Category Archives: Housing

Airlift

27 Friday Jan 2023

Posted by in Housing, Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , ,

Things have changed. Suddenly, or at least it seems sudden, I’m not looking for a flat to rent. We are looking for a house to buy. Together. It’s still made more complicated by disability and my lack of work, but it’s within sight. It feels sudden because for 5 years of our relationship housing was something we dealt with separately. For 5 years I tried to find somewhere appropriate to live, with the assumption I’d be there on my own. C moved between rented rooms, his own flat, here, and his family. Then the pandemic happened and he was here with me, sacrificing months of rent money to make sure I wouldn’t be on my own during lockdowns. For almost two years we were bubbled, making a go of being a “household” and learning just how much we could get on each others’ nerves but also just how well we worked as a cohabiting couple. It was that, the pandemic. Those two fraught, surreal years that now comprise a quarter of our relationship and felt like a matter of weeks and an eternity all at once.

Then more things happened, rather quickly: I inherited some money when my beloved grandmother died, which pushed me out of qualifying for housing benefit and made the prospect of getting a rented flat a lot more difficult; C got a better-paid job; my mum sold her old house and pledged the profits to me for housing. Suddenly the two years of cloudy pandemic uncertainty cleared, and we realised we’d jumped over that “together but separate homes” stage, realised we’d already been doing that for 7 years. In that time many couples have long since moved in together, and I have had many moments of upset and frustration in that time about my access needs and the horribly punitive benefits system stopping us doing it sooner. But those things fell into place, almost without us realising what picture they were creating, and soon without really having any formal conversation about it we were discussing “our home” as a real thing that was actually going to happen. Is happening.

I don’t know what kept me from truly believing it, but I didn’t think this would happen to me even over the last several years of this relationship. Somewhere in my mind I felt a certainty that I would be in a state of permanent failure-to-launch, that the brain-and-body maladies would keep me stuck living in this flat full of 20 year old ghosts, or worse – sent to live in another depressing poky bedsit in a rundown block attended by disinterested and patronising support workers. That’s where my mind kept going in the years I was looking for housing, that I would be stuck there again in a situation worse than remaining here (where I can still see scenes of violence and fear play out like holograms in every room). In all honesty, I just didn’t think about the future because I didn’t know if I was going to have one. I definitely didn’t think it would involve someone else, and there are a lot of feelings to sort through still – some “normal”, and some from the darkest recesses of my brain. It’s funny how even positive things can stir up harmful emotions when you’ve accustomed yourself to feeling undeserving. I’ve spent much of the last 6 months telling myself that I am worthy of this, that I’m not unconsciously pressuring (or hypnotising, or bewitching) C into wanting to live with me, and that he’s a grown up who can make his own decisions however illogical I find them. He wants to live with me. He wants to own a house with me. We want our life together.


Housing Doldrums – when is progress not actually progress?

08 Thursday Aug 2019

Posted by in access, Disability, Housing

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , ,

In May, 28 months after first applying to the council as needing housing rather urgently, I was accepted onto their Homefinders scheme. This is where private landlords list their properties and us lucky property seekers can then bid for the right to rent them. Applicants are placed in the queue based on their assessed needs and urgency to move.

So far so simple.

Except not. In March I found out I had been placed in Housing Group 3 – extra health and wellbeing needs – which sounded accurate on the surface, until I learned that Group 5 was the group for those who need wheelchair accessible properties. My advocate and I queried this, as I rarely go anywhere without my powerchair and absolutely need it for independent living, but were told that Group 5 was only for wheelchair users that need to use their wheelchairs inside their homes as well as outside. Fair, I do not need to do that at this point as long as I can have reasonable adaptations made. But this left us with an issue – does Group 3 ever get offered wheelchair accessible properties? We asked the council multiple times in emails, going as far as to request a face to face meeting so I could get a straight answer, but no joy. We were also told that there were many other applicants in the group, and my chances of getting anything via the council were so slim that I should continue to look privately or consider a low cost homeowners scheme (hello, where is the bank that will give a mortgage to someone existing solely on disability benefits?).

