Many years before key worker housing was the vogue, the GLC developed an estate in Cheshunt, Hertfordshire to include a small cul-de-sac of homes for police staff. It was usual practice for the Development team to suggest names to the local Council so two were put forward: Letsby Avenue and The Copse. Unfortunately, neither were selected for unknown reasons.....

Tenant reported that their home on the notorious White City estate in West London had been invaded by Martians. Their Housing Officer advised them to contact the Foreign Office......

One of my scheme managers found a distressed customer whose budgie had just died. Being an enterprising sort of officer she tried resuscitating it and failed. She then remembered that George next door was on oxygen so took it round to give it a quick blast. The budgie revived, flapping its wings. This so surprised the scheme manager that she dropped it, which killed it.!!!!!!!! George has been sworn to silence.

One of our surveyors had been held hostage by the tenant because the tenant wanted some work completed that hadn’t been done before. The worst thing was that a couple of months later we accidentally sent the same surveyor to the same property with the same tenant and lo and behold he got held hostage again! I don’t think he tried very hard to escape because he was apparently served tea and biscuits.

When I was a housing officer I went on a rent arrears visit to a young family, knowing that the mother was pregnant. On arrival the mother complained of feeling unwell and on asking her the symptoms I surmised that she had gone into labour. “I can’t be, I’m only 8 months”, she exclaimed. I ignored this and immediately called the midwife and the tenant’s husband who promptly arrived home and took his wife into hospital to give birth, leaving me in charge of the elder child. Suffice to say I didn’t get my days work done that day!

One of our housing officers found a budgie on the steps of our offices and she took it home to look after it. She put a notice up and had a number of calls to say it belonged to various people. Taking the budgie to the most credible claimant she opened the cage and asked to tenant to call it, upon which the budgie took immediate flight and landed on the tenants head. Confirming, for our officer, that she had found the right owner.

 He hadn't a prayer

A tenant accepts an offer on a two bedroom flat, but the very next day he comes in and says he wants to give the keys back because he can’t accept the flat because it is haunted. The receptionist didn’t know what to do so referred the case to the housing manager who came out and said “that in order to take any action we need some evidence, so if you can provide some evidence we will deal with it.” The very next day the tenant returns with his priest who verbally confirms that the flat is indeed haunted. This time the housing officer that took on the case successfully dealt with the problem by issuing a notice of seeking possession against the poltergeist!

and these were collected during the summer..........

Down like a lead balloon                                                                                                                                        

I was once put in charge of National Housing Week and decided that it may be fun to hire one of those airships that floats high up above a venue and carries an advertising banner.  Great idea, right?  Wrong!  Finding what I thought was a bargain airship from a firm in <placew:ston>Wigan, I paid £200 for the airship and the banner.  What I failed to do included paying for a self-deflator should it break its moorings; I failed to notify air traffic control that it would be in the sky; and I failed to get a license to fly it. On the morning of the event, I realised my mistake when, what I can only describe as a weird wind, caused the airship to cut its moorings on razor wire.  Off it headed in the direction of Manchester airport. At this point, panicked, I started to read all the things I should have read before launching it in the first place and duly notified air traffic control.  They immediately investigated the situation and informed me that should they need to request RAF fighters to shoot it down, the bill to my local authority would be in the region of a million pounds! I then called my Director of Housing, who, after he had stopped laughing, began to realise that this could result in the forced sale of all of the Council’s assets. Needless to say I spent a sleepless night chain smoking and drinking whisky, glued to Sky News to see what happened.  Early the next day, I received a phone call from my uncle to say he had sighted it floating across a sailing lake in Nantwich, Cheshire and it was heading towards central Wales. To my knowledge it hasn’t been seen since!

Attack of the lizard man

 As a Ward Councillor, I was approached by a resident who complained of being regularly pestered by a gentlemen neighbour. On investigating and getting the relevant authorities involved, we discovered that this neighbour was known as the “lizard” on account of him literally sliding across the road on his stomach, sliding up the resident’s garden path, slithering up to her bay window and literally licking her window clean from top to bottom. Duly dealt with, the resident was now upset that she no longer has a window cleaner!

No Cox here

I have the task of updating the tenants’ ‘changes of circumstances’, and one came in last week that said in big letters across the front: “I am getting divorced and I no longer use Cox” – obviously a change of name, but …..!

