Homes, not Harm is a report from the Runnymede Trust based on qualitative research examining the chronic housing conditions lived by residents in the London boroughs of Camden, Croydon, Lambeth and Tower Hamlets. Below, researcher Carol Sidney, gives a flavour of the new report.
"Housing affects your health, your everything. It's all interliked." - Workshop participant
Finding solutions to London’s chronic housing emergency has never been more urgent. In a new report from the Runnymede Trust, researchers examined the multiple harms to the physical and mental health and financial wellbeing of people of colour and those with lower economic status who live at the sharpest end of the UK’s housing system.
Unable to access a safe, secure, appropriate and truly affordable home, they are trapped in temporary accommodation, which puts their lives on hold and pressure on their relationships.
They live with entrenched housing conditions such as overcrowding, black mould, cold and damp, which create or exacerbate physical and mental health problems for them and their children.
Lacking access to well-managed council or social housing, they become lost in opaque or racist housing management systems. Alternatively, they are forced into the private rented sector with precarious or insecure tenures, at the mercy of rent or service charge hikes and soaring energy bills.
Participants in this report painted a striking picture for researchers of the hidden misery and helplessness they feel enduring these conditions.
The participants in this report certainly have the will, energy and creativity to work to improve their housing conditions. Now we need the government and local authorities to act.
Rian* is recently married and, together with her husband, is sofa-surfacing between her overcrowded mother’s home and her overcrowded in-laws’ house, carrying their personal belongings in black bin liners between the two.
In her paid employment, Rian is required to work from home, on her mother’s kitchen table, which creates a clash when the kitchen is required for cooking or used as a spare bedroom for one of her siblings.
During the research Rian was insistent that the responsibility for the housing crisis remains with national and local governement and their urgent need to increase the supply of housing available at social rents.
The root of the crisis
Homes, not Harm surfaces a number of findings that hold the key to policy-making seeking long-term, permanent housing solutions. For example, and speaking directly to Rian’s circumstances is what Positive Money identified as a ‘two-tier’ housing system: the over-supply of homes for homeownership and buy-to-let landlords, and a woefully small supply of social homes that are genuinely affordable.
Taking this into account, the report points to recommendations such as building targets for social homes, local authority ‘first refusal rights’, ‘buy backs’ and empty home levies.
We’ve got to a point where a home has become like a luxury item. And it's something that people sit down and they talk about in TV property programmes. So, what about people who work buses? What about normal people who work in Lidl and Tesco? What's going to happen to them? Where are they going to live?
Workshop participant
The report outlines how a ‘home’ has become conflated with ‘home ownership’. Participants quickly revealed that these two things are not the same thing, and the researchers then looked at other kinds of ownership models that can also provide permanent homes.
Stories from the sharp end of the housing crisis
Illustrations by Julia Miranda
One of the most valuable aspects of this research is that it made space for those with the least agency and control over their housing conditions to have time and space to contemplate the value of a range of other types of housing supply, and what role they could play in realising them. The results were mixed, but nevertheless give pointers for future local authority and government policy.
For example, Gail*, a resident in Croydon, was very vocal and angry during the research, but this barely masked her ongoing despair at having to deal with racist and unresponsive housing management systems while living, year after year, in housing that is inappropriate for her and her autistic son.
She has written to her doctor, to the police, her MP, the local services that support her son and everyone else she can think of. She has filled in all the forms, time and time again, and visited the housing departments in Croydon Council and her housing association time and time again.
But, year on year, her housing conditions do not change. The research enabled a discussion about the potential for Gail to get together with her neighbours and seek change through tenant-led action, but she was sceptical to say the least:
I can see that having a strong community and working together can develop anything. But when you’re stuck in a house that’s not working for you, you’re mentally stressed, you can’t be part of the wider community. I’m isolated, and I don’t have good neighbours, and I don’t want to talk to neighbours who can’t even say “hello”.
More favourably, Tony*, a participant and resident of Lambeth, has been living in a tiny, one-bedroom flat with his partner and their child, with their only living space forced to act as a bedroom.
No space to grow healthy food. No space to store and cook healthy food. No space for an exercise bike. An expensive, unreliable concierge system that does not stop local drug dealers getting into his building. No space to bring his two children from a previous relationship, and to enjoy a family setting where he could maintain his role as their father, active in their young lives.
For years, Tony, living in temporary accommodation in Elephant and Castle, has watched as safe, spacious, well-designed flats have sprouted up all around him – homes he could never afford to buy and would never have been allocated to him through social housing.
And yet, Self-build, the housing option based on collective action, collective ownership and ‘sweat equity’, was the option that he became the most animated by:
I never knew this even existed. The only place I thought I knew this existed is when I went back over to Dominica to visit my granddad. He built his house. This happens here in the UK? I'm mind blown. I can't believe it. I can't believe I could build myself and my family a house. How? Where? Show me and I'll sign up now.
The first-person accounts in Homes, not Harm add to the mountain of evidence that the UK housing system is at breaking point and fails those on modest and impoverished incomes.
It uncovers the sense of powerlessness for those who live at the sharpest end, and provides space to explore where permanent housing solutions may be found. The participants in this report certainly have the will, energy and creativity to work to improve their housing conditions. Now we need the government and local authorities to act.
Homes, not harm was funded under the racial justice fund - a joint initiative from Trust for London, Lloyd's Bank Foundation for England and Wales and City Bridge Foundation.
Read Homes, not harm in full on Runnymede Trust's website.
*Names changed to protect identities
