What is wrong with the country’s social housing is obvious. Whether any politicians have the will to fix it seems unlikely, as highlighted by a new book from a young, south London activist. Review by STEVEN DOWNES
A kid with a camera phone from a south London estate: Kwajo Tweneboa has been naming and shaming rogue landlords since 2021
When a kid with a camera phone from a council estate in south London can do more to raise awareness, foment justifiable anger and create a campaign opposing the Dickensian conditions endured by tens of thousands of tenants living in social housing, then it should be clear that it is not only our wretched housing system that is broken, but our political system, too.
Where was the Labour Party, or other opposition parties at Westminster, over the multiple scandals that led to the Grenfell Tower fire, the massive levels of homelessness across the country, the death of two-year-old Awaab Ishak because of the mould infestation in his Rochdale bedroom, or the Made-in-Croydon travesties in Regina Road?
The appalling, “slum-like” conditions of flats in the blocks on Regina Road were, of course, a scandal allowed to fester under a Labour council administration. So when apportioning blame – and there’s plenty to go round – over housing, and the lack of decent quality homes, it becomes clear that it lies at the door of politicians of all parties going back more than 40 years.
It is now that today’s generation are having to try to live with the consequences. “It’s completely fucked up what’s happening and what’s happened for so long, how people have been failed,” according to Kwajo Tweneboa, described by some as “Britain’s most high-profile housing campaigner”.
It was around the time in early 2021, when The News At Ten was shocking the nation with its filmed reports of living conditions in council flats in South Norwood that Tweneboa used social media to highlight the horrible conditions on the Eastfields Estate in Mitcham, where he was living with his terminally ill father and family.
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Tweneboa’s family’s landlords then were Clarion, the country’s largest housing association. That’s the same Clarion who this week were fined by the Housing Ombudsman for its latest case of “severe maladministration”.
That’s the same Clarion that has “Lord” Gavin Barwell as a non-executive director, the former Croydon Conservative MP picking up that appointment soon after he lost his job as Theresa May’s bag-man. And that’s the same Gavin Barwell who was housing minister at the time of the Grenfell fire seven years ago.
That’s the thing about housing in Britain in the 21st Century… the same landlords keep repeating the same practices, over and over again, and many of our politicians have jumped on the merry-go-round with them for the ride.
When Kwajo Tweneboa posted his first housing tweet in 2021, it followed months of complaining to Clarion, who pretty much ignored him. He then went into neighbours’ homes and filmed the conditions they were living in. That got posted on the interweb, too. And it went viral.
Tenants elsewhere got in touch, and Tweneboa began naming and shaming failing housing associations, private landlords and councils across the country.
He has weaponised the squalid conditions in some rented properties against the cruel housing associations and landlords.
The shame usually works, and something gets done in individual cases, one case at a time. But that’s probably why Tweneboa’s scorn is mostly directed at the politicians who still fail to act to prevent and prohibit landlords’ neglect and disrepair to their properties, while still expecting to collect the (often state-subsidised) rent at the end of every month.
Our Country in Crisis: Britain’s Housing Emergency and How We Rebuild is Tweneboa’s first book and is an important work. Parts memoir, part manifesto, it is a call for urgent action. The kind of urgent action that you sense that even Tweneboa is not expecting any time soon.
The book is broader than Tweneboa’s own experiences and those of the tenants to whom he has given an effective voice. He has had a long association with Sarah O’Connell, the campaigning broadcaster and journalist who was behind the exposure of housing conditions on Regina Road.
And Tweneboa was helped in writing the book by Dan Hewitt, the ITN reporter whose own “epiphany” on a council estate in Croydon has seen him continue with a much-needed broadcasting crusade against bad housing and bad landlords.
With short chapters and plain language, Tweneboa lays bare how badly Britain has failed with social housing. All the post-war gains of safe and dignified housing for all have been squandered, much of it sold on the cheap thanks to Thatcher’s Right To Buy, a policy few politicians, red or blue, dare suggest be repealed.
Yet Right To Buy lies behind the shortage of available social housing, and with it soaring private rents, and therefore drives millions into private housing ownership, at vastly inflated prices, mortgaged for life. Tweneboa is rightly critical of the perverted manner in which housing has become a wealth asset rather than a basic necessity.
Clarion call: Kwajo Tweneboa named and shamed the landlords of the Eastfields flat
Tweneboa has called his book “a manifesto for change”.
His work has an unexpected supporter, with former Tory housing minister Michael Gove providing a quote for the dust jacket: “A must-read for anyone who cares about the state of the nation”.
Gove was in government for 14 years.
Under Gove and the Tories, private rents have hit record highs, house prices have peaked, mortgages have soared, the number of households living in temporary accommodation has hit new heights, and thousands of renters have been evicted from their homes. That end to no-fault evictions, like so many reforms promised by the Tory government, never did get enacted with Gove at the Levelling Up Department.
And meanwhile, seven years on, Grenfell survivors and bereaved families still wait for justice.
Tweneboa suggests that there is a model available for politicians to fix the housing crisis – the one laid out in 1945 by the government of Attlee and Beveridge.
“People want delivery. People want stability. People want genuine change for the right reasons,” he said in a recent magazine interview.
“People want politicians with integrity and morals, empathy and understanding for what it is they need behind their closed doors.
“The state of housing is the biggest housing crisis we’ve faced since World War II. We’re going to need a similar response, similar to what happened after World War II, which really is going to fix things.”
As a manifesto for better housing and better social conditions, it makes a compelling argument. It’s just that the people riding the merry-go-round now are only offering more of the same, and it’s unlikely any of them will bother reading or acting on Tweneboa’s hard-won experiences.
Read more: Investigation into housing scandal finds systemic failure and incompetence
Read more: Croydon shamed over ‘dangerous squalor’ in council flats
Read more: Ombudsman demands culture change after council flats ‘shock’
Read more: Only 10% of council housing repair jobs ever get checked
Read more: Ali accused of cover-up over findings on council flats scandal
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