The 11^th hour

 At a time when interest rates were rising at a ridiculous level, there was a scheme called “Mortgage Rescue” which was aimed at people in financial difficulty and in danger of losing their homes. The idea was to bring in an RSL to buy the property and to convert the owner into a shared ownership tenant. I recall one such lady who took part in the scheme.  With a warrant of repossession pending on the Friday, she approached us for help at 4pm on the Wednesday before.  All I can say is that is that we managed to prevent the lady from being evicted only by staying up working on the case until 2.30am each night.  I know that as a fact because I was the silly b*****d who did it!

The pointy end of leadership

 Part of my team leader role involved encouraging the estate’s cleaners to include the emptying of the “sharp’s bins” in their daily duties as they were reluctant to do so due to reasonable fears about infection and disease. In a display of “leading by example”, my colleague and I decided to show them how easy and safe it was to do. Unfortunately we hadn’t read the instructions properly and consequently managed to open the bin upside down resulting in the needles falling over and around our feet. Embarrassed, we then tried following the instructions to use the grabbers and gloves to pick up the fallen needles.  The cleaners, who had been looking in horror at our poor attempt at cleaning, gained their composure, and decided there and then that they had to take over the task as it was impossible for them to do a worse job than us!

Pass the butter… knife 

The most embarrassing incident of my career involved calling out the Armed Response Unit to a knife incident in our hostel canteen following a radioed report that someone was threatening our staff and residents with a knife. This shows the importance of good, clear, thorough and detailed communication as the knife in question turned out to be a plastic butter knife!

Publicity: What not to do

Before the annual housing conference exhibition, companies try to find new ways of promoting themselves to senior housing staff. One year, a large box arrived personally addressed to a Director of a London borough without any corporate labelling or return address. At the time the security alert was set at a high level especially regarding suspicious packages. Consequently all the staff in the building were evacuated for two hours whilst awaiting the bomb squad who uncovered a pot of marmalade and an invitation to a breakfast meeting in Harrogate. Needless to say the invitation wasn’t accepted!

Money down the toilet

 During a conversation between a Councillor and the Chief Executive (CE) of a Housing Association, the Councillor mentioned that he needed some minor repairs done to his toilet. “Leave it with me,” said the CE, who went on to instruct his DLO to attend to the repair. The DLO manager was a little uncertain about this but, as it was a direct instruction from the CE, he issued the order for the work. It turned out that the state of the toilet was worse than expected and required a full replacement. Sadly for the CE, the property had been sold under right to buy 3 months earlier and the CE, for audit purposes, found himself liable for the full costs of the repair!

Money for nothing

An estate caretaker was becoming increasingly concerned about an elderly resident who was becoming more and more frail and confused. On talking to her, the caretaker discovered that she didn’t trust banks or members of her own family and had, over the years, been keeping all her spare cash in old biscuit tins under the bed. One day, the lady showed the caretaker all her savings she’d stored in tins – it was over a few thousand pounds! Worried that this may make her a vulnerable target, the caretaker duly reported this matter to his supervisor who informed social services.  This caused the resident great alarm, as she felt pressure to put the money safely away and thereby leave it accessible to her relatives (whom she despised) upon her death. Some weeks later following the visit from social services, she called the caretaker back to the flat and with some relief and a big smile on her face, stated that she had solved the problem with the money. “Oh good, you banked it then?” enquired the caretaker.  “Oh no,” she replied, “I tied it all up in carrier bags and threw it down the rubbish chute” – all £7,000 of it!

Peeping toms

On an estate walkabout, some of the local residents were complaining that all the trees surrounding the estate had been cut down.  What they didn’t realise was that the trees had been cut down in response to some of the other residents’ complaints to the Council that local boys were climbing them and looking into the upstairs windows! It just shows you can’t win.

Car-ried away

 On another estate we had a problem with damaged cars being abandoned. They were everywhere: left on driveways, on the streets themselves and even in people’s gardens, the car’s owner having pulled down fences to leave them. It was all looking pretty messy. In response, we started a communications campaign which highlighted that these cars were causing residents to complain.  On being alerted to this, the people who owned the cars immediately said, “Oh, we didn’t realise that anyone cared!”  Within weeks, all of the cars had been cleared away without us having to do anything at all.