So as well as frustrating myself to tears looking through property sites for accessible and affordable flats (as I have been doing since early 2017), since May I’ve been logging onto the Homefinders site weekly to see what’s listed as available for me to bid on. I’ve never seen more than 4 available in my strict category (1 occupant, 1 bedroom) in one week, and to answer my own question to the council it seems that wheelchair accessible properties offered to Group 3 are sparse. I’ve seen one so far, and it was on the ninth floor of a tower block far enough removed from public transport that even the site listed it as such. Even yesterday, a friend alerted me to a property listed that had a “roll in shower” so must be wheelchair friendly? Nope – third floor, no lift. We’re going to try and push again for that data on accessible properties, or a face to face meeting.

What else in the meantime? I’ve applied to two different specialist housing organisations in the last couple of weeks, although I’ve not even had an acknowledgment of application from either of them, and since posting a desperate tweet to find any other links/HAs/charities/flats for rent I’ve got a couple more to try.

It’s hard keeping my head above water right now. I can be in a perfectly good mood then think too much about housing and start going under. I tried to access private therapy to deal with the trauma around housing and homelessness from my previous experiences, but something got in the way – lack of wheelchair accessible therapists. The irony is not lost on me. I’m even considering reapplying to my local CMHT for help, but I’m not sure I’ll be accepted since in November they kicked me off the therapy program I was on because my housing issues were monopolising my thoughts and causing more acute mental health issues, distracting from the longstanding ones the program was designed for. If I don’t laugh I’ll scream

And that’s where I’m at now. I know I’ve been crap at updating this, it’s hard to pull the brainkittens together to write something longer than a tweet – see last post – but I’m trying to write it out more. It makes me feel less lost and confused, writing it all down as a record of what happened too. I’ll do a medical update one at some point, but it seems less urgent.

Thanks to everyone who’s retweeted my plea – so far 674 of you! Please keep it going, any advice, any ideas are appreciated. Even if it doesn’t get me a property to rent, I hope that it wakes people up to the appalling lack of wheelchair accessible properties in this country.

Further Adventures in Bureaucratic Incompetence.

10 Tuesday Apr 2018

Posted by in Blog, Disability, Housing, Mental Health

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , , , ,

Will I ever share good news to do with housing? Well, one day I hope to but today is not that day. When you’re dealing with a department as shambolic, uncommunicative and Kafkaesque as the council’s housing department, you have to cross your fingers and pray that all other agencies involved are on the ball. That appears not to have happened.

This afternoon I spent 40 minutes in an airless back office that smelt of feet, waiting for the results of the Great Bureaucratic Incompetence-Off. I knew that the council had sent a form (plus a freepost envelope!) to my GP back in October – I knew this because it had been put into the system shortly before I had an appointment in November, and the GP I saw had told me her colleague would be doing it soon. I also knew that it was now five and a half months later, and I had seen zero progress as far as housing went – but also that sometimes the council needed something akin to 20,000 volts up the arse to do anything with the information they themselves had requested. However, an afternoon at the housing office is only slightly more preferable to one spent having a filling without anaesthetic, and I assumed that finding anything out from the GP’s office would be somewhat easier than dealing with staff at the housing office (you know those characters in videogames who have important things to say to you but you can’t ever work out the right thing to make them say it?). I guess in retrospect 40 minutes in an eau-de-pied office surrounded by broken blood pressure machines was better than [time doesn’t actually exist in a housing office] the alternative.

“There’s a queue, dear”, said the receptionist, when I asked her to look up the letter on the system, and see if anyone had “actioned” it (arrgh, not a verb, I refuse to accept it).
I was aware there was a queue, I had waited in it for 10 minutes, and now I was at the front of it. “Can’t you come back another time?” Mindful of the ‘aggression will not be tolerated’ rules laid out on laminated pages on the counter, I aimed for ‘snippy but polite’ and pointed out that there was always a queue and by the standards of queues I’d been in there, this was quite a mild one. Five minutes later I found myself guided to the back office by the reception manager, and left for 20 minutes or so while she tried to find out some more information. She returned holding the sheaf of printouts that the first receptionist had handed to me 20 minutes ago. No, nothing had been done with the forms since they arrived in October. For over five months I sat at home like a lemon (again!) assuming someone was doing something with the information I had given them (again!) but instead the Thing That Needed Actioning (argh!) was sitting in a to-do pile in another dimension (again!)*. She left again for a while, and came back to offer me an appointment to fill the form out tomorrow morning with, awkwardly, the same GP who told me that her colleague would be doing the form five months ago.

