Category Archives: Communities

UK charity declares ‘refugee homelessness emergency’ as numbers hit record high

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Naccom report says gaps in state support have led to more than 1,940 refugees having no accommodation

Homelessness among refugees has doubled in the last year to reach record levels as charities hand out tents and sleeping bags to those forced to live on the streets for the first time, according to research.

The No Accommodation Network (Naccom), an umbrella organisation for 140 frontline organisations working with asylum seekers, refugees and other migrants across the UK, has collated the data and shared it with the Guardian.

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Woman who fell to her death from Hackney council flat ‘was trying to fix drainpipe’

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Coroner’s report finds Sarah McGreevy died after climbing on box on sixth floor balcony to unblock pipe repaired with tape

A woman who accidentally fell to her death from the sixth floor balcony of a Hackney council block was trying to fix a blocked drainpipe that had been repaired using “heavy duty tape”, a coroner has found.

Sarah McGreevy, 37, died on 16 June after climbing on to a wooden box on the balcony to manually unblock the pipe, a common practice among residents of the fifth and sixth floors of the building after heavy rainfall, according to the coroner’s report.

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Housing, social care and universities: who lost out in the UK budget?

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Rachel Reeves made funding the NHS a priority but people working in other areas said they were disappointed

Rachel Reeves’s first budget emphasised raising taxes to help the NHS, as the health service tries to cope with huge waiting lists and an ageing population. Funding the NHS was a top priority but people in other sectors – from universities to social care – feel the budget was a missed opportunity to tackle impending crises or introduce desperately needed reforms in their areas.

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Chancellor pledges extra £500m for social homes in budget

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Treasury plans £5bn total investment in housing supply and a reduction in discounts under the right-to-buy scheme

The Treasury has announced an extra £500m for social homes in the budget, in what appears to be a compromise with the housing department, led by Angela Rayner, over the scale of ambition required in the sector.

The promise of an additional £500m for the government’s affordable homes programme (AHP) is intended to add up to 5,000 extra social homes. The Treasury said it will bring total investment in housing supply to £5bn.

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Nearly half of prisoners at HMP Brixton tell watchdog it is easy to obtain drugs

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Report finds prison is failing to prepare inmates for release and hundreds of prisoners have substance abuse problems

HMP Brixton, the most overcrowded prison in the country for moderate-risk inmates, is failing to prepare prisoners for release, with nearly half saying it is easy to buy drugs, a watchdog has found.

Inspectors found that many of the 740 men held there had turned to drugs because they had nothing constructive to do. Two-thirds of the men were sharing cells designed for one person.

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‘Quite shocking’ lack of government contact during UK riots, says MCB head

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Zara Mohammed calls for review of Downing Street’s non-engagement policy with Muslim Council of Britain

The head of the Muslim Council of Britain has called for an explanation and a review of the government’s policy of non-engagement with the body after her appeals for contact during the summer riots were ignored.

Zara Mohammed, who was elected more than three years ago as the MCB’s youngest and first female secretary general, said there had been a “quite shocking” lack of contact with the new government at a time when mobs were targeting Muslims and mosques.

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Fewer than one in five UK voters are ‘hard nimbys’, finds survey

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Pro-building Labour group hopes study will spur on major planning reform and government drive to build 1.5m homes

Fewer than one in five voters are “hard nimbys” who are opposed to local housebuilding under almost any circumstances, according to polling by YouGov that will give a boost to the government in its aim of building 1.5m homes this parliament.

An MRP model based on a 12,000-person survey shows between 15% and 20% of British voters would almost never support housing developments near them, with the rest willing to do so if certain conditions are met.

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The final Grenfell inquiry report and what it means for families – Politics Weekly UK

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The 2017 Grenfell Tower fire in London was the result of ‘decades of failure’ by central government, the public inquiry into the catastrophe has found. The Guardian’s John Harris looks at the findings of the report with the social affairs leader writer Susanna Rustin. And, as Labour continues to warn ‘things will get worse before they get better’, we are joined by the economists James Meadway and Ann Pettifor to discuss whether a painful period of austerity-lite is the only way through the storm

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Councils in England draining reserves to stay afloat, leaders say

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Survey of 24 city authorities finds two in five plan to sell off assets and reduce services

Local authority leaders say they are having to drain their financial reserves to keep services afloat and avoid effective bankruptcy.

A survey of the mid-tier group of English city councils, which includes Southampton, Hull, Sunderland and Norwich, found that many that had previously avoided financial difficulties during periods of austerity were close to running out of funds.