No white elephants here

 One of my jobs was to repair a privately-owned, run-down terrace in the middle of a housing estate.  On this terrace was a bath which had become unused and the council was planning to pull it down and put a car park there. The residents, however, didn’t want it pulled down and hoped that it could be turned into a community centre. I duly did a report to take to committee but the idea was refused, primarily by the City Treasurer who said: “No, we can’t afford that; it will be a white elephant”. I made two attempts to modify the report to get it to committee and I knew the councillors were in favour of it, but each time, it was refused by the Treasurer.  Finally, I changed the recommendation to make it seem like I was in favour of pulling it down to make a car park; but actually, I didn’t change the text of the actual report. When it did come to committee the councillors said, “This is very odd – all the way through you are arguing about how it could be a community centre but your recommendations say pull it down!” So they overturned the recommendation, and it has now been a very successful community centre for the past 15 years!

Mr Bigglesworth returns

I was working on renovating some houses which had been built before the war and were in desperate need of repair.  One of tasks we had to do was to glue together some external cavity walls because otherwise we would have had to have taken down the external layer of the wall.  It involved using a rather gluey material that was pumped into the cavity. We did one house where there was an elderly cat sleeping on the window board.  Unbeknown to us, as we were pumping this stuff into the wall cavity, some was dripping down onto the cat!  Consequently the cat had to be cut off the window board, taken to the vet and, much to the owner’s alarm, he was returned completely shaved and resembling something from another planet!

Taking a stand

On one estate, there was a single mother with a couple of misbehaving children who were giving other residents a hard time. Apparently, they were acting up because they felt they had sanction from their parent and the rest of the community. We decided to hold a meeting to discuss this issue, at which I said that no amount of policing will cure this: it was actually the responsibility of the community to decide what was right and wrong.  One woman stood up and, looking around at her neighbours, said, “We are not going to stand for this!”  The residents themselves made a firm decision that night to not accept the behaviour – since then, the children have stopped misbehaving.

Are you being served?

 As I came into work on the first Friday after taking the job of director of housing at a local authority, I noticed there was a bloke sitting in a chair outside my office.  When I asked him who he was and what he was doing, he said: “I’m a bailiff from the county court and I’m now serving you with a notice - if you don’t carry out a certain repair at a particular address within 28 days, you’ll be imprisoned!” The following Friday, another two came in with more notices.  When I asked where all this was coming from, I found out that, apparently, my Area Manager was making consensual agreements in court.  In doing that, she had a) accepted there was disrepair: b) agreed to pay compensation of £6,000 to £7,000 a case; and c) agreed that the director (me) would be clapped in irons if the work wasn’t completed within the stated timeframe! I wasted no time in replacing my name with the name of the Area Manager on the affidavits and, on doing that, she stopped doing consensual agreements in the courts. 

Not a penny more

I was out one evening, many years ago, on a rent arrears recovery mission with a housing assistant.  We were walking around this estate and passed an address where the account was in arrears by 1p.  The tenant just happened to be standing on his doorstep, so we decided to call and tactfully offer the gentleman the opportunity to clear his account. Unfortunately he took great exception to this, thought we were extremely out of order and sent us packing. Later that week in the local paper there was a full page picture of him holding a penny and making the most derogatory comments about the local authority wasting time chasing around after a penny. Opinion back in the housing office was divided: some thought it sent a message that we were far too strict; but the others hoped that it would encourage residents with overactive imaginations to wildly exaggerate our response if a reasonable sum became owing, thereby encouraging prompt payment!

Strange, very strange

A repairs and maintenance surveyor goes into a derelict property. Opening up the protective doors, he walks into the property and is surprised to see that all the floorboards in the front room have been lifted up, and that someone has dug deep down into the foundations creating a 4ft pit. He notices a foul smell and follows it into the kitchen where he makes a horrible discovery – the smell was coming from 2 bins which were full of dog parts.

