I would like to explain the principal reason I (have
just) joined this list.
I am the chair of the Tenants Disability Action Group
of Notting Hill Housing Trust tenants in London,
England. We are campaigning for our Registered Social
Landlord (a Housing Corporation term) to be socially
inclusive. For a Social Housing provider to NOT be
socially inclusive is a contradiction in terms, as I
see it.
NHHT was founded 40 years ago as a response to
Rachmanism. The slum landlord Peter Rachman was
exposed in 1963 as part of the Profumo/Christine
Keeler scandal and his practices of harassing and
bullying tenants, charging high rents, overcrowding,
evicting on whim and failing to do repairs caused
sufficient consternation at the time to move a local
vicar to rally liberal opinion and set up NHHT to make
an intervention to save properties in the area from
falling into the hands of unscrupulous speculators.
(Are there any other sort?)
Notting Hill, for those who do not know it, is similar
to the Left Bank in Paris or Greenwich Village in New
York. It is a cosmopolitan area with Spanish,
Portuguese, Moroccan and West Indian communities and a
shrinking service-sector white working-class
population mingling with artists writers and
intellectuals gravitating towards it. It is gradually
becoming gentrified as it becomes a trendy place to
live.
40 years on, from 1963, the mid-Victorian housing
stock in the area (five-storey terraces, now converted
to a flat on each floor with several steps to the
front door) is proving increasingly unsuitable to
tenants, who were in their 20s and 30s and
non-disabled when they became NHHT tenants but are now
in their 50s and 60s and many of whom have become
disabled and find themselves marooned on upper floors
with no lift.
There aren't ednough ground floor properties to
allocate one to all the Trust's disabled tenants and
in this area, most ground floor flats aren't level
access to the street, anyway. Naturally most people
want to stay in the area where they have lived for a
long time; it is where their matrix of friends,
networks and watering holes and their identity is
located.
When, through demolition, inner city land does become
available, planning guidelines mean that new build
properties have to blend with the existing townscape,
and thus the problem is perpetuated for another 150
years: they too are built with several steps to the
front door, albeit with lifts once you get there. (If
you can get there!)
There is a Kensington Housing Trust block, built in
the 1980s, round the corner from me. A disabled tenant
in the basement is a woman of short stature, who uses
a motorised scooter to get about. The Trust has had to
build an exterior lift down to the basement, so she
can get to street level. The prospect of disabled
tenants being offered flats on lower floors could have
occurred to the architects and the Trust, and they
could have designed accordingly, but they were too
unaware of disability issues to have thought of that!
Hence the importancde of disabled tenants groups to
make them more aware of these issues.
The problem in a nutshell is supply and demand: as
improvements in medical science increase longevity,
paradoxically this leads to an increasing number of
disabled people in the population, as people are now
surviving conditions that 100 years before would have
killed them, but do so with impairments, as "damaged
goods". The Social Policy implications of this growth
in the disabled population have not been grasped or
grappled with, yet. (Not just in housing.)
The housing stock built 100-150 years ago was built at
a time when there were far fewer disabled people and
they tended to live in institutions, and more recently
in residential homes. The assumptions behind the
architects' plans of the day reflected this reality.
The move towards independent living in the community
is in England, at least, more recent: a result of
disabled people's struggle in the last 30 years,
starting with UPIAS (Union of the Physically Impaired
Against Segregation) fighting to free its members from
Leonard Cheshire Homes.\
But are there enough suitable flats and houses for
this social trend towards independent living in the
community being faciltated?
In a nutshell, then, we have a housing stock that
reflects a society which was not inclusive proving —
unsurprisingly — inadequate to the needs of a disabled
people's movement that seeks to bring about a society
that will be inclusive.
This is a perfect example of residual consciousness of
a bygone era living on and surviving in bricks and
mortar that later generations are then saddled with.
Whilst the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 will
from 1st October 2004 require public buildings to be
accessible, there is as yet no legislation to require
either private landlords or Social Housing providers
to do the same.
It would involve massive infrastructural costs and
major works if it were to be brought in, of course.
But frankly, is there any other course?
In Wales and Northern Ireland, all newly built social
housing must be built to the Lifetime Homes standard,
but this is not yet the case in England or Scotland.
Even if we persuaded our landlord to build a lot more
new lifetime homes, ahead of legislation requiring it
to do so, the problem is that we, the existing
tenants, wouldn't get allocated them: the local
authority that financed the deal would get the
nomination rights from its housing waiting list.
So we will remain marooned on the upper floors of
houses that have become unsuitable for us.
NHHT has 10,000 tenancies; 2,000 of its tenants are on
the Transfer List. Last year only 94 transfers were
able to be effected. Disablity confers no preferential
consideration for rehousing unless a tenants is
totally housebound. Thus for tewnants in 2000th
position, on the list, a 20 year wait to reach the
head of the queue can be anticipated.
At 57, with diabetes (which shortens life expectancy)
I can realistically expect to be rehoused in a wooden
box, 6 foot long, 6 foot under, long before I am
rehoused in a suitable flat. London house prices
having soared through the roof (a million pounds for
an ordinary semi) the only people who can afford to
buy in London are people who inherit a London property
on the death of their parents. So once you are in
Social Housing, there really is no way out. The Venbus
Fly Trap has closed upon you.
The new Rights of Succession legislation the
Government is about to introduce, which would give
live-in carers and relatives the right to succeed to a
tenancy on the death of a tenant, will only exacerbate
the shortfall in the number of flats suitable for
disabled tenants as compared to the number of tenants
needing them.
If few leave social housing in London to become
owner-occupiers, because of London house prices, the
only prospect of a flat is when a renant dies and
there is an empty flat. (In employment the phrase used
for people trapped in their jobs is that promotion
opportunities only become available because of "dead
men's shoes". This is similar.)
But if the few suitable flats that are allocated to
disabled tenants then are passed on to those disabled
tenants' non-disabled live-in carers, rather than
allocated to a disabled tenant on the Transfer list,
the supply and demand problem will get worse. That is
not an argument against succession rights, which I
support, it merely serves to illustrate the lack of a
clear well-thought-out Social Policy on Housing for
Disabled People.
You see the scale of the problem. Fresh ideas are
needed, from practice elsewhere. Point me in that
direction, please.
I think we probably need housing and property rights
established and guaranteed in a constitution (we don't
have a constitution in this country as yet). I note
that the Finnish constitution does this. So I wondered
how does this work in practice, how does a disabled
Finnish citizen get to insist on getting a suitable
home provided? How long do you have to wait?
Bruce Birchall
London.
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