(*) If this sounds depressingly familiar, it’s because it is. From January til June 2017 my housing application for impending homelessness sat in an unattended inbox until my friend (who is a housing support worker, but not for my council) badgered them into finding it and starting the process. So that makes a grand total of 11 and a half months of unnecessary delay out of the 15 months since I submitted my application to the council. Should I have sat around for both delays, waiting for them to get this far without chasing anyone up? Of course not! – and that’s where the paralysing anxiety comes in, and the depression that makes me too miserable to even think about housing, and the fatigue that prevents me from being in any way useful most of my waking hours. Basically, all the things that will go on that medical form tomorrow. It took until today for me to feel okay enough to ask about the letter; it’s nearing a miracle I still have the energy to write about it after.

THIS is why I need an advocate, a support worker, a someone who can do the chasing-up and checking-in. It’s not me trying to shirk responsibility for my own endeavours, but trying to ensure that I don’t fall between the cracks again. Because I have, due to the aforementioned assortment of brain kittens and body woes. When I do speak to people about it, their assumption is often that I’m trying to weasel out of doing my own work; I’m educated, well spoken, on paper I should have my shit together. In reality, I’m holding the cracks together with jam. However, I have a vague plan: tomorrow I see the GP to do the form and at the same time I will ask if she can refer me to somewhere. If I have no luck there, I see my therapist on Thursday. If no luck again, the CAB (so, somewhere around 2019 when I’ve built myself up to it….)

I’d just really love for every step in this torturous process not to come with its own obstacles. NOTHING about the housing process so far has been anything less than frustrating. At this point, “frustrating” would be a vast improvement.

It’s just a saga now.

05 Tuesday Dec 2017

Posted by in Blog, Housing, Uncategorized

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

, ,

I’m sorry for the gap between posts. I’ve had a cold and apparently when you’re already chronically  ill, a cold turns into “three weeks of being mostly asleep”. Not that much has happened in terms of housing; the council move at a rate that doesn’t exactly suggest that they work with people in danger of becoming homeless. Also, a couple of weeks ago the Guardian’s Disability Diaries , which I was a contributor to, were published and there’s been a lot of good feedback. I hope it helps in a small way to change public preconceptions about disability of all kinds.

Before I “update” (spoiler: no actual progress) I will share some exciting news. I finally decided to make a Patreon page.  Readers of this blog are, of course, under no obligation to sign up, but this blog is just one small aspect of what I hope to be able to do in terms of disability awareness and activism. Already I’ve reached my first funding goal, which means I’ll be meeting with a designer next week to revamp the style of this blog, ahead of registering a domain name. Fancypants!

So, the housing saga, and it is a saga at this point. It’s almost a year since I was told to find somewhere else to live as soon as possible, and I keep hopping back and forth aimlessly between the council and private rental options. Neither have been productive.
This month I’ve been focussing on the council, as I received a letter last month telling me that the “medical officer” had written to my GP to verify my various health claims (so that I could be referred to the council’s “housing association” partner). First problem – aside from the fact I went through four GPs there in a year due to them all leaving or retiring, my surgery closed down at the start of October after failing its CQC inspection. I had an appointment with the named GP at my new surgery last week to explain my housing needs and she seemed understanding and receptive, though I feel bad asking already-overstretched doctors to do things like this, when I’ve already uploaded reams of medical evidence to the council’s housing denier bot. Second problem – As I learnt in January when my mental health took a nosedive, the hospital mental health team’s notes don’t get copied to the GP’s system, so this sent me into a small tizzy when I realised that a GP would be unable to confirm the mental health history I had outlined to the council. Trying to rectify this was a small saga in itself:

I called the council, on the number at the top of the letter. There was a housing extension there, but as it turns out, the officer was there only for questions about rent. Any other housing queries had to be sent to the Housing Office. No there is no direct number, or email address. No he could not pass a message onto the Medical Officer, because they didn’t work in the same building. So, lacking any other option, I went back to the wretched hive of scum and villainy known as the Enfield Housing Office. “Do you have an appointment?” No, because there is no way to make an appointment. I took a seat as requested, and watched various vulnerable people having their needs denied. Eventually my number was called and I wrote down the information to be passed onto the medical officer. “She’ll call you, wait here and she’ll call you” “Is she not here?” “No, she’s upstairs”
So, I sat in the Housing Office for 90 minutes until someone who couldn’t be bothered to come downstairs and talk to me phoned me instead to verify that yes, someone had passed on the post-it note with the mental health team’s details. How very dehumanising. 

Then, on the 22nd of November, a text from a lettings agency:
“Enfield Homefinders have forwarded your contact details” – without my permission to do this, I might add. They included a link to a property on RightMove. It is not wheelchair accessible. So, the council gave a third party my phone number so they could advertise properties to me, without also passing on my access needs (which go beyond just needing level access). Superb. I was polite in my reply, but made it clear that I didn’t want either of our time being wasted by being offered unsuitable properties. I strongly suspect that this is nearing the extent of what the council will actually do for me, although I’m not aware of what their legal obligation is if they don’t actually have any suitable properties themselves.

 

 

 

Where Are All The Accessible Properties?

31 Thursday Aug 2017

Posted by in Blog, Disability, Housing

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , ,

I came back from 10 days away to no emails from the council after our visit there a couple of weeks ago. The friend who is acting as my advocate sent them an email when I told him this, and got a quick reply that I should soon be able to look for private rented accommodation in the borough, then use their scheme to cover the deposit. Ignoring the fact that I should have been sent this information as soon as I had been approved (with J cc’d), the deposit is not what I am having problems with, as my dad has already offered to pay it (a small but arguably fair recompense for evicting me). The problem I am having is with finding suitable rented accommodation in the first place. Heck, it’s what I’ve been trying to do for the last several months! I was told first in June that I’d have to look for private rentals because the council itself did’t have any accessible properties on their books, but I only went through the council because I was having trouble finding any affordable accessible properties in the whole of London; limiting my search to one borough, even to properties that have agreed to house council tenants, seems doomed to fail. I’d optimistically hoped that if Enfield Council didn’t have any suitable properties then maybe they could refer me on to another council that did, or a housing association that the public can’t access independently.  Enfield do have a housing association that works with them, but I’m still waiting to see if I’ve been approved for referral. If I am, then I will have to see if they actually have any accessible properties either. If neither have any, then what?

So where are the wheelchair accessible properties? I’ve found some on general property rental sites during my 8-and-a- bit-month search. They’re generally accessible by coincidence rather than design, and in new blocks of flats that definitely don’t want people like me applying; the kind that have concierges, and pot plants in the hallways. It goes without saying that they are not affordable, even with housing benefit. I could cover the difference for one or two months, and then I’d be out of money and back to square one. It also goes without saying that most properties, accessible or not won’t accept housing benefit, or sometimes ANY:

IMG_2620

Disability Discrimination is alive and well in the UK in 2017.

I suspect the answer is that accessible properties are dying out. The local council used to own many, which got sold off along with much of their general housing stock. The new landlords take out the adaptations, and raise the rent. They can deny installations of equipment needed to help disabled people live independently, and they can evict tenants without good reason just to redecorate a bit then hike the rent up. I haven’t been able to find somewhere to live in almost nine months with a very flexible eviction date, so I don’t imagine I’d do very well with just a month’s notice.Of course, if you can afford to buy your own home and make the necessary adaptations to it, that’s another matter. However, like many disabled people in the UK, I live on disability benefits and am therefore not allowed to save up for a deposit, though I do enjoy imagining the look on a bank employee’s face should I present my financial profile and ask for a mortgage. It seems the wiser thing to do should have been to wait until I had a career, savings, and a mortgage before becoming disabled. Silly me.

