Words: Merlin Betts. Images: SGH
The morning of Thursday 28 August we went to the Hastings Borough Council (HBC) offices, hoping to catch the housing department after their weekly meeting. Three of us were with Thomas, a homeless man who the council are fighting in court.
As I joined the group, another person responding to our call-out appeared from the crowd, then another. Reaching the doors of Muriel Matters House, another four people were waiting outside. We went in, funnelled by a barrier and an (ultimately very lovely) bouncer away from what used to be the main reception desk. As still more people arrived following our call-out, we did our best not to block access to the side-grotto containing the reception windows. Thomas [not his real name] stepped up and asked to see someone from the housing department.
Thomas and his family have been in temporary accommodation for the last two and half years, and for the last 18 months of that they’ve been fighting HBC in the courts because, as a friend remarked, “someone at the council filled a form in wrong” and they were declared “intentionally homeless”.
During that 18 months their temporary accommodation has been paid for by East Sussex County Council, while HBC pay substantial legal fees to defend their decision not to provide the same. The family’s legal fees are also paid by the government. Thomas has only had one discussion in person, with one council officer, about how they became homeless during this entire time, and has otherwise been ignored. HBC are stressing out everyone involved, further clogging the court system, and hiking up a massive bill for the taxpayer. They’re doing this while they supposedly work out a housing strategy to tackle, amongst other things, homelessness. It doesn’t make any sense.
And meanwhile, their temporary accommodation provider, Roost, are threatening to evict Thomas and his family, seemingly for being untidy. There’s no allegation of any impact on anyone else, or damage to the building; it’s just that in temporary accommodation, you can be evicted very easily. The landlord doesn’t really need to have a reason to evict, because temporary tenants don’t actually have a tenancy or tenants rights at all. Social services say if the family are evicted, their six-year-old child would be taken into care. Thomas and his family are not having a fun time.
After about 15 minutes, a council official dressed in black appears and tries to tell us that this is all just normal process. Would you say there’s anything ‘normal’ about what I’ve just described, reader? The wheels of bureaucracy are grinding up the bones of those who fall through the cracks… I guess that’s what we’ve come to expect, but I don’t know if that makes it ‘normal’.
On Thursday 28 August we learned that you can wake council officers (though not so much elected officials) from their administrative stupor by hanging out in their workplace and singing out of tune about housing rights, “housing is a human right… human right… human right; housing is a human right… not a privilege.” Oh you thought that was all? “Housing is a human right… human right… human right…”
Over an hour and a half, we were told various creative combinations of: the housing department aren’t available, it’s a legal case and the council have no power over it, and we didn’t give them a chance to prepare.
Well, turns out the deputy chief executive of the council was available, and so was the elected leader of the council (who also heads the housing portfolio).
It turns out that because they’re defending their own decision through the courts, the council could absolutely reconsider that decision and bring the whole legal case to an end – they just don’t want to. Glenn Haffenden, leader of the council, said he’ll give Thomas a meeting on Tuesday, though can’t yet promise anything on behalf of the housing department.
And it’s good that Glenn is now stepping up, because Unite the Union (of which Thomas is a community member) had contacted him about the case and he admitted he’d seen the emails, but he’d chucked it over to someone else, on whose desk it had promptly been ignored. Also… 18months… many attempts by Thomas to communicate with someone at HBC, little or no reply… they really can’t say we didn’t give them enough opportunities to respond.
After a morning of being told we had no reason to be there and no influence over council proceedings, the council agreed that we did have reason to be there, and gave us an appointment that Thomas had spent the best part of 18 months asking for. That’s good news. But it begs the question: is this how we’re all supposed to interact with the council? To skip the waiting queue of an unknown number of months, to avoid being incorrectly labelled by faceless officialdom, are we all supposed to get a posse together and ride on down to Muriel Matters?
If we have to, I’m sure many of us will… but it doesn’t seem like a very efficient way to run the council. At that point, we might as well just make our own council and run the whole business ourselves. Quicker, cheaper, easier. But for the minute, council officials are paid to handle this stuff, and a bunch of volunteers who aren’t paid to do any of it, who work other jobs, have families, have lives of their own, think the council aren’t doing a good enough job.
Maybe council workers have too much to do, and no resources to do it. Maybe they’re also having a hard time. In fact, I think many of them probably are. Fine, but I ask you, council workers, are you about to make yourselves street homeless, are you about to take your own child into care? No. So maybe, despite whatever else is going on, you should at least not destroy this family. Is that so hard?
