Off Topic The Politics Thread

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Should the UK remain a part of the EU or leave?

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    Votes: 56 47.9%

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  • Total voters
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kiwiqpr said:
Diane Abbott‏Verified account@HackneyAbbott Aug 21
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It's shameful that in one of the wealthiest countries children are being made to live in shipping containers. Gov needs to build more social housing, properly fund local authorities & work to ensure people are living in safe and secure housing immediately



Homeless children put up in shipping containers, report says
Children’s commissioner for England condemns ‘scandal’ of family homelessness
Patrick Butler Social policy editor
Wed 21 Aug 2019 00.01 BST Last modified on Wed 21 Aug 2019 19.10 BST
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    The home of Corelle Tertullien, 26, where she lives with her two children in Hanwell, west London. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA

  • Thousands of homeless children are growing up in cheaply converted shipping containers and cramped rooms in former office blocks, putting their health and wellbeing at serious risk, according to the children’s commissioner for England.
    Anne Longfield said it was scandal that at least 210,000 young people in homeless families in England were put up by councils in temporary housing and bed and breakfasts or forced to “sofa-surf” with friends, often for long periods.
    Such accommodation could be unsafe, disruptive and overcrowded, with no room for children to play or do homework. It was frequently in poor condition, far from family support networks and schools, and often in isolated locations dogged by crime or antisocial behaviour.
    “Something has gone very wrong with our housing system when children are growing up in B&Bs, shipping containers and old office blocks,” said Longfield. “It is a scandal that a country as prosperous as ours is leaving tens of thousands of families in temporary accommodation for long periods of time, or to sofa-surf.”
    Launching a report on family homelessness, she said the main causes were a lack of affordable housing and financial instability created by welfare changes, cuts to universal credit and a four-year freeze on housing benefit.
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    Shipping containers that have been converted to residential use for the homeless of Brighton. Photograph: Dominic Dibbs/Alamy Stock Photo
    Corelle Tertullien, a mother of two, was previously housed in a hostel in Southall, west London, and moved into a container in Hanwell shortly before she was due to give birth in December.
    “When I got the phone call, he said: ‘Oh, we have a flat for you’,” she told the PA Media news agency. “And then when I came here, I realised obviously this is not a flat. This is a shipping container. When they tell you, they make it out like it’s a flat or a house, but no, it’s a shipping container.”
    Tertullien, who has two sons aged two and nine months, was forced to move out of her family home due to overcrowding and has to keep her belongings elsewhere because of a lack of space.
    She said: “We’re all sleeping in one bed at the moment because I can’t fit the cot in here, there’s no space. There’s no bathtub. Originally I was washing him (the nine month-old) in the kitchen sink but now I wash him on the floor, getting a cup and washing him that way, because he’s too big to fit in the sink now.”
    She said the lack of circulation in the metal storage containers means they were prone to overheating, which leads to condensation dripping from the ceiling.
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    Terminus House, a disused office building in Harlow, Essex, now being used for social housing. Photograph: Chris J Ratcliffe/Getty Images
    “The fan is never off, it is constantly hot in here. The only way is to have your door open but I don’t want to have my door open because I don’t want people to look inside,” she said. “Most of the time they’re in their nappies because it’s just too hot.”
    After almost nine months living in the container, the shop assistant is unsure when she will move into permanent accommodation. She said another resident had been living in a container for three years. “But to me, if it’s temporary accommodation, you shouldn’t be here for three years,” she added.
    The report cites the case of Lucy, a homeless woman in her early 20s, and her two-year-old son, who were placed in a converted office block an hour away from their local area in London. The room had no basic furniture. Supposedly an emergency placement, they ended up staying for 11 months.
    “They put me in a small room in an office block which had been converted into flats. It was in an industrial estate in the middle of nowhere. The cars and lorries would whizz round really fast. It was very noisy and it felt unsafe to walk to the shops,” Lucy said.
    The NSPCC said such conditions were harmful to children. “These descriptions of pokey, dangerous conditions belong in a Dickensian novel, but instead they paint a picture of life in the 21st century for many families,” said the charity’s head of policy, Almudena Lara.
    The report says one in 10 new homes created in England and Wales since 2016 are in former office blocks, rising to more than half in hotspots such as Harlow in Essex. A government rule-change in 2013 means such developments no longer have to seek planning permission. Councils have called for the rule to be revoked.
    Many of the conversions fail to meet official size standards for a one-bedroom home, which is 37 sq metres. The report cites single-room flats of 18 sq metres converted from offices, and one of 13 sq metres – barely larger than a parking space.
    Office-block conversions are often located on or near industrial estates, far from shops, schools and other amenities. Some children who live in them are reportedly stigmatised by peers as “office-block kids”.
    Converted shipping containers are increasingly used by councils to provide temporary accommodation for homeless families. While some families prefer them to B&Bs because they have their own self-contained bathroom and kitchen, they are regarded as too hot in summer and too cold in winter.
    The report says 124,000 homeless children were recorded as living in temporary accommodation in England at the end of 2018, an 80% increase since 2010. On top of this, it calculates there were 92,000 homeless young people in families who sofa-surfed with friends or relatives.
    These estimates do not include a further group of children who have been placed in temporary housing by social services, for which there is no publicly available official data. Of those young people in temporary homes in 2017, more than half had been there for longer than six months, and one in 20 for more than a year.
    The report says an estimated further 375,000 children live in households that have fallen behind on rent or mortgage payments, putting them at risk of becoming homeless.
    The latest official statistics show 2,420 families were living in B&Bs in December 2018, a third of whom had been kept there for longer than six weeks, in breach of the law. These figures do not count at least 1,641 families in council-owned B&Bs, which are not included in official data.
    The Local Government Association said a severe lack of social rented homes in which to house families meant councils had no choice but to place households into temporary accommodation including B&Bs.
    A government spokesperson said: “No child should ever be without a roof over their head and we are working to ensure all families have a safe place to stay.”

