Who Knew This Would Happen?

It is a Wednesday afternoon at Stratford housing court, and every seat in the waiting room is full. Over the next few hours, a conveyor belt of tenants and lawyers file into the courtroom to discuss their housing disputes – up to 29 cases are dealt with in a single day. In one case, a tenant is trying to buy more time after receiving a section 21 no-fault eviction earlier in the year, before they were banned. He has had no luck finding emergency housing with his local council. His landlord wants him out in the next 14 days, but he says he needs more time. He is off work due to chronic ill health, and has three children aged eight, five and one – the two eldest are due back at school next week. He wants the maximum 42 days, but the judge grants 28, meaning he could be facing homelessness by the end of the month.

In another case, the judge postpones a section 21 eviction order made just before the new Renters’ Rights Act came in, as some of the documentation was proven to be out of date. This gives the tenant more time to find a new home.

And the landlord more delay in selling or re-renting the place, but who cares about that? 

While tenants try to delay their evictions, landlords make requests for their cases to be moved to the high court in an attempt to speed things up – the current wait for bailiffs in this part of London is seven months. Lawyers have said a wave of last-minute no-fault evictions, and a growing number of landlords selling their properties, is pushing more renters into homelessness and driving England’s housing courts to breaking point.

Who could have predicted this? Everyone, and they did! But the government had the bit between their teeth and didn’t listen, as usual.

“There was a lot of talk about no-fault evictions ending, but technically they haven’t – we’re getting a lot of section 8 notices where the tenant isn’t at fault, but the landlord has a right to sell,” Sidki said. “Sometimes these are tenants who have lived in the property for a decade, and they can’t find anywhere else to go.” Lawyers said the lack of affordable homes for renters to move into meant they were increasingly delaying eviction as long as possible. Many local authorities have also told tenants they must resist eviction in order to access emergency housing support.

My brother had this issue with his tenant. 

Nye Jones from Generation Rent said: “The fact so many landlords uprooted tenants’ lives just because they still could, shows how badly we needed greater protections and the end of section 21. 

“Ideally local authorities should be providing more support to people who are on the cusp of homelessness than just ‘stay at home until the bailiffs come’. But it’s a sad fact that they want to avoid putting them in temporary accommodation as long as possible.”

Of course they do! It costs money to do anything, something you single issue, fresh out of university, socialists never realise.  

But There Have Never Been So Many Free Water Points...

“The city is not built for heat,” said Josie Ashdown, a lead manager at the homelessness charity Thames Reach. “You can feel that the concrete makes it hotter here than probably anywhere else in the country at points, and there’s hardly any tree cover.”

As London endures repeated heatwaves fuelled by the climate crisis, outreach teams are offering extra support to those most at risk – handing out water, carrying out welfare checks and directing people to cool spaces. 

Why would they need to hand out water? Hasn't Mayor Khan provided them?

Scientists have estimated that the May and June heatwaves in England and Wales killed 2,700 people.

Complete bollock based on nothing. As Tim pointed out. As believable as the 'food waste' figures.

Many of the tents beneath an underpass in London were empty when the Guardian visited. Their occupants had probably left in search of water, work or somewhere cooler, Ashdown said. But for the record numbers of people like Tom who are sleeping rough, escaping the heat is rarely straightforward.

“If you’re relying on begging to earn money, you don’t have much choice to leave,” said Leggat. “You have to sit outside, often in the sun and usually in hot urban environments.”

With the welfare state providing for you, why would you need to beg? 

Often people have to carry all their belongings with them, including winter clothing they cannot safely store. Anneke Ziemen, a service manager for the Thames Reach rapid response team, recalled one man who was still dressed for cold weather during the heatwaves. 

“He said: ‘When winter comes, I need my clothes. I can’t have anyone steal them.’ It makes sense, but it’s also going to be 34 degrees and you are literally cooking yourself.”

And here we see a reason why some people will always be homeless, indeed why, even in they are provided with housing, it often doesn't work and they wind up on the streets again within a few weeks or months. 

Ashdown said: “There have been a couple of people this year that we’ve got our eye on, in terms of whether they have the capacity to make decisions around the heat, because it makes people so much more vulnerable.”

They don't have the capacity to make decisions. About anything. And that's the core of the problem. 

We Shouldn't ... And Most Of Us Don't!

In January 2017, the then mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, promised to end rough sleeping in the region by 2020 – a bold, frankly absurd promise that inevitably didn’t materialise. Nearly a decade later, shortly after becoming prime minister, Burnham promised to end rough sleeping again, only this time for the whole of England. So why should we believe him this time around?

We shouldn’t, of course. Because he's just as big a liar as the unlamented Starmer.

I have interviewed Burnham several times over the past decade. At the end of 2019, when it was clear he had not lived up to his promise, I asked him if he regretted making it in the first place. “I wasn’t making what you would call a traditional target,” the mayor said. “I issued my commitment to make it more of a wake-up call to the system. And I think it has had that effect.”Burnham’s advisers had told him to tone down the pledge, but he resisted. “The team here said I should have said: ‘End the need for rough sleeping,’ because you can’t force people into a shelter … In retrospect, if I had said ‘end the need for’, that probably would have been a wiser thing to have done. But I wasn’t in the space of wanting to play semantics with it.”

A lot of verbiage to say, ‘Oh, damn, you caught me out!’, eh Reader? 

Official figures showed rough sleeping decreased by two-thirds in Manchester during his first five years as mayor. There are reasons I can quibble with this claim. First of all, it doesn’t pass the eye test. Just walk through the city centre in the early hours, and you’ll find people still bedding down in their dozens. Second, the statistics on rough sleeping are based on single-night snapshots, which involve council representatives walking around counting the people they find rough sleeping. The problem with this is obvious.

Government statistics are lies? Gosh, you don't say... 

Burnham’s government would also need to reverse 16 years of austerity. This is all quite spendy, and to fund it would require higher taxes, more borrowing and aggressive nationalisation of natural monopolies. An upheaval of the economy of such magnitude is unlikely to happen when so many Labour MPs have their fingernails firmly embedded in the market. If there’s even a suggestion that Burnham intends to depart from turbo capitalism, then he will be out of SW1 faster than you can say Liz Truss.

Ha ha ha  he things we had 'austerity'. What a comedian!

His priority should be triggering a nationwide Housing First programme. Housing First, a policy pioneered in Finland that effectively eliminated rough sleeping, gives people a home with no preconditions, then tailors support to their individual needs.We know this works because we did it ourselves, only with a different name. The Everyone In campaign, established during the Covid-19 pandemic, virtually ended rough sleeping overnight by emergency block-booking hotels. Surely we can do the same thing again.

That was a measure for a short time event, not a permanent solution, there's a difference. And how can the government block-book hotels, when they are already being used for boat people? 

There are about 300,000 long-term empty homes in England. Housing people in some of these dwellings might be a good idea; capping rents at an affordable rate would be another, as would fast-tracking asylum applications and enabling asylum seekers to receive benefits and temporary work visas while their claims are processed.

We have a housing crisis, according to yoy, and you want to increase it by increasing the population? 

I’m not confident that Burnham will do any of these things. Not because I think he doesn’t care or lacks the political will, but because government apparatus is smothered in molasses, and most Labour politicians are Tories in all but name.

What in the student politics...?!?