Wheeling and dealing

A council in south <placew:ston><cityw:ston>London employed a number of temporary surveyors to undertake an audit of their properties. Their first task was on a street of houses which were all owned by the council except for two in the middle.  One of the surveyors thought this was very odd as they looked exactly the same as all the other houses on this particular street: they had the same door knockers and the same council paint. They had obviously been lived in and when he investigated further, he found out that they had been vacated within the last month - coinciding perfectly with the start of the audit! Those properties had been off the asset register for over 3 years but someone had been renting them out!

The phantom

One of our tenants kept complaining to us that at 8pm every night there was a really loud noise, possibly made by a water "hammer", going off in her high rise block of flats.  We sent the emergency crews to the block but they could find nothing that would explain the noise. The next night, when the loud noise was reported again, the crews responded straight away - once again, however, the noise stopped by the time the crew got there. The next night, knowing that the tenant always called around 8pm, we decided to be proactive and situated ourselves at the block in readiness for her phone call. At 8pm, sure enough, the whole block suddenly shook.  “Crickey, what is that?!” we all thought, before investigating.  We finally located the culprit – a seventh floor tenant who decided to take his BSA Phantom motorbike up in the lift and start it up in the middle of his living room. Needless to say we enforced our tenancy conditions on the deviant tenant!

Pond life

 Inspectors of a council house in Scotland noticed that there was a degree of erosion in a resident’s backyard, so they asked the tenant if they could have a look around and see what the problem was. They went round the back and saw there was a garden pond.  The surveyor asked, “What is that hosepipe running into your garden pond?”  The tenant replied, “We have always had it running, ever since my son built the pond 20 years ago - it has always leaked so we keep the hose running all the time!”

No a-void-ing it

 A customer of ours had a void which was absolutely full of smelly, rotting rubbish.  Our team got to work on the property and after 2 days of clearing it out, they found the tenant buried underneath the rubbish, alive and well but who just couldn’t be bothered!

Catastrophe

 A repairs contractor came to replace a tenant’s radiator in her bedroom. While the tenant waited in the living room, the contractor went in to do the job. Having removed the old radiator, and not finding anywhere safe to put it, he placed a dust sheet over the bed and laid it on that. A while later, the tenant came in and asked if the contractor had seen her cat – after much searching the cat was found under the dust sheet on the bed in a little star shape!

Raising the roof

 For many years, I worked on the refurbishment of houses, which often meant removing and replacing roofs. On what I thought was a normal day in the office, I had issued out a works order for a roof to be removed and replaced at a particular address: 25 Trafalgar Road.

Coming up short

I was a very young housing assistant and one of my jobs was covering the rent arrear visits for the housing officer (my father) when he was off work. I visited a young single mother with a couple of kids who was very apologetic about her arrears.  She said: “Mr Jones would be really angry with me for not paying my rent.” After saying it wasn’t a problem, we sat down to work out how she would pay it off. Then one of her young children walked in holding the biggest vibrator I have ever seen in my life and asked: “Mum, what’s this, I just found it in your bedside cupboard?” The tenant turned to me with a look of mortification on her face and said, “I’m so glad Mr Jones isn’t here!” Believe me, her rent account was cleared the following Monday!

Big Ben

I had received some complaints about a tenant with a “whining dog”. On visiting the offending property, and explaining the reason for my visit, the tenant replied, “Oh no, it’s just Ben”.  “Ok,” I said, “but can I just ask what are you doing?” She replied that it was not a guy but an integral part of her act that she does each night. “Come up to the bedroom and meet him,” she offered. I didn’t want to disturb, but she insisted.  On entering her bedroom, I was confronted by a Himalayan brown bear in the bedroom – apparently, every night, she did an exotic act with her partner, Ben, the brown bear. I clearly looked bewildered, so she said: “Would you like to see what he does?”.  I replied, “No, no the mind boggles, but I’m only here on a housing visit and all I need to know is whether you can stop him whining!”

What’s in a name?

Some time ago, the Housing Corporation were proposing to instigate a Social Housing Investment Team – they then decided that perhaps the title was wrong!

Spending a royal penny

 The Queen was due to visit an estate in South London and everything was set for her arrival: the gardens were tidy, the afternoon tea was prepared and there was even a little portaloo at the back of the welcoming area – just in case members of the royal party needed to go. As the welcoming party lined up to await the royal arrival, the Mayoress whispered into the housing manager’s ear that she needed to “spend a penny” and hastily went to the portaloo. Just as the royal car drew up, the Mayoress returned and whispered quietly into the housing manager’s ear, “You may want to know that the flush doesn’t work!”