maybe if so many people werent fleeing war torn france there would be more accomodation to choose from
and less people on the streets
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Mrs DT works in housing
Long story short it’s a mess
The Tories have cut all social housing budgets by over 70% in the last few years.

Maybe if the UK’s housing ideal wasn’t based just around greed and the English benefit system was not so corrupt ... oh buts that’s just a maybe.

France... there is no housing crisis maybe just pockets in urban areas ... same as any other European country.

When the UK accepts that to allow figures of over 60% of average income to be spent just on having a roof over your head is crazy then you would get change imo... that will never happen the housing market cannot be undone. Young people are still encouraged to get onto the housing ladder.

Others who have no chance of a house purchase then are at the mercy of the corrupt landlord market. I know this because I am one. The only moral thing my girlfriend and I have done is too release our so called investment over to organisations that shelter sincere family cases for a minimal rent.

Has anyone any idea how much rents are in Wimbledon Village?

**** the system it’s very wrong and it’s all based around greed. They talk about capping rents but that won’t stop it not a chance the entire nation is built around housing debt .

In France people rent and just can’t believe the idea of going into debt and a young age
Property portfolios are not a thing to be proud of. Life in the best years is for living when a typical property owner in the UK has endured a lifetime of paying vast amounts of a house they now face parasites in their later years who want to rob them of the profits they may of made especially those elderly home owners who face the criminal activity of care homes.

France looked after it’s older generations and it’s people who suffer from any illness.

I know this because I see it

The UK does not

The housing situation is the UK cannot be solved and what this article is really about imo is the amount of people who can’t into the madness want it all for free... that’s not ever going to happen when the evil ethic of making money out of housing is there.

No one based in London has done anything clever if they are a historical home owner as many are close to being millionaires now on paper. It was luck nothing more.

When a London home owner can typically sell their property (and even after other parasites who all take their slice during the sale) go and then buy three houses on average elsewhere in the UK then the system tells you how that is total nuts.

And still the idiots of the UK think this is great. I hope the property market fails in the UK would love to see it happen but that would mean that the entire economy would go also.