Through all this, I am struggling to keep my mental health together. I’ve worked really hard since January’s housing related episode to keep a balance, but when I got the forwarded email yesterday evening, my mood plummeted and I’ve been treading a dangerous line ever since. I can’t seem to engage with the council or think about the process without sacrificing the progress I’ve made since January, and I’m not currently in therapy because the CMHT doesn’t have enough staff to run the group yet (it seems once they’ve decided on the best course of therapy for someone, this can’t be changed due to such trivial things as staff cuts). I’ve spoken to the social worker there before, but she said she didn’t deal with the council because they never picked up the phone, so that’s another line of support cut.

In trying to be proactive, I’m writing this. Angry blogging is my first line of defence. Delegating research to friends who offer help is another. Does the council have a duty of care to appropriately house me, or does their responsibility end at offering me the chance to bid on unadapted properties? How much difference can getting my (shiny new Labour) MP involved make? Or the media? That kind of research. What also helps is that, unusually, I have quite a lot on my plate right now at least writing-wise, but this does rely on keeping the clouds from gathering in my brain. Once I’m fogged with depression, productivity becomes impossible.

Onwards, somehow!

 

We’re (not) working on it. The council website lies on their behalf.

04 Tuesday Jul 2017

Posted by in Blog, Housing

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , ,

notworking

“We’re ignoring it.”

It’s nearly seven months since I began the process of applying for housing through my local council and the progress is laughable. Every few days since the start of March I’ve logged into my council account online to check what’s going on with the multiple documents I was made to upload. “We’re working on it”, says the automatic reply. (Remember, I’m applying because I am being evicted and need wheelchair accessible accommodation.)
I tried calling, no I couldn’t talk to anyone because I haven’t been approved yet therefore I don’t have a case worker to talk to. Kafkaesque.
My mental health team’s social worker refused to call on my behalf “because they never pick up”, so that was the end of that route of advocacy.
My friend, however, did manage to get through. I’m in a better position than most “vulnerable people” applying for housing through this ridiculous system, in that I have a number of friends working in relevant sectors – charities, housing groups etc.- and one of those friends got so frustrated on my behalf that they called the council, explained what their job was, and was forceful enough that the council called me back the same day. I should be hearing from a case worker sometime in the next fortnight, though obviously I’m not holding my breath.

It turns out my application has been sitting in some virtual in-tray in a virtual office that no one occupied and had been since January. “We’re working on it” was some placating notice generated automatically as soon as uploads had been received, whether anyone was actually “working on it” or not. [This was further proven when I tried to apply for a taxicard at the start of this month. I got an email receipt saying they aimed to have it done within two working days; it’s been over two weeks now and, yes, they’re still “working on it”. The good news is I can actually call the concessionary travel department on  my own behalf and talk to a human.] I’m starting to believe that council employees aren’t taught how to work the new online system, because that would mean they have to at least try to help as many people as apply for services.

So what now? Now I wait for the phone call from the case worker and try my best not to slip into serious depression over this ridiculous housing situation again. It’s coming in waves, but I’m almost getting used to it.

 

Six Wasted Weeks

01 Wednesday Mar 2017

Posted by in Blog, Housing, Mental Health

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , ,

(CONTENT WARNING: suicidality mentioned, eating disorders, mental health, unreliable therapists, sleepless rambling)

One day I want to write a post about the housing saga and have it be a POSITIVE one. I really do. Today is not that day.
It’s been 6 weeks since the hospital’s crisis team discharged me back to my regular department. During that handover meeting, my key worker (who I was meeting for the first time) promised me she’d set up a meeting for me and the team’s social worker with the aims of helping me navigate the council’s housing system without such a catastrophic effect on my mental health. The kind that saw a return of bulimic behaviours I haven’t had in 10 years. The kind that had me shaking and sleepless and suicidal in my GP’s office on a Saturday morning three days beforehand, with no idea where else to go to try and get help, desperate to stop myself from doing anything reckless. (Actively trying to prevent the loudest 20% of your mind from taking over the anxious insecure majority is a strange feeling.)
I went home feeling like the cork was just about jammed back into the bottle, aware that it would be very dangerous to let the pressure build back up again.