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Top Tories fuelled riots with ‘divisive language’ on immigration, say party grandees

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Veteran Conservatives on the party’s liberal wing have criticised the rightwards shift by some senior figures

• Tim Kirkhope: The Conservative party has shifted too far to the right. We must fight for the centre ground

Tory grandees have accused senior figures in their own party of using divisive language that inflamed anger over immigration before the recent rioting, amid warnings that too many Conservatives have “turned a blind eye” to a shift to the right.

The criticisms come as fears grow on the party’s liberal wing that the leadership election risks pulling the party further into populist polices designed to take on Reform UK.

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Record homeless figures in England prompt calls to tackle ‘national scandal’

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Latest housing data show 151,630 children in temporary accommodation – the most since records began

More than 150,000 children in England are living in temporary accommodation, prompting calls for the government to address what it calls a “national scandal”.

Living in temporary accommodation is considered a form of homelessness and can involve people staying in hostel or bed and breakfast (B&B) accommodation.

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‘We got failed by the police’: how veterans of Leeds riots stepped in to defuse disorder

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A group of Muslim men put themselves in danger to calm unrest in Harehills over children being taken into care

Nadsy Qurban bent his neck to show how the crown of his head was ­covered in a number of burns, each the size of coins. “The smell was like I’m burning some goat or something, like I’m cooking some goat. That’s how bad it was,” he said.

Needless to say, it hurt. But a week on, the burns he gained while putting out fires during unrest in the Harehills area of Leeds are ­starting to heal.

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‘It’s put so many families in poverty’: people on the impact of the two-child benefit cap

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As Labour backbenchers call for Keir Starmer to scrap the cap, families reveal their struggles as a result of the two-child limit

Keir Starmer has launched a cross-government taskforce to tackle child poverty, but backbench Labour MPs are calling for the government to go further and scrap the two-child benefit cap. Here people reveal how the limit affects their families.

Alicia* is a mother of four children in Newcastle, and is separated from their father. She does everything she can to avoid going to collect a parcel from a food bank. She will often buy a big sack of potatoes and cook them in different ways throughout the week – jacket potatoes, fried chips, wedges – so her kids get variation. She often skips breakfast and lunch herself.

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Life at the heart of Japan’s lonely deaths epidemic: ‘I would be lying if I said I wasn’t worried’

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Some 68,000 people are expected to die alone and unnoticed in Japan this year, police say, as the population continues to age

“We occasionally greet each other, but that’s all. If one of my neighbours died, I’m not sure I would notice,” says Noriko Shikama, 76. She lives alone in a flat Tokiwadaira, in Tokyo’s commuter belt and has come to the Iki Iki drop-in centre to catch up with residents over cups of coffee served by volunteers.

Here, amid the everyday discussions about the merits or otherwise of dyeing grey hair, people also share news about the latest lonely death, or kodokushi – officially defined as one in which “a person dies without being cared for by anyone, and whose body is found after a certain period”.

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Rough sleeping in London hits highest level in a decade

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Almost 12,000 rough sleepers were seen by outreach workers in 2023-24, a 19% increase on the previous year

Rough sleeping in the capital has hit the highest level in a decade, with more than 1,100 people living on London’s streets for the first time because of evictions.

The number of new rough sleepers seen for the first time by outreach workers between April 2023 and March 2024, surged 25% to 7,974 people – the highest in at least four years. Almost one in 10 people living on the streets was aged 25 or under – including 13 children.

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Labour sends activists to 13 seats where it fears losing Muslim voters over Gaza

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Concern continues after local elections and George Galloway win that party’s position on Israel-Gaza war still eroding support

Labour is directing activists to campaign in seats with substantial Muslim populations, over fears that some voters have been alienated by the party’s stance on Gaza.

Its campaigning efforts are mostly being concentrated on Conservative and SNP seats in an attempt to secure a potentially record-breaking majority. However, there are 13 Labour-held seats where Muslims make up at least a fifth of the electorate which the party is telling its activists to target.

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‘I just let it rip!’: jumbo amateur rock band bangs the drum for Brum

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Brum Rocks, born out of community musical groups, will bring together dozens of performers to play a new anthem for Birmingham

When Steve Groome started learning to play guitar after retiring, he never expected he would end up in a band.

“At 66, I’m not going to get a phone call from Mark Knopfler or Eric Clapton. I might not even get in an averagely rubbish covers band,” he said. “But I don’t need to with this, we have fun. I just let rip.”

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Labour urged to focus on Midlands in plan for new towns

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Planning experts are considering areas near Nottingham, Stafford and Northampton for housebuilding drive

Labour’s