125. The Scandal Of Slum UK

0:11Hello and welcome to The Rest is Money with me, Steph McGovern. And with me, Robert Paxton. So we have one of your mates on the show today, don't we, Robert? Your colleague is an investigative journalist, Dan Hewitt. Do you want to tell us about him? Yeah, so Dan has done absolutely brilliant work at ITV exposing the crisis in the housing market and in particular the slum conditions that thousands and thousands of people are forced to live in if they live in council houses, if they live in social housing. Obviously, there is some decent social provision, but it is a national scandal. The number of low-income people, often vulnerable people, families, who are living in conditions that would have been regarded as a scandal in the Victorian age, let alone in a rich country, rich modern country like Britain today.

1:11and he's just actually put out a podcast called The Trapped about all of this. So much to talk to him about, isn't there, Steph? Yeah, I mean, he's uncovered some genuinely shocking stuff that I think you will all be pretty appalled to hear about. So here is our interview with Dan Hewitt. Well, Dan, great to see you. Now, I'm assuming this is 45 minutes or an hour of group therapy, given that you and Steph have quite a big thing in common, don't you? Well, I mean, we probably should talk about this offline, Steph, if we're going to get into what it's like being Robert's producer. But do you want to get into it now, Robert?

1:43Do you want to be cancelled this early into the podcast? Yay, I found someone who understands me. Come on, listen, you owe it all to me, both of you, for God's sake. I mean, for goodness sake. I don't know whether Robert used to ask you to do this, Steph, but when I first started working for Robert, when we were busy on News at 10, I would offer to go and get dinner for us in between edits. And the first time I worked with Robert, I said, I'm going to this sushi chain. and he said, oh, just get me the Omega thing. And I was like, okay. So I went there and I'm looking for this Omega thing. I can't see anything called Omega.

2:16And I'm ringing other producers who've worked with him who don't know what he's talking about. So I just picked one up and gave it to him. And he said, perfect, thank you. That's the one. Two or three weeks later, another producer, Rachel, calls me and says, Robert's asked me for this Omega thing and apparently you know what it is. And I was like, I just guessed. It's the big one with all the sushi. I don't know. Oh my God. do you know what's really funny I cannot believe you ever went and got him food I never did any of that I mean he was lucky if I answered the phone to him that is about right that is that's why I moved to ITV yeah exactly yeah for a bit of respect I like it I know exactly what that omega thing is by the way as soon as you said it I was like really yeah that's okay yeah I still don't know Well, we'll discuss it offline.

3:29here in part to talk about this great podcast here as you've done on it but you've been working on this for a long time now set the scene for us about you know why you got into the appalling state of british housing particularly for those on the lowest incomes and you know what the fundamental problem is i've always felt that as a subject housing is really underreported given its significance and size to in people's lives and over the years i've done quite a few stories on poverty and child poverty. And every time I did a story on whether it's benefit system or poverty, housing would crop up, but it would never be the focus.

4:05And then during the COVID pandemic, not to insult you again, Robert, but I was working as a correspondent in Westminster, and I was frankly a little bit bored, hanging around Westminster all the time and really wanted to get out. And I'd started seeing these Facebook groups. Why is that insulting me? Well, we were colleagues at the time. It was me, my presence that was making you bored. Your company was not enough to keep me in Westminster. I started looking on Facebook and seeing these groups on Facebook of social housing tenants who were posting these awful pictures and awful videos of their conditions.

4:36And they were essentially saying that their landlords were using COVID as an excuse not to do repairs. And it felt like, to me, decent story, good pictures, let's go and do it. And we went down to Croydon. We got a tip off from our producer at the time, Sarah, who said she knew these flats in Croydon that were apparently in a pretty bad way. And that's how it started. we went down to Croydon and I walked into these flats, this tower block on Regina Road, and the pictures and videos I'd seen were absolutely nothing compared to what my eyes were seeing when I walked in this flat. It was hell. You would not leave an animal in there.

5:10And there were families living in there, there were children living in there, and their lives were in danger. This was not just kind of bitter damp, bitter mould. This was squalid, dangerous housing in London in 2021 and these tenants have been complaining to their landlord and complaining to everyone about it and nothing was being done and they'd been left like this for months. How did the tenants react when you arrived there, when you were talking to them? Because the thing that I've been fascinated by from talking to lots of people in similar situations is how they kind of end up just giving up, don't they?