So, since then I’ve waited. For six weeks. In the meantime having no luck with my other housing options (see previous post). Mental health up and down, nothing as bad as it was when the crisis team had to get involved, because of the aforementioned cork keeping my distress gently bubbling away on the inside. Literally holding out for the help I was promised.

Today I left a voicemail with my key worker, chasing this up. Two hours later the social worker called. “K has just told me about your situation….”
I had to ask her if she meant “…for the very first time”. Yep –  Just. Told. Her. 
If I hadn’t called, how long could I have been waiting for this meeting? I have a horrid feeling the answer would have been indefinitely.
If I wasn’t so tired I’d be absolutely furious. I AM absolutely furious, but the tiredness means it’s coming out as defeatist sighs and the frantic need to write this all down before I fall asleep at the laptop.
I’m pretty sad too, though. I don’t find it easy to trust people, psych professionals even less than most, and I’ve already lost a huge amount of trust in my new key worker. I know that mental health services are getting cuts all over the place, everyone’s so busy and overworked, and she probably genuinely forgot. The problem is there’s a human impact on the other side of the safety glass. My life can’t be put on hold right now – I’ve wasted 6 weeks waiting, and my provisional deadline to move is now a month away.

The social worker said she would text me some potential meeting dates. I’m not letting myself hold out much hope of that without another prompting phone call. I’m also very glad that anxiety over being forgotten about is overriding anxiety about making phone calls right now.

(Lack of) Housing progress.

20 Monday Feb 2017

Posted by in Disability, Housing, Mental Health

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, , , ,

Just over two weeks ago I posted a tweet asking for help finding accessible rental accommodation in London. It was retweeted over 240 times, and garnered no replies.
This isn’t a damning verdict of community spirit – it’s a damning indictment of the lack of actually accessible properties on the rental market, and subsequently why, 6 weeks after beginning my housing search due to impending eviction, I have made exactly zero progress.

In terms of looking for private market property, I have used every website I can find. First off, I tried the site which has ostensibly taken over for the Accessible Housing Register, which currently lists a grand total of ZERO accessible properties available to rent inn the UK. So, onto the non-specialist sites. Disappointingly, NONE of them have any filters for accessibility – even dssmove.co.uk, which lists only properties which accept housing benefit – which means I have to search for listings mentioning “wheelchair” and see what comes up (usually not much). (Searching  for “accessible” will bring up red herrings as it is often used in context of local transport.)  Another method is to look for buildings with lifts, or ground floor flats only, but again there is no guarantee that this means they are wheelchair accessible. I have sent a multitude of messages to property agents about places on the market – checking either DSS allowance for those which are accessible, or wheelchair access for those which do accept DSS, or both – and the few replies I have had so far have been negative. I have, however, been signed up to numerous unsolicited mailing lists.

On the non-private rental side of things, progress has stalled. The meeting with my key worker at the Personality Disorder service, in which she promised to put me in touch with the department’s social worker to help me navigate the council, was over a month ago and since then I’ve heard nothing either by phone or post. I went to the middle-of-nowhere hell that is Enfield Council’s housing department and gave them my doctor’s note, so hopefully they won’t discard my application in the meantime. My other option is a specialist Housing Association. The only one I’ve contacted and heard back from is Habinteg- I was accepted onto their waiting list last year, when my housing situation was simply “undesirable” and not “6 weeks away from eviction deadline”. It took me a while to build up the nerve to contact them, by phone, and I was told to email them instead. That took me over a week, the anxiety of response made worse by the disinterested person on the other end of the phone. Then I got this back:

habintegreply

[Good Morning,
Thank you for your email.
As stated in our Lettings Policy, we are unable to state accurately when we shall be able to help you, but I do assure you that your application will be given full consideration when suitable vacancies occur in the future.
Any information provided to support your application will help us to determine your priority of need in terms of housing, as we allocate properties on the basis of priority of  need, applicants do not move up the list,  and we are not able to guarantee to be able to offer properties to all applicants that have been added to our listings.
Regards,]