You’re kidding!

 Some years ago we had a tenant living on the top storey of an eight floor block of flats.  This tenant, rather successfully, kept a goat on the flat roof!

The tin man

 On my regular rounds around the estate, I visited a tenant and, as I opened his door, I noticed that on every surface in his property, there were wall-to-wall washed out tin cans. I said to the tenant in my most authoritative district housing manager’s voice: “so, what do you call this then?” He replied, “tin cans - what do you call them?”

Name dropping

The tenant chair of an ALMO was explaining to a group of tenants how he was enjoying meeting new and famous people in his new role.  He was later overheard to complain that at a recent breakfast meeting with the Prime Minister he “didn’t even get any bloody breakfast”!

Spotted duke

Some years ago, a new GLC housing estate had been built which spread over two London boroughs. The Duke of Gloucester was due to make a private visit to the estate and both authorities’ Mayors were keen to be in attendance. The local housing manager had been asked to arrange for the Duke to be able to visit and chat with one of the local tenants in the high rise flats and, because the visit was supposed to be private, the chosen tenant was only told she would be visited by the two Mayors. In due course, the royal party arrived on the estate and made their way up to the flat. On opening the door the young female tenant was introduced to the Duke and promptly fainted. At which point her mother stepped over her daughter’s body and took the hand of the Duke and regaled him with a story about meeting his father some years before. The party were then invited into the living room only to find the husband painting the ceiling.  “Don’t mind me,” he says, “I have to carry on as I’m off to work in a bit and it needs to be ready for a visit”. Thirty minutes later the Duke, both Mayors, housing officials and other dignitaries all left covered in little white spots!

The customer’s always right

 As a former director of housing in the early to mid-1990s, we were pressing hard to focus on customer service and had started a huge customer service campaign. One day when I was returning to the office after lunch, I had to walk past the enquiry desk. Noticing that there were a lot of people waiting there to be seen and that there were fewer staff than normal because it was lunchtime, I thought I could demonstrate leadership from the front and so I walked around to the staff side of the enquiry desk and invited the next person to come up. The next person came up and started to explain to me about their homelessness problem.  I started to ask a few questions and, after a while, she asked me who I was, so I gave her my name and told her I was the director of housing.  She replied, “Well, it’s no good talking to you, get me somebody down here who knows about homelessness so that I can sort out my issues”. Feeling suitably abashed, I called the homelessness section and asked for someone to come and deal with her problem!

Only fools and horses

 Going back to the 1980s, I was doing a rent arrears visit to the 8^th floor of a block of flats and I was waiting for the lift. As it arrived, the door opened and a young lad walked out of the lift with a horse!  I found out that this horse had been living in a second bedroom in a flat on the seventh floor for quite a long period of time. Luckily, in those days, we were generic housing officers so I was able to pass the task of sorting that one out!

Naughty nanna

A little old lady came in to complain about a man flashing her every night at 6:30pm. We sent a housing officer out to her little terraced house to check. When the officer arrived, she said, “it’s upstairs that you can see it from”, so up the officer went. “Not this floor”, she said, “up another level”. Up they went again into the attic. She got a chair, made the housing officer stand on it and out of the tiny garret window sure enough there was a clear view into the flats in the newly built neighbouring block. The gentleman accused of the ‘crime’ had no idea he was being spied upon!

Sexual healing

 New to the job and on my way to visit a property following a repair call, a colleague told me to be prepared. When I got to the property, the door was answered by a scantily dressed woman. “It is the window in the bedroom that needs looking at,” she said, directing me towards the stairs. Up I went and after inspecting what seemed like a perfectly fine window, I turned round to find her lying provocatively on the bed. “Do you fancy me?” she asked. You have never seen anyone move as fast as I did – straight back to the office to report what had happened to my manager. Once he had stopped laughing I realised the joke. She was the well-known local nympho and that was my initiation!

Peggy

We were covering a neighbour noise nuisance case that had failed to be resolved before arriving in the courts. When the judge asked the defendant what was causing the continuous banging, she promptly lifted up her skirt and bounced up and down on the wooden bench, revealing at once her wooden leg!