5:44And you know, it just becomes their norm that they have to put up with this, which is even more shocking. Yeah, that is exactly right. And it's interesting you say that because the tenants we spoke to had a slightly mixed reaction. The tenant who initially sort of reached out to a friend of my producer essentially was reaching out. She was a mum of two with two young boys and was so desperate to get out that she'd tried everything. She contacted her MP, the council, her school. Her school, when she'd gone to the kids' school and said, I'm living in these conditions, they called social services who went round and said, well, there's nothing we can really do about this, and left her.

6:19Everyone had let her down. So I often say, and I've said in the podcast series, I say when I've talked about this before, that I'm so grateful for people to speak to us. But they're not speaking to me because they're doing me a favour. They're trying to do themselves a favour. They're absolutely desperate. But other tenants, I was quite taken aback by how accepting they were, as you said, of their situation. I met a guy called Leroy who said, this is what it's like living in this block. This is what it's always been like. It's always been like this. He was a working class black man in central London, and that is how he felt the world treated him.

6:56And he was a delivery driver working full time, paying essentially to live in squalor. He'd contacted the council several times. They hadn't fixed the problem. Hadn't he just stopped? He'd just given up. And in some ways, as you say, Steph, it was the resignation was more heartbreaking really than the anger. The anger was understandable, but the resignation was even more depressing because it was kind of accepting this is what it's like to live in Britain for a group of people. So when did you make the leap from seeing what was a scandal in Croydon into recognising that this was a nationwide systemic problem?

7:34them that really came as a genuine reaction from the audience from our viewers because I mean we've all been in that situation haven't we I'm sure on TV where we go on and we say we've had an enormous reaction from our audience and it's like four emails and we can really overhype it this was genuinely enormous I mean the report went out that night in March 2021 and we had hundreds of emails that night by the next day we had hundreds more some of them were just viewers saying, oh my God, these conditions, the leaks, the collapsed ceilings, the mould, the slugs, the squelch, everything. It was appalling.

8:06But it was, on the whole, the reaction was social housing tenants across the country saying, that is what it's like in my block. That's what it's like in my council flat, in my social housing property. And I've been complaining also for weeks and for months, and nothing's been done in my property. And so we did a follow-up story and then a follow-up story. And every single time we did a report, more people would email it was as if we were holding up a mirror to this group of people in society that had been ignored by everyone and suddenly they were saying that's me and here we have a journalist here we have a team of journalists who actually seem to care and i think i mean we may get on to this but i think part of the problem with this story has been in the 80s the 90s 2000s you will see local newspapers covering stories like damp and mold and poor housing conditions i don't think a national organization has ever kind of put the join the dots and said well it's happening in pockets everywhere this is a national story and even in my own newsroom initially the reaction was this is a local news story isn't it really this is a story about one block in south london so why is this a national story we had to work quite hard to get it on air on the national news that's interesting you say that because that's exactly kind of what happened with the we did a special about kids homes and again there was like these kind of pockets of local outrage at the kind of profit making of private companies from these local kids homes but it wasn't really being talked about as this big national problem and did that make a difference then when you put it out there nationally you were getting obviously all these people contacting new viewers and stuff but were you then able to get politicians to listen to you and you know the people who needed to we were though i have to say i think initially so a conservative government at the time were quite keen to essentially distance themselves from this being a national story about kind of systemic issues that may speak to the kind of country we live in and the country that's being created and i have to say on the on the flip of that at the time for many months the labour party then in opposition were not that keen either to talk about it because many of these councils were labour run because they were in a city but also this was social housing and social housing is is something they support they want to see more social homes they they believe in that model a lot more than, say, the conservative right do.

10:15And so it kind of fell politically between two stalls. The national government didn't want to draw attention to it and the Labour opposition didn't want to draw attention to it. And so for a while we were doing these stories and it wasn't really getting much political attention. It was only when it became kind of overwhelming. We were doing this almost every week. Months into it, we then started getting attention from Westminster. But it was only really when Michael Gove became House and Secretary that we started to see any political movement on this issue. So can I just ask you, having immersed yourself in this now for so long, why is it that a combination of housing associations and councils let so many people down?

