Housing policy in Croydon is reminiscent of Dickensian England – Inside Croydon

CROYDON COMMENT: Council briefing shows officials and mayor playing fast and loose with their legal obligations on homelessness insurance, says KEN TOWL

Croydon Access: we are all just two pay packets away from being forced to live on the streets, dependent on Croydon Council for help

Croydon Council is playing fast and loose with their obligations to provide temporary and emergency housing and thereby increasing the cost to the public purse and compounding the suffering of the borough’s already desperate residents.

The council’s Homelessness Strategy and Delivery Plan 2024-2029 sets out a plan to tackle homelessness in the borough, which will prove both costly and cruel.

Most of us will never have to deal with homelessness, but then again, most of us are only two paychecks away from being forced to live on the streets.

Imagine how your life could start to fall apart. Prices go up, a relationship breaks up, you lose your job, or you keep your job but it doesn’t pay enough and the rent goes up, and if you can’t pay, your landlord can issue a no-fault eviction. find someone who can.

You don’t have to be reckless to become homeless. That’s what years of austerity do to a society.

Let’s say this happens to you in Croydon. Where do you and your children turn for help?

For the statutory safety net that is the council, of course, the council which, in a July 2017 press release, boasted that it had successfully negotiated extended leases for “338 units” in Concord House, Sycamore House and Windsor House on London Road, “guarantees Croydon Council a quality homeless accommodation offer for the next 40 years”.

The council’s internal report from May 2017 is quite smug about how well Croydon Council was dealing with homelessness. Of the tenancy extensions, it claims: “This means that whatever happens to demand for homelessness over the next 40 years, the 338 units secured by these proposals will form the basis of the overall supply mix.”

Fast forward seven years to the present and it didn’t quite work out that way.

It’s all worse than anyone at Croydon Council imagined. If you need temporary or emergency accommodation, you’ll most likely end up in a B&B (and don’t expect breakfast!) and you may find your family split up in the neighborhood because no accommodation is available suitable for a family.

As Inside Croydon reported earlier this week, council figures suggest more than 80% of placements are in expensive, unsuitable accommodation with families separated, trauma on top of trauma.

Official figures: chart from council briefing paper showing 206 ‘split’ families in temporary accommodation, with one family accommodated in this way since 2012

And this is becoming the experience of more and more people. The law, in the form of the Homeless Persons (Adequacy of Accommodation) Order 2003, states that families with children cannot be required to live in hostels (ie shared toilet, washing and cooking) for more than six weeks. That time limit is routinely violated, and there is nothing to stop local authorities from separating families. This is reminiscent of the workhouse in Dickensian England.

The opposition Labor group on the council has proposed that the cruelty of splitting up homeless families should be removed, or at least severely limited, so that council placements in separate housing are infrequent and short and do not exceed 14. nights.’

But Mayor Jason Perry seems intent on avoiding that commitment and settling for “an aspiration to end household splitting” and that, in the meantime, “the council may divide households into two or more accommodation units, subject to any welfare concerns and for a reasonably short period’.

Mahatma Gandhi said that you should judge a society by how it treats its most vulnerable members. There is something in this.

I guess you can also judge a political class by the euphemistic language and neutral tone they use to create reports containing sentences like this: “Placement policy is an operational delivery tool that helps the council to prioritize the provision of temporary accommodation and reduce the risk of legal challenge regarding such decisions.”

It’s good to know the board has our best interests in mind.

Read more: Over 200 families shared by the council’s housing department
Read more: ‘My family’s hell on earth’: 18 months in a boarding house in Croydon
Read more: Croydon’s B&B nightmare: ‘an indictment of modern Britain’

• Ken Towl, pictured right, is a regular contributor to Inside Croydon, writing on a range of subjects from the arts to social policy to education to plastic giraffes…
  

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