Liquidate give away a sum if your feel guilty I have done it and it feels great. I have a home now not an asset but today I can host 30 people if required all for 45,000 Euros. That’s why I harp on about lifestyles and culture

Worn torn France my arse
 
DT’s Socks said:
That’s ridiculous and stupid how do know this poster lives in Wales? Or has ever seen a sheep ? His football team maybe the Swans but no need to tag on a stupid stereotype fable
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I did say "may". The Swans were singing about being sheepshaggers on Wednesday, so go and tell their fans to stop tagging stupid stereotype fables (and then duck)
 
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West WindsR said:
Like most issues in this country, Thatcher is the root cause.
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Labour were in power for over 10 years under Blair and Brown. Under their open door immigration policy, they totally underestimated the number of EU migrants coming here. They could have built houses and didn't. How do you blame Thatcher for someone living in a converted shipping container?
 
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Goldhawk-Road said:
Labour were in power for over 10 years under Blair and Brown. Under their open door immigration policy, they totally underestimated the number of EU migrants coming here. They could have built houses and didn't. How do you blame Thatcher for someone living in a converted shipping container?
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- The mass sell-off of social housing.

- NIMBYism with regard to new housing. I think Thatcher created a more selfish mentality than existed previously (having not lived through that era). Blair continued her legacy for sure but then he was more Tory than some Tories.

- It was and still is undoubtedly in the Tories’ interests to restrict supply of housing given their voters’ demographics.

Blair and Brown were far from perfect but I still believe Thatcher (and Thatcherism) is the root cause, as I said.

There are other factors, of course. People don’t want to live in random under-populated parts of the north and Scotland but where people have no links to London, particularly in the most over-subscribed boroughs, it seems logical to not house them there.
 
Goldhawk-Road said:
Labour were in power for over 10 years under Blair and Brown. Under their open door immigration policy, they totally underestimated the number of EU migrants coming here. They could have built houses and didn't. How do you blame Thatcher for someone living in a converted shipping container?
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Didn't you know?

If you're left wing, Thatcher was and is responsible for everything and anything they don't agree with or believe in.

It's just a ridiculous thing to say that Thatcher is responsible for everything that is wrong in today's Britain.
 
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rangercol said:
Didn't you know?

If you're left wing, Thatcher was and is responsible for everything and anything they don't agree with or believe in.

It's just a ridiculous thing to say that Thatcher is responsible for everything that is wrong in today's Britain.
Click to expand...

Has anyone said that though or are you just getting yourself worked up again?
 
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Goldhawk-Road said:
She wasn't wrong about closing fossil fuel mines down though, was she? Where she went wrong in my view is that she should have invested more in new industries in the north. All Blair did was give you John Prescott.
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She was wrong at the time goldy. To the elite in london, the North is a fabled place only read about in books
 
rangercol said:
Didn't you know?

If you're left wing, Thatcher was and is responsible for everything and anything they don't agree with or believe in.

It's just a ridiculous thing to say that Thatcher is responsible for everything that is wrong in today's Britain.
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I agree col but she was a heartless bitch who didnt give a flying **** about the lower classes
 
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West WindsR said:
Has anyone said that though or are you just getting yourself worked up again?
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It's pretty much what you said:

"Like most issues in this country Thatcher is the root cause".

It's just a simplistic, childish, Tory hating sound bite which doesn't make any sense.

Thatcher made some bad calls, but also turned the country around when we were the poor man of Europe.
Also, that was a generation ago.
Pretty much where we'll be again if your mate Corbyn gets his way.
 
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rangercol said:
It's pretty much what you said:

"Like most issues in this country Thatcher is the root cause".

It's just a simplistic, childish, Tory hating sound bite which doesn't make any sense.

Thatcher made some bad calls, but also turned the country around when we were the poor man of Europe.
Also, that was a generation ago.
Pretty much where we'll be again if your mate Corbyn gets his way.
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I don’t care much for Corbyn. The root cause just initiates a problem. It doesn’t mean I’m saying she’s directly accountable for all of it.
 
West WindsR said:
I don’t care much for Corbyn. The root cause just initiates a problem. It doesn’t mean I’m saying she’s directly accountable for all of it.
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I don't blame you for back tracking.
Don't worry, we all get it wrong on occasion.

I thought May would do OK as PM and look what happened there!
 
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