10:52I mean, historically, we thought of our councils and indeed housing associations as inverted commas, good organisations that were trying to make the world a better place for underprivileged people on low income. So what went wrong? You use the phrase, I think, good guys or good housing. That is essentially how the sector responded when we first started doing stories here, that we are used to seeing a lot of attention when we talk about slum housing or slum landlords. It's private landlords. It's kind of a bloke called Kevin with three houses, and he's not entering his phone, and he wants to make a few quid.

11:26And suddenly we were focusing on state-run housing where there's no profit incentive, so why wouldn't they just carry out repairs? And over time, the sector started to accept that they had a problem and there was an inquiry, etc. But there's a few things. I think firstly, you can't ignore austerity. You can't ignore the stripping of local authority funding and council funding. And that is part of it. If you speak to anyone in local housing, they will tell you that 20, 30 years ago, estates would have offices on the estate. They would have housing offices, repair teams that were well funded. A lot of that's gone.

11:58Most estates now don't have a local office they can pop down to and say, I've got a problem and get fixed quite quickly. Housing offices are overwhelmed with too many people. Well, with housing associations, it's slightly different because they're not local authorities. They're non-for-profit, but they make a lot more money in terms of their turnover. And in the podcast series, we talk about it. I mean, some of the bigger housing associations, they're turning over 900 million, a billion pounds a year. Their CEOs are on sort of three, 400 ,000 pounds a year. They're not short of cash. And so it's not for them.

12:27I don't think it was a money issue. I think the conclusion I started to come to was partly a crisis that we have in our housing stock, which we know there's not enough affordable housing, and started to bleed into a crisis in culture. So because social housing is in such short supply, the people in it have no choice but to stay in it. It's going to squalor all the streets. That's their choice. And so even subconsciously from these housing providers, I felt it was like, well, what's the rush here? They're not going to go anywhere. we don't need to fix this properly or fix this quickly they're going to stay and they're going to carry on paying their rent either through their wages or through housing benefit and so i felt that this this lack of urgency there's an lack of urgency in the system treating people these people were trapped and they were staying in those homes and they had no choice and so even though these housing associations would often call their tenants customers they're not customers they can't vote with their feet they can't leave they're in social housing partly because they can't afford private rents and they certainly can't afford to buy their own home so i think part of it was a culture issue i also think part of this is the fact that one of the under-reported issues of the right to buy scheme under margaret thatcher was not only did we sell off nearly sort of two million homes over the past 40 years but at the exact point in the early 80s when a lot of the homes that were built in the 50s and 60s needed to be regenerated and looked at again we didn't do that as a country and we sold off the good stock so what you have left now in social housing especially in local council housing is the bad stock and it's not being maintained it's not being well looked after by councils with a lack of resources so i think it's a few things combining that led to this this storm that we reported on yeah and it feels like it's a kind of a vicious circle as well because up where i am in in north tyneside where you know there's real pockets of deprivation around here i was having a conversation with various people this week and and was given several examples of massive wastes of money so one is a friend who works in housing who was helping a woman who was experiencing domestic violence to get out of this home with her children and they had nowhere to put her and so she's ended up in a hotel and she's been in this hotel with her kids for ages and that's just rightly so she should have been taken out of that situation I'm not saying that but there was nowhere to go so all this money being wasted then I was talking to someone who's a taxi driver about how his business is at the minute because he was saying since the cost of living it's you know it's harder there's fewer people going out and stuff but he's making like thousands of pounds a week taking kids to school paid for by the council like he was like oh yeah I've got this deal I take these two kids I get a thousand pounds a week for it and I was like oh my god you know that's just two anecdotes just in the I've heard in the last year so you just think you're right there's not enough stock and then there's this incredible waste of money because the councils end up desperate and they end up having to overpay private companies, private people to actually provide the services they can't do themselves.

15:25I mean, this was the story that we told when we did our crisis in children's homes story, which is, you know, councils massively overpaying for private providers because the basic support to help families that are in trouble has been eroded by austerity over many years and they end up having to pay for crisis support and it's way more expensive. And that's exactly what's happening in the housing sector. So we go into this in the series and one of the episodes is dedicated to that exact issue you're talking about, Steph. We meet a woman, Michaela, with three kids. She was living in a really poor quality home and she was placed in a local hotel, a travel lodge in Enfield, and she was in there for nearly nine months.

