Bedsits and Bibby Stockholm

There has been a justified outcry about the housing of asylum seekers on a barge, particularly the plan to create overcrowding by housing two people in each cabin designed for one.

This is inhumane.

In the last week, I have engaged with three private renters who have been living for years in accommodation that is also small, (though on firm ground) but in such appalling condition that some

would regard as even worse than conditions on the barge.

I won’t use their real names, but Carol has a small studio flat which was found for her so that she could be discharged from hospital after a car crash caused by a hit-and-run driver. The accident has left her disabled and prone to falls. She therefore spends a lot of time at home, but this tiny studio flat is damp and mouldy and she’s been suffering from asthma since she moved there. She told me that sometimes, she is gasping for breath and is forced to sit outside the house in order to breath (far from ideal since the house is on a busy road).

Toby, a pensioner, has spent years in a tiny studio flat which has never been maintained and is now in a very poor state with cracks everywhere and a hole in one wall.

Sara has a room in a shared house and has to limit her personal belongings to avoid a fire risk. She has health problems, including blurred vision and a musculoskeletal condition which causes acute pain and inability to grip or climb stairs easily. The whole house is infested with cockroaches – they hide in the bathroom and toilets; they are on the stairs and crawl over the beds in the tenants’ rooms.

These tenants are not unusual – there are thousands of people suffering similar conditions.

Why don’t they move? Properties do exist which do not involve such horrors. The answer is simple. These tenants have to rely on housing benefit and despite the conditions they endure, the rents are the maximum they will get for housing benefit/Universal Credit. All the one-bedroom flats I’ve seen advertised, even in the cheapest areas, are way above what tenants can claim in benefits.

The Local Housing Allowance which caps housing benefit, has been frozen since 2020 while rents have gone through the roof. Recent analysis by the Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS) reveals that low-income renters are much more likely to be living in homes that are hazardous, in disrepair, without adequate heating or modern facilities.

The proportion of rents advertised on Zoopla which are affordable to housing benefit/Universal Credit recipients has fallen from 23% to 5% since the freeze – a tiny proportion compared to the 38% of renters who receive housing benefit.

Why is the freeze on housing benefits and the misery it is causing not hitting the headlines and creating the same degree of outrage as the Bibby Stockholm?