Photo: Wikicommons under CC BY-SA 2.5 (this is not a photograph of a Hastings property)

Hastings’ Dickensian housing

Christine Harmar-Brown shares her insight into the struggle facing local families in the current rental housing market.

Apparently, there is a TV reality show about the ‘refurbishment’ of a well-known London hotel currently airing. It features extensive underground excavations which only former coal miners are prepared to undertake, as well as the addition of top floors to create a luxury penthouse apartment available for thousands of pounds per night.

In another part of the forest, in Hastings, a family of seven are waiting to be evicted from their privately rented house. The landlord has secured their eviction under a Section 21  notice. The house in question is damp and in a general state of disrepair due to serial neglect over many years on the landlord’s part. He has literally let it rot around them. Despite frequent attempts to request repairs, the windows are rotten, the floors are rotten and the boiler has not worked for months. But it’s been affordable, just.  Now he is evicting them, probably in order to undertake repairs and either sell or re-let at a vastly increased rate.

Yes, they have had notice. Yes, they have looked for alternative rental accommodation. But rents have skyrocketed way out of their reach. Despite this single mother working her hardest, with rents between £1,700 and £2,000 per month the figures just don’t stack up. Housing support is fixed at a rate considerably lower than that of the commercial market. Current waiting times for social housing are 2–3 years…

So, best efforts to find another property and vacate the landlord’s house by the date given have failed.  The local authorities are aware of the family’s plight but, in a Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare, will not, or cannot, do anything until the bailiffs arrive to forcibly remove them which, incidentally, could incur court costs for the family. At this point the council can step in to house them in temporary accommodation in privately owned properties which the council will be paying over the odds for as property provided as temporary accommodation comes at a premium.

And just in case anyone reading has glossed over ‘forcibly remove’ and its implications, as a start, they include standing on the street in the pouring rain with no way to transport your family and your possessions to… the council office where you hand in your eviction notice as you are now officially homeless.

Further incomprehensible policy exists in Rother District Council. Their private housing department’s call-out for rental properties to ease the housing burden have been thwarted by their own planning department.  Owners of holiday lets who wanted to offer their properties for long term rental are being advised that change of use will not be forthcoming because of the need to preserve the leisure and tourism offer.

So, whilst some of us are booking into £10,000 a night penthouse suites, others are struggling in a broken system with dangerous housing and soaring mental and physical health issues, the cost of which is yet to be reckoned.

Also in: Home Ground