16:10and she was a nine-month-old baby who was growing up in a hotel room designed essentially for a kind of businessman's overnight stay and she was raising three children in there in this tiny, tiny room. It's costing the council an absolute fortune, but when she went to the council to say, I need somewhere to live, there weren't enough homes so that she's put in a hotel. But what you also have is the situation, this is partly the treatment of people in this situation, at weekends when Tottenham would play or when there'd be a concert in central London the hotel would put the prices up naturally and the council couldn't afford the prices so you'd have this situation where on occasion the hotel which is about half full of homeless families would empty the families would move to a cheaper hotel even further away the Tottenham fans or the Beyonce concert fans would move in a couple of days and then they would move back in And they would move around like that.

17:08They would go around because that's where the budget is. In terms of the cost, Eastbourne Council told us that last year that for every pound in taxpayers' money they receive, they were spending 49 pence on temporary accommodation. It's a complete false economy. So when we talk about the state's retreat from house building and regulation, in terms of spend, we're still spending tens of billions of pounds on housing. We're just spending it on housing benefit. We're just spending it topping up people's rents or paying it on temporary accommodation. so why would you spend 30 billion pounds a year topping up people's rents that's going to private landlords is going now to temporary accommodation providers like hotel companies and not build houses the problem you've got is you can't do that overnight you can't just turn the tap off because it just plunges people into poverty so getting that bill down takes time and building houses takes time i can't overstate how much of a mess we've got ourselves in as a country when it comes to housing.

18:10Dan, we're going to go to a quick break and then after which, I mean, we've got loads more to talk about on this.

18:41One of the things I'm interested in is whether you have acquired thoughts, views about how we can give these powerless people more of a voice. And it's not just the crisis in housing, but there are millions of people in this country on low income, sometimes with disabilities, who are basically expected to take what they're given, even when what they're given is completely inadequate. How do we empower those people? It's a really tough one because I think I've come to the conclusion, and I think we're talking in the week when Labour, the government, has announced more funding to tackle homelessness, and it's a decent sum of money, a billion pounds.

19:24I just feel like any kind of announcement around this issue skirts around. It's firefighting, effectively. so the ultimate the ultimate thing that needs to be done i'm sure we'll get on to it is is you need to build houses en masse because that's the only real solution to this in the short term the one thing i found was if you look the tory lib dem government comes in and starts to save money and one of the things it did it's kind of cut government departments and one thing it did do is really strip back the role of the social housing regulator to the point where the social housing regulator was only really able to look into the finances of housing associations to make sure they didn't go bankrupt one of the things they did do is they took away the government took away the right of the regulator to visit people's homes or to speak to tenants directly why because it's cost money you take just remove the staff so essentially the regulator it's incredible and we talk about the whole one of the whole episode of the podcast is dedicated to this story you have in a situation where the regulator when it receives a complaint about a housing association this has since changed the law has since changed into our reporting.

20:29For many years, the situation was the regulator couldn't visit the homes that it had received a complaint about. It couldn't even speak to the tenants living in those homes. But because of its power as a financial regulator, it could speak to the landlord. So you had a situation where they go to the landlord and say, we've received this complaint. The landlord would say, look, it's a bit of a mistake on our part, but it's not systemic failure. It's a one-off. We're really sorry. And the regulator would turn around and say, we found no evidence of systemic failure. And when we first did a big report, a big investigation to this what into Clary and a big housing association, and the report came back and said no systemic failure, we were like, well, how?

21:06And when we looked into the system, and the system is designed to ignore people, it's not like a kind of loophole. It was meant to be like that. And what's happened over the years is these people have not only not had a voice, but any voice they did have has been removed from them. As a minimum, the regulator needs to be doing things like that. It is now. I think the housing ombudsman in terms of housing needs a lot more power. but we're again talking in the week of WASP when ombudsmans are not particularly listened to. One thing that at the end of the last Labour government, the one thing they did have is a voice, a sort of tenants voice group that was then meant to be representing social housing tenants.

21:40Again, that was taken away by the Tory Lib Dem government. I think there are millions of people living in social housing and they don't have a kind of a union or a voice or a representative. I think they need one. They need someone they can go to that can fight on their behalf because even though, yes, these local councils have had their money stripped from them, yes, these housing associations aren't making money, they do have press offices, they do have PR departments, they do have spokespeople that can come out and argue on their behalf. The tenants have no one. They didn't come to us because they fancied being on telly.