Wayne’s world

 The housing officer asked the single mother the names of her children.  “This is Wayne, and this is Wayne and this is Wayne, there is another Wayne over there and another two Wayne’s upstairs,” she said. “Why have you called them all the same name?’ asks the officer. ‘Because when I want all of them I only have to shout out once”. “But, what if you want an individual one?” asks the officer. “Easy”, she replies, “That is when I use their surnames!”

Why not?

 Doing our rent arrears rounds, we came across an address where we knew an elderly brother and sister lived. Upon approaching there was a real stench of strong ammonia, which we were both concerned about.  At the door, we knocked and knocked and, after about 10 minutes, an elderly man appeared, looking a little bit like old Uncle Albert from “Only Fools and Horses” wearing only a pair of very dirty y-fronts.  We explained that we needed to come in to discuss the rent arrears for the property, but we would be happy to wait awhile for him to get fully dressed. “Oh, alright then,” he says, and closes the door. We wait what must have been 25 minutes when he finally reappears, still in the dirty y-fronts, but with a pair of black socks on.   In the end, we just had to get in there because if we waited until he gets fully dressed, it would have taken 8 hours.

Freebies

At housing conference last year, a rather large lady was pushing around her wheelchair, which presumably she should have been sitting in, piled high with all the goodies from the stands. It struck me as strange and I couldn’t help myself but ask where it could all possibly be going. “EBay probably,” was the response!

In touch

Twenty years ago the Prince of Wales was visiting Salford University and was being introduced to a row of students. “And what are you studying young man?” asked the Prince of one of the students. “Housing management,” replied the student. “Housing management?” said the Prince looking a little puzzled, “Is that anything to do with cookery?”

Pigeon droppings

A lady came into the housing office very upset and clutching a carrier bag. “My son came out of our tower block and this fell on his head - I demand compensation!” she said. Inside the carrier bag was a dead pigeon that had fallen from the sky. Naturally the son had been surprised, but had not been injured so the tenant was sent away without hope of compensation. The housing manager then passed a note to the housing officer concerned demanding to know what he was doing about pigeon droppings on his part of the estate!

The case of mistaken identity

 A tenant was sent a letter asking her to ensure that her son stopped causing a nuisance on the estate. The following week the tenant was featured in the local paper holding both the letter and a photograph of the scan of her 12 week old baby with the headline: Notice served on foetus! It turned out that the complainant thought the boy concerned lived at number 23 but he actually lived at number 32.

Learning through experience

 In the early 1990s, we received a complaint from a homeless family that the temporary accommodation they had been provided with was sub-standard. On meeting them to discuss the complaint, I discovered that it was more of the culture shock and lifestyle change that they were complaining about, rather than the quality of the accommodation. They had been independent and had their own home, but when their business had gone into liquidation, they had lost absolutely everything. On talking through the trauma that the family had been through, the father became really interested in public housing and took himself off to university to undertake a degree in the subject. We were able to offer him his work placements and I became his mentor. After some time gaining experience elsewhere he returned to us and is now one of my senior managers and that, for me, is quite a powerful tale of how you can turn someone’s personal trauma and explain to them the importance of housing and the role they can play in changing it.

Making the difference

 One of my constituents was an elderly lady of 75 with a 40-year-old son living alone in a neighbouring ward. The son had the mental ability of a 10 year old which had caused him to be teased and taunted mercilessly by the local kids.  This gave his mother such concern that she found she needed to visit him every day to calm him down, which at her age was becoming increasingly difficult. By the time she came to see me, she was at the end of her tether saying that she had been trying for years, through numerous “agencies” and “offices” to get her son moved closer to her or her closer to him and had not gotten anywhere. It turned out that the lady simply had no idea of the correct procedure to request the move but I am pleased to say that within 3 weeks of her coming to see me her son was living two doors away from her.  She was so delighted that I received a card that simply said, “Thank god for you”. It is that kind of difference that you can make that makes working in housing so worthwhile.

