Tag Archives: council

Further Adventures in Bureaucratic Incompetence.

10 Tuesday Apr 2018

Posted by in Blog, Disability, Housing, Mental Health

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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

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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

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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

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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.