22:10They came to us because they had no one else. They had no one else to go to. They should not come to ITV News with their housing concerns. They should not be coming anywhere near journalists with their housing concerns. They did because there's nowhere else to go. We're talking about a lot of people who are in jobs as well. They're kind of the working poor, aren't they? Because sometimes the assumption can wrongly be made is, you know, that these are people sponging off the state who are not getting a job or whatever else. And that is so not the case in many of the people we're talking about here, isn't it?

22:41100 % I think the vast majority of the people we feature in our investigation had a job part-time or full-time they were they were paying to live in their situation we talked to her about hotels I mean Michaela who I mentioned who's living in the travel lodge she was working for a pharmaceutical company she was she had two sons in school little Aurora who was at the time nine months old in nursery she was paying to live in these situations through she was going to work and then living in hotels. She was going to work or living in a squalid flat. So 100%, the idea that, I mean, even if they weren't working, it would be still appalling, but the fact that people are paying to live in these situations through they're going to work, they're doing the right thing.

23:20What would you say to Michaela that she needs to do? And this is one of the issues you write to raise as a misconception is that what would the message be to someone like Michaela to kind of get herself out of her situation, get a job, or she's got one? What would the answer be? work harder get a second job get a third job which we know some people are doing and that still wouldn't be enough in parts of this country the rent is so high that it doesn't matter how hard you work in Enfield we met a guy who was a locksmith called Ben who was working full-time had two children he was living in the travel lodge because he'd been evicted from his house and he couldn't find anywhere to rent and he was telling me the reason why is because landlords in that area of North London either wanted the tenant to be earning£50 ,000 a year or have a guarantor earning£50 ,000 a year.

24:09He didn't earn that and could never earn that as a locksmith and he didn't know anybody on£50 ,000 a year and so he couldn't rent anywhere. What would the message to Ben be from the government? How could he improve his lot? And similarly I once interviewed a lady who was a pensioner who was evicted from her private rental. So she had used to own her own home and then got divorced and ended up renting. She was privately renting. And then when obviously we saw house rentals, the price of renting go up and house prices go up so much, she then got booted out in favour of them wanting a tenant who could pay a lot more money and she couldn't afford that.

24:47They booted her out. She ended up sofa surfing and she was in her seventies. And you're like what how can you get to a point where someone who can afford rent but can't involve the massively inflated prices but she was saying she was struggling to even get viewings and in the end she there's a good end to this story and that she did finally get a rental again but she was like sending flowers to the estate agents she was writing like letters to the landlords before she'd visit and just going above and beyond just to try and find a home in her 70s and that's the last thing you want to be worrying about isn't it when you're a pensioner yeah and i come back to it it's essentially an experiment that's not worked in in 19 i read this recently in just before thatcher came into power in 79 just under 33 percent of england lived in council housing which is kind of remarkable that's not that long ago and now it's around eight percent right to buy and the rocket booster that put up it was put up right to buy by thatcher existed in other forms before that, but it really was rocket boosted by Thatcher, has led to nearly 2 million homes leaving the market and we've not replaced them.

25:54And if you do that to a country in a very short period of time, you end up in situations like we're in now. Now, that's not a political point. That's not saying I have an issue with right to buy. There's arguments of legitimacy around right to buy, but you kind of argue with the numbers. You kind of argue the fact that if you take a housing market and remove that many affordable properties out of it in a very short period of time and don't replace them there will be consequences and the consequences are the 70 year old woman that you've you've met who's sofa surfing it's that it's Michaela living in a travel lodge it's Ben living in a travel lodge it's people living in conditions that you wouldn't leave animals in that is the consequence of not building successive governments not building affordable decent homes for its own citizens it's the retreat by the state from the housing market on, I think, a dangerous level.

26:41Have you looked at other comparable rich countries? Is housing provision for those on low incomes particularly bad in the UK compared to other parts of Europe or North America or indeed Asia? It's hard to compare. I looked a little bit at Western Europe. And so in the UK, we were kind of slightly a bit of an outlier and had dependency on local authority housing up until the 1980s. There's a slightly different model in Western Europe in terms of they're more reliant on the kind of housing association style model. In the UK, we became very reliant on council housing up until the 80s, and partly why Thatcher came in and wanted to kind of get rid of that was seen as kind of a sort of socialist experiment.