No contact name given, not even a mention of my name. I am pretty sure I was given a template response. I’m not even sure anyone read my original email stating I was facing an eviction deadline. After another few days of fretting, I’ve sent a copy of the eviction notice but I don’t expect more than another pithy email possibly telling me that it was insufficient evidence. I’m trying not to get utterly depressed at the probable loss of what was, at the start of this anxious period of my anxious life, my best hope at being suitably housed.

Update 21/02 – I have received an email from Habinteg informing me that my emails and evidence have now been forwarded to a Housing Officer. Whether or not this is so they can tell me the same thing, I’m not sure.

As the days count down to the provisional deadline of March 31st, my mental health is piping up again. Last night I had the first seizure I’ve suffered this year, and the first in at least a few months. I’ve begun dreading the evenings and nights again, in case of the Sudden Desperate Sads which lead easily to desperation, dissociation, or worse. I’m waking up anxious, staying anxious, until it turns to depression as the day wears on. I know this is when I should be calling the PD service key worker, but the lack of contact I’ve had from them since the Crisis Week means I’m incredibly anxious about doing so.

And breathe…(for a minute)

09 Monday Jan 2017

Posted by in Blog, DWP, Housing

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

, , , , , ,

My PIP assessment results arrived over the weekend. I’ve been awarded higher rate care component (as before), but also higher rate mobility. This is the part that enables disabled people to lease adapted cars, if they wish. Right now neither C nor I can drive so I won’t be using it for that, but the extra money will definitely be helpful right now. It came as a massive surprise – I was expecting to get nothing for mobility again because I can walk a small amount with crutches. Is this the one time they took “safely, repeatedly, reliably” into account?
Also, amazingly, I don’t have to be reassessed until 2020. That’s almost four years of not panicking over it, unless someone reports me because they saw me standing up from my wheelchair. I don’t trust the abled public not to be vindictive arseholes almost as much as I don’t trust the DWP not to send letters to terrify us just for shits and giggles.

And that’s the good news.

The other sort-of-good news is that I filled in the Council’s homelessness help form and I “may qualify for help”. Heartening. Now I have the next form to fill out, which I’ve already done (albeit before being given an eviction date), and it’s coming up on a year since they received it and I’ve still not heard back…hmm. Hopefully they’ll let me submit another one.

In other trying-to-prevent homelessness stuff, I’ve been looking on various websites for places to rent (with housing benefit) and one thing is standing out to me: nowhere, including dssmove.co.uk, which specialises in properties which accept housing benefit, has an option to search for wheelchair accessible properties. I did find a website claiming to list all accessible properties available to rent or buy in the UK but when I checked yesterday they had precisely 0 properties that met my conditions (to rent, in UK).

Other things:

  • My therapist has left the CMHT, which would be sad if I’d heard from him at all (aside from his farewell voicemail) since September. Still no word on when BPD group sessions start, so chances are I’ll have moved out of the catchment area by the time that happens.
  • Still no joy getting a gut specialist appointment because I need to submit a stool sample first in case my obvious gastroparesis turns out to be H Pylori (hint: it isn’t). Trying to produce a stool sample with gut dysmotility and a stomach that won’t empty, at the right time of the morning to rush it down to the GP’s surgery… let’s just say it’s been *months* and it hasn’t happened. I asked my GP for a blood test instead and the hospital threw it away as they “only test stool samples”, and breath tests are only done on inpatients. Hell’s bells…
  • It’s still my job to keep calling Stanmore and finding out whether they have reopened the waiting list for the pain rehab program.
  • New GP seems fairly disinterested in helping me to find an accessible dentist or referring me to the hospital’s community dental clinic. Must push.
  • Occasional suicidal ideation, mostly when I think about being placed in temporary housing – specifically B&B/hostel type places like when I was homeless at 17. I remember the fear and the desperation, and my brain goes “better kill yourself before it happens again”. No brain, stop it.

