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London council houses disabled woman in unsafe, mouldy home [1]
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Date: 2023-06
Days after I visited Yusuf, employees from the council inspected her flat and told her the mould didn’t qualify as a category one hazard. They said they “can’t” take action on anything less serious.
Around 10,000 homes in Brent, where Yusuf lives, have some form of serious health hazard, with many affecting the borough’s most vulnerable residents.
In theory, councils have a responsibility under the Equality Act to provide reasonable adjustments for those with disabilities or serious health concerns, like Yusuf, to avoid forcing people to live in homes that are unsuitable or could worsen their health.
But housing lawyers and charities openDemocracy spoke to have warned of systemic discrimination in UK housing, as councils and private landlords alike fail to act on that obligation and aren’t held to account.
One housing group in Westminster told openDemocracy that 80% of its cases now involve disabilities or ignored medical needs, while another was forced to protest outside a different London council’s building due to the number of its vulnerable members who have been left living in squalid homes.
Ammar Azeddini also lives in Brent, just a 15-minute walk across Harlesden from Yusuf. But Azeddini doesn't sleep in his studio flat, he says. The conditions have forced him to spend nights sleeping in the corridor – essentially left homeless in his own home. The mattress he would have slept on is riddled with bed bugs and droppings from the rodent infestation in the flat.
The conditions in his flat are so bad that we have to relocate to a nearby coffee shop to talk. As we chat, Azeddini shows me pictures on his phone of the multiple mice he has found dead in the flat in recent weeks.
Ammar Azeddini's flat | Andrew Kersley
The walls behind the wardrobes, in the bathroom and in the kitchen are blackened with mould. Then there’s the litany of other disrepair issues Azeddini rattles off to me – broken plumbing that has left a sheen of water on the floor, bulging floorboards, now-blackened plug sockets from faulty wiring. The boiler in the flat has been broken since the winter, he says, but has been left completely ignored and unfixed by the landlord, who lives just next door.
In fact, after weeks of complaining about the conditions, the landlord’s response was to send Azeddini an eviction notice. In a letter seen by openDemocracy, he said that he understood Azeddini was on a “mental health prescription” and claimed he was “a security risk” to both himself and the property.
Like Yusuf, Azeddini says he was placed in the property by the council, which has fined his landlord over the property in the past but has not yet forced him to fix all the hazards in the flat or helped Azeddini into a new property.
Both Yusuf and Azeddini are members of the London Renters’ Union (LRU), which is supporting them in trying to get the council to take action.
“Nobody should become sick because of their housing but thousands of people across Brent live in homes that present a serious risk to their health,” Jacob Wills, the Brent organiser for the LRU, told openDemocracy.
Wills added: “Disabled people and renters with chronic health conditions are often left in some of the most dangerous and inaccessible housing.”
The local LRU branch spent part of last week protesting outside Brent Council’s office to try and force the council to acknowledge and address the scale of unsafe, unsuitable homes in the borough.
But the issue is far from just limited to Brent. In neighbouring Westminster, The Westminster Hub, a housing support group, told me that “eight out of ten” of their cases now relate to some failure from a council or landlord to provide the legal adjustments or support required for tenants with disabilities or acute health conditions.
“It’s like disability discrimination [laws] have been exempt from housing,” says Vanessa, one of the Hub’s volunteers. “It’s almost a lawless sector.”
Part of the problem comes down to the fact that despite there being an array of laws in place to hold criminal and rogue landlords to account for poor conditions, enforcement is often close to non-existent.
Across 2019 and 2020, the government provided councils with an average of just £37,222 in special funding to cover the cost of housing-law enforcement, according to The Economist.
What that means in practice is that many people end up living in often severely hazardous housing. Those who are most vulnerable – in particular those with intense medical or disability-related needs – are typically worst affected, as they may have additional needs, such as accessibility requirements, or medical complications that arise from prolonged periods in hazardous homes.
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[1] Url:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/london-council-tenants-unsafe-homes-disabilities-mould-mice-broken-toilet-shower-brent/
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