Giving something back

 When I was at university I was involved with a charity that took children from deprived areas on holiday. Part of my job was to go to run-down council estates such as those featured in the film Rita, Sue and Bob too and get permission from the parents to take their children on these holidays. I was shocked by what I saw in some of these homes: missing inner doors; no carpets; hardly any furniture.  The conditions were so bad that I decided there and then that I could do a better job managing that estate. Only 7 years later, I was, in fact, managing that estate just as it was undergoing a massive refurbishment – how fantastic is that?

Looking from the outside in 

About 5 years ago, our office took on a young single mother of 3 who had left school at 16. As soon she started to work for us, she was unable to afford her rent and consequently became homeless. Being homeless, the council organised bed and breakfast for her and her young family.  We tried to pay her as much as we reasonably could but there is a limit when the person has no qualifications or experience. After 2 or 3 years staying in this kind of accommodation, her local authority finally helped her get a house.  It was really interesting for the rest of the office to see the process from the users’ perspective. She was quite badly treated – we saw her receiving an offer that arrived after the closing date and then seeing her go to the back of the queue again.  And, of course, it was never the housing office’s fault. She now has a degree and has exercised her right to buy so she has been a great success story.

Changing the focus

 I took over a 90-bed direct access hostel for single homeless men in central London. On arriving I found the service staff under extreme stress due to uncovering an overdose death on average every ten days. Room checks had become a distressing chore that nobody wanted to do. Immediately we changed the culture by challenging the service users by telling the residents that it was fine it they wanted to use drugs and inject themselves, but they were not, under any circumstances, going to overdose as it was not fair on the staff or themselves. Within a year we hadn’t had a death for 6 months.

Helping residents help themselves

 We set up a PFI scheme to provide extra care homes and we moved many, many people out of residential care into this new scheme, which was all about promoting independence. It was absolutely fantastic to see the difference that it made to the individuals concerned because these people who had been not looking after themselves at all now had been given the opportunities to help themselves and it really worked.

The reason why

 A long time ago when I was just 16 and still at school, my father, who knew the director of housing for a local council, organised for me to do some work experience on an pretty rough estate. The idea was to put me off working in housing. On my first day I was out on a visit with my housing officer and we pulled up outside a house – all the windows were boarded up and I said in my naïve way, “what are we doing here, surely no one lives here?” In fact a family lived there - they had already started to remove the panels off the back of the house to use as firewood.  During the course of the week, I saw many cases that week that were even worse, and it was this week-long experience that inspired me to work in housing - the rest is history.

Innovation in action

In 1998 I went to Omaha in the US with Bob Armstrong, who had been appointed to improve a housing estate which had 38% rent arrears, 400 empty properties, and 80% of his customers had guns. Bob was set a number of objectives with a principle to get the kids to go to school and to get the people to pay their rent. He didn’t bother setting up working parties, or huge procedural reviews, or new computer systems or anything like that. What Bob did was understand the culture of poverty and he realised that the people in the projects basically just sat and watched television all day. He contacted the cable TV companies who were also having difficulties collecting the cable money, and he made a deal whereby the residents couldn’t pay their rent unless they paid their cable TV, and they couldn’t pay their cable TV unless they paid their rent. What happened was that if a resident didn’t pay their rent, the first thing that happened was that they lost their TV signal and a notice came up that read “When you pay your rent, the signal will be restored”. Rent arrears disappeared to less than 0.3%. He also gave everybody a $10 discount, took a dollar off the top and created the only people’s foundation in America that is owned by the poor.  This foundation has so far sent 57 black kids from those projects to university in America just by using a bit of joined up thinking and common sense – top man!

 I used to run a scheme that helped to re-house elderly people out of London to coastal areas around the UK. A couple had registered to move to a bungalow in Cornwall because their daughter had recently moved there. The scheme took a while to be agreed and built (5-6years) but the day finally came when we took the retired husband and wife to see the potential new 2-bedroom bungalow we hoped they would be entitled to. The husband did not seem as keen as the wife. We did the assessment and sent them a letter telling them they could go. I am told that when the letter came through the letter box; the husband picked it up, read it, walked up to the balcony on the second floor and jumped off.

 We were clearing some tower blocks of about fifteen floors each and there were some residents who had been moved out of the slums and into these new tower blocks in the 1960s. Some of these people were now in their 80s and 90s and there was one particular frightened elderly man who jumped off his balcony and killed himself rather than been moved. It just goes to show how emotional it is for some people who are forced to move.