I’m using a lot of distractions this week. Mostly Poirot.

 

Game Face

31 Saturday Dec 2016

Posted by in Blog, Disability, Family, Housing

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, , , ,

“I don’t think I can have you stay in my flat any longer. I want you gone within three months.” And with that announcement, delivered three days after Christmas, my father broke into a smile.
“There. Now I have that off my chest we can get on with enjoying the holiday.”

And remarkably, he has. Ever since dropping that bombshell on me over breakfast on the 28th, he has been eerily pleasant as if the idea had been pressing on his mind and now he had said it out loud it was no longer there. It’s crushing me, instead.

I wish I could say I was new to being thrown out by my parents. The fact is I ended up at my dad’s when my mum threw me out in early 2014. Before that we have to go back to 2003, age 17, when I wasn’t thrown out but more “had to leave” my dad’s flat for legal reasons – two years after my mum sent me to live with him when dealing with a suicidal teenager became too much of a hassle for her. After a period of homelessness and hospitalisation, I got my own flat in 2004, and stayed a tenant of a supported housing agency until I gave it up (and all the disability benefits too) to go to university. Although I knew my mental health was precarious, I had no idea at that point that I also had a genetic disorder affecting my connective tissue, and that within 8 years I would be a wheelchair user, unable to work, and back living at my dad’s because I couldn’t get an income.

 I have no idea how long he’s wanted to throw me out for. Periodically he’s complained that I’m not making an effort to find accommodation, to which I point out that I’m still waiting to hear back from the council – that private accessible accommodation that accepts housing benefit is hard to find is a gross understatement. Truthfully, my plan was to wait until I heard back from my last PIP assessment – firstly so I knew if I would be able to afford the move, and secondly (and more importantly) so I would not have to deal with two major stressors at once. Dealing with one thing at a time is how I manage my mental health. If I try to take on too much at once, it can go very badly. But he’s forced my hand here. I have to find somewhere to live before the end of March, even if I have to take my PIP claim to appeal again.

He’s always been very territorial about his flat. Despite my living there as a teen, it was always HIS. He resented that it was to his flat that my boxes would come back to when moving to uni, moving abroad, moving back in. He resents more when I get too comfortable. And heaven forbid I let my mother in….. part of me feels that my offhand comment on Boxing Day about mum “popping round” in the new year may have been the straw that broke the camel’s back. He’s expressed discomfort with my familiarity with the flat before. The few non-fixed adaptations and equipment prescribed by the council’s occupational therapist have mostly been consigned to the conservatory. He doesn’t want a cleaner in HIS flat (despite never being there to clean it himself). The powerchair in the hall is tolerated, although the wheelchair ramp, which I negotiated long and hard for, is considered a symbol of my “settling in”. Ironic, since it’s the thing which enables me to LEAVE the flat most of the time. Essentially, I’ve always known my residence would be temporary. I’ve been reminded constantly.

So, having had two days to take it in, I’m feeling relatively calm. Enforced calmness was necessary to avoid a stress induced breakdown 4 hours from home where all my information is, in a house where the internet is unreliable at best and any supportive family had left the day before. I had my necessary cry, and my small rage, and then I put on my grown up face and asked him to please give me a letter for the council stating intention of eviction by the end of next week. With luck, common sense will overrule spite and he won’t say I have made myself “voluntarily homeless” as he’s been threatening to. I’m not sure it would stand anyway, since I’m not a tenant and there was no contract for me to break the terms of.

In the coming weeks/months I will be blogging about my search to find a new home, and probably also drawing parallels with my experiences at 17 which so far I haven’t had the guts to because of associated PTSD. This is going to bring those memories bubbling to the surface though, so writing them out will be one way to take control. 

So. Let’s find an accessible place in London that also accepts housing benefit. Game face: on.