The relentless and calculated destruction of council housing by successive Tory and Labour governments and councils, coupled with the crippling financial instability created by factors such as Universal Credit and a four-year freeze on housing benefit, have inevitably led to children being turfed out onto the streets in their hundreds of thousands. The Children’s Commissioner for England has published new research* which shows that these attacks on the poor have created more than 210,000 homeless children in England. 124,000 are officially homeless, an 80% increase since 2010. In addition, an estimated 90,000 children are among the ‘hidden homeless’, ‘sofa surfing’ at the homes of friends or relatives. And, with no publicly available official data on the number of children placed in temporary accommodation by social services, the real figure is even higher. In addition, a further 375,000 children are currently at risk of homelessness because of rent and mortgage arrears. Mark Moncada reports.
‘Something has gone very wrong with our housing system when children are growing up in B&Bs, shipping containers and old office blocks…It is a scandal that a country as prosperous as ours is leaving tens of thousands of families in temporary accommodation for long periods of time, or to sofa-surf.’
Anne Longfield, Children’s Commissioner for England
Many homeless families are being warehoused by councils in dangerous, overcrowded ‘temporary’ accommodation that includes squalid B&Bs, converted office blocks and, increasingly, shipping containers. In 2017 around two fifths of children had been left to languish in temporary accommodations for at least six months; around one in 20 – an estimated 6,000 children – had been trapped there for at least a year. Even by the government’s own contemptible standards this is illegal.
Office blocks and shipping containers
Councils in Ealing, in west London, Bristol, Brighton and Cardiff – all of them Labour – have washed their hands of their statutory duty to homeless families by rehousing them in repurposed shipping containers that are like saunas in the summer and freezers in the winter. Many councils also use converted office blocks often on industrial estates, with units for whole families as small as 14 sq m, more than six times smaller than the average house size in England and Wales, for which they pay £800 per month per flat in rent.
Unscrupulous developers have ravenously taken advantage of a change to Permitted Development rights in 2013, which means that they can convert offices into residential premises without planning permission or minimum size requirements. Since 2016, one in 10 new homes created in England and Wales has been in former office blocks. These are the slums of the future. One such builder of shacks and hovels – the CEO of Caridon, Mario Carrozzo – allows more than three times the space for his £164,000 Ferrari (in its garage) than he does for human beings. Carrozzo lives in a £5m mansion in Surrey, complete with three sitting rooms, a cinema, gym, spa, tennis court, pool and games room with bar. In 2018, the value of his investment properties was £113m, with £11.2m profits for the year. Caridon is a multi-million-pound property development and lettings company. In Harlow, Essex, where 13 office blocks have been converted into more than 1,000 individual flats, Caridon runs Terminus House and Templefields House, containing nearly 400 flats between them. In 2016/17, Caridon received nearly £8m in housing benefit receipts from councils across London.
On these industrial estates, children are trapped and isolated, with nowhere to play except old car parks. They have no room to learn to crawl and develop. There are no facilities, being miles away from town centres. At school, they are called ‘office block kids’ by their classmates. They eat, sleep, play and live on mattresses that cover almost the entirety of the floor space of their ‘home’. The future of thousands of working class children, their health, well-being and development, is being seriously jeopardised by these inhumane conditions.
Home Office: ‘Slum landlord-in-chief’
As well as dumping homeless children in shipping containers, Ealing Labour council also works in partnership with housing company My London Lets. The company, which is paid by the Home Office, houses hundreds of asylum seekers in a network of filthy, overcrowded ‘guest houses’, such as Maharaja Guest House in Southall, west London. It is infested by tens of thousands of cockroaches which feed on the residents’ food, rats gnaw open plastic cooking oil bottles and run across children’s faces while they sleep. Several families are expected to share a single washing machine and bathroom, and because of faulty boilers that don’t get repaired, they go without hot water or heating for months at a time.
Housing provision in Britain is not motivated by meeting the needs of the working class, but by increasing profits. My London Lets states that ‘HMOs [houses in multiple occupation] are far more profitable to run than other types of residential lettings with rental incomes often two to three times those of single households.’ These levels or profits are possible only because families of four are sharing small double beds in flats unfit for human habitation.
Toufique Hossain of Duncan Lewis Solicitors stated, ‘These conditions are depraved. The secretary of state is the slum landlord-in-chief. We are talking about deeply traumatised people. They have seen and experienced horrors that they will never shake. And here they are, in the United Kingdom, made to sleep with cockroaches. It is inhuman and degrading.’ Of 8,313 asylum properties inspected just 24% were compliant, with 43% assessed as ‘not fit for purpose’ or ‘urgent’.
The office block kids and refugee children have a common enemy and a common goal: stand together to tear apart this network of slum housing and win truly decent, truly affordable housing for all.
* Bleak Houses: the crisis of family homelessness in England, August 2019
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No 272, October/November 2019