27:27So that's one thing, is that we have a slightly different model here. The other issue in the UK is that we have very, compared to, say, Germany in particular, we have very landlord-weighted rights over tenants. So in Germany, over time, if you rent a property, you build up certain rights. The longer you live in a property, the harder it is for a landlord to turn up and get rid of you. In the UK, that has not been the case. I mean, the Labour government is talking about getting rid of Section 21, the no-fault eviction. But in the UK, again, through the reforms of Thatcher, you have a market that's very much geared to incentivising landlords, incentivising people to become landlords.

28:04So as far as tenants' rights are concerned, we have tenants have far fewer rights in the UK than, say, compared to Germany or France. It's interesting you say about the landlord and how, you know, everything's kind of in favour to the landlords in this country. So this is not going to make me very popular, but I was a landlord for a bit. I've talked about me buying a property in Middlesbrough before, but couldn't get onto the property ladder when I was in my early 20s. So I decided to buy a house where I'm from. and I then couldn't work in Middlesbrough doing what I wanted to do, moved to London to work and I couldn't sell the Middlesbrough property because it was pretty much negative equity at that point.

28:44I'd bought at the top of the market. It was literally the worst decision I ever made buying that property. So I ended up renting it out and I had endless problems and felt like, and I'm not saying poor me, I'm literally not saying that before anyone jumps down my neck, but I don't think I ever had a point where it was like I felt empowered like you know tenants who stopped paying rent for months there was nowhere for me getting rid of them and then I had to get someone evicted and they trashed the house and it cost me tens of thousands of pounds to get it repaired and so and it wasn't me trying to be a rich landlord it was a practical situation of I had to move to London for work and I couldn't sell that property and I did end up selling it last year and I told everyone I sold it for the same price I bought it 20 years ago but in that time it didn't feel like landlords like I know you're saying that there are loads of landlords out there making loads of money I know there are and I know there's loads of bad landlords but there's also just some people who for practical reasons have a property and it is actually really hard being a landlord too and there's a danger that those people will be pushed out from actually providing homes as well because it's it's it's actually really stressful and and I didn't have a second home by the way this wasn't me owning two properties that was the only property I owned for at least 15 years I only bought my first house I've lived in like three years ago so you know I was renting for a long time so whenever I was renting I felt like I was the landlord was the boss of me you know was that situation never paying back deposits and always you know trying to put up the rent every year and everything else and then as a landlord I felt like I was losing out too so I was in this kind of position.

30:24Dan's about to burst into tears. I mean, he's never heard such a tragic story. I was counting the number of I'm not a bad person caveats. Just so you know, I'm not a bad person. I really hope, and this is a slight problem with, and this is why a podcast is a great medium for this kind of storytelling and investigation because I'm able to now say there is nothing wrong with being a landlord and there is nothing wrong on the whole with landlords. Most landlords are good. I have members of my family are landlords. You get good landlords and bad landlords. You get good tenants and bad tenants. No system, no legislation, no government will ever be able to eradicate bad people.

31:05Essentially, whatever you're describing is you're a good person who's trying to do a good thing and trying to get on in life and you had a house and you basically became a bit of an albatross around the back. What I would say is a couple of things. First, you can't get rid of that problem. You'll always get people who have trashed properties. You'll always get landlords who try and pull a fast one. There is no doubt that right now, if you're a family who lives in a property and looked after it for a very long time, been a good tenant, unfortunately you sound like you didn't have many of them, but if you did have a good tenant and then you rocked up one day and say, I want to sell the property, or you've trashed it and I want it back, as much of a pain that is to maybe get that tenant out, you will eventually get them out.

31:45The law is on your side. It might be a pain, but the law is on your side. And that should and always be the case. The problem with the right now of the system is if you're a good tenant, you've looked after the property, done everything right, you've run a raise a family. And then the landlord comes along and says, right as they can now, here's eight weeks, off you go. Two problems with that. One, it's just kind of inhumane if that tenant landlord just wants to raise the rent. Yeah, because it's just not, that's just not great, is it? The problem is, though, that landlord, you're right, isn't responsible for the ultimate problem, which is that family would simply go and find somewhere else if they could afford it.