A bit of compassion
What made my jaw hit the floor was Ms Baldwin’s statement:….
“We need a welfare safety net in this country for people who have had difficult challenges and difficult starts in life”.
Is this woman not thinking of her career? How can she go so recklessly against her party line? Making statements that suggest notions of compassion or empathy. I’ll bet the chief whip pulled her in and……..whipped her…..Or maybe he just called her a ‘Pleb’ and cycled off through the gates of Downing street giving the finger to the duty cops.
Get a bank account – problem sorted!
Finally, on a lighter note, (read that phrase with curled lip) government announced plans to publish the findings of the pilot project for housing benefit payments going direct to tenants of councils and housing associations later this month (24 Dash again)
Speaking at the Institute of Revenues Rating and Valuation Annual Conference and Exhibition Lord Freud….damn this sticky……oh!!!!! Sorry Said:
“The work that is being done with tenants has resulted in more people opening bank accounts and becoming financially aware”.
Fantastic news. People are opening bank accounts. That should sort it. The fact that they have nowt to put in those bank accounts is just a detail of course; it’s just a teething problem.
Direct payment problem
Like the teething problem that occurred last month when Green-Square accidentally took money out of tenant’s accounts before the due date, throwing them into rent arrears.
Green-Square’s Ann Cornelius said:
“That really upset our residents because they were really trusting us. £400 on average is a lot of money to hit your bank account and people didn’t have the money they expected when they expected it and also they had a lot of charges. It was an awful lot of hassle for them and us.”
I’m not dissing Ann. I know her personally and have trained many of their staff. She is a lovely, committed and able human being and Green-Square are a great organisation but this shows what can happen. If a tenant is trying to pay off a Wonga Loan and the money isn’t there they get whacked with extra fees. It’s a snowball kind of thing.
Ann ended by saying:
“No matter how good you think your IT systems and profiling are – they’re not that good at the moment. You need an awful lot of information.”.
Even staff at the treasury have their doubts that the various agencies will be able to cope when Universal Credit comes in.
Every technical glitch affects real people down the line, causing chaos, sleepless nights, even broken relationships. While government messes about getting things into shape real lives are being affected.
Ben Reeve Lewis
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With Universal Creidt, and the rent caps, I am heading for the bunker, with plenty of tinned food. And yes, it used to be that housing was available: people were homeless due often to mental health issues, not because they couldn’t afford any properties anywhere.
Yep. I dont think that many people whose work doesnt bring them into contact with people on benefits in one form or another quite grasp the magnitude of what is coming.
I know several intelligent people who arent prone to over dramatise are predicting riots and civil unrest. Peple will literally be starving and evictions will go up.
Conversely if, as happens in many cases now, judges simply refuse to grant possession to tenants of social landlords many of them could go bust.
I remember last year training some housing officers in Wales and explaining UC in principle. One stalwart of 25 years service looked at me and said “We’re finished”
Haha, loved the ‘glass half-full’ intro.
Take a look at this recent thread:
http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.php?t=4225977
This is just one example of why tax payers are angry and demanding changes to welfare. The problem is this woman’s situation is not uncommon.
No one disagrees that there needs to be a safety net for those most in need. The majority of the vulnerable tenants I deal with on a daily basis are receiving some kind of assistance from the state, mainly LHA, pension credit and attendance allowance. But when you are a healthy person of working age receiving the equivalent of approx £35k in benefits, something is seriously wrong with the system. Even the proposed cap of £26k still seems high to me.
Wirral Partnership Homes found that almost half of their tenants believe they can afford to stay in their under occupied social housing after the LHA spare room reduction kicks in. This demonstrates that there is room for cuts.
“While government messes about getting things into shape real lives are being affected.”
As you said yourself, it’s a teething problem. Won’t things be a lot simpler once UC is in place, meaning fewer mistakes in future? Welfare is a BIG system, it’s unrealistic to expect progress or change without experiencing one or two problems.
I’ll answer a loink with a link JamieT http://www.alexsarchives.org/?p=4674&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=refreshing-beveridge Partly laziness but mainly because the author is a professor of Social Policy and so he writes articulately about the same topic while I tend to rant when me anger gets the better of me.
On your last point of teething problems, I meant it sacrcastically. When you are on the financial edge there is no room for teething problems. In taking £400 from people’s bank accounts in error Green-Square will have tipped many people over that edge. Bank accounts would have been closed down, people gone without food, families becoming desperate before they realised it was an error.
People on benfits dont have financial latitude and going down the back of the settee to find 50p for a pint of milk is common. I know, I’ve been there in the past and I wasnt even on benefits. What is a teething problem to an organisation can be the straw that breaks the camel’s back for many, and the argument about eggs and omelettes doesnt wash for me.
I know what you mean about the amount of benefits some people get and I’ve always said that there are fraudsters and scammers out there and they make me as angry as anyone given how hard I work just to stand still but I dont presume that all benefit people are like that, Cameron and his cronies do and thats how they manages to fastrack these frightening policies through.
I promise next week I will write about nice news. I have 3 weeks of anger so far I cant afford the heartburn pills anymore
Ben,
you describe the problem but what do you think the solutions are? Do you think that the taxpayer should keep funding a life on benefits for fit working age people? Do you think that the benefit bill should just be allowed to increase like it has in the last 10 years?
I think large part of this problem is high immigration, this has caused a massive shortage of housing and driven up rental prices. The population of the UK has grown by nearly 4 million in the last 10 years and that’s only the (legal) ones who registered on the last census.
I have HB tenants with 4 children that I have estimated get tax free benefits of over £25k pa (not central London). In four years she has never worked a day, if you dont count giving birth twice, he works the odd day but says he cant compete with the eastern europeans who have taken all his work but the point is they are very comfortable relying on benefits. They have a people carrier, an iphone each, both smoke and drink, the house is stuffed with computers, games consoles and televisions.
Unless something changes I cant see them ever working and being a burden on the taxpayer for the rest of their lives.
A solution Dave? Damn…..you’ve spotted the chink in my armour haha
The factors that impact on all this are complex and intertwined and I dont know of a single action plan or ethos that would do it. For instance immigration and the influx of Eastern European workers is part of a general Europe wide plan to promote labour migration and skills swapping between all EEA countries which is supposed to help boost our economies. I have yet to see how it has done that. I remember reading that Labour admitting that in going along with the plan they seriously underestimated how many would take up the call, orginally reckoning on something like 18,000 but ended up with around 800,000.
And it does impact on jobs. I know a lorry driver, self employed who ran his own rig on a payment plan for 15 years who had to sell it and get a job as a driver again because he couldnt compete with Eastern European drivers working for less than he could earn to pay for his lorry.
Wages themselves are a major factor. Since announcing cuts, the numbers claiming housing benefit have risen and continue to rise, not through the unemployed but topping up people on low wages. So public money is being used to prop up employers.
My point has always been that you cant create effective solutions to a complex web of causes and effects by singling out one element and expecting that to solve it.
It’s the standard old tactic that has been used for time immemorial for governments and rulers in crisis. Everyone is fed up, so find a populist scapegoat, blame them and then base all your policies on that single point of reference.
For Mao it was the intellectuals, for Stalin it was the capitalists, for Castro it was the USA and for Cameron it is people on benefits.
I’ve never said that benefits shouldnt be reformed and modernised and maybe we should as you suggest consider the numbers of immigrant workers into the bargain but capping housing benefit, reducing benefits through UC and going over to single monthly payments is a social disaster in the making.
The effects of it will be felt by all of us, not just those on benefits.
Even if you take the argument that people shouldnt get handouts and should work for their benefit, an argument I have regularly with my partners Frazzy, employers would simply rely on a pool of free workers and unemployment would rise.
Unlike our politicians I dont pretend to have the answers but what I can see is the dreadful ramifications of not considering the wider picture when coming up with policies and I also think it’s unfair and immoral to scapegoat people on benefits to shore up a lack of real ideas.
You cant bring in a single policy in a holistic system without it having different effects elsewhere, both good and bad. What our government singularly fails to do is display any awareness of what they are creating, they just base all their thinking on making the poorest pay the toughest price to right what is after all a pretty much worldwide recession that was caused by irresponsible banking practices who are evidently getting away with it scot free.
Phew…..where’s me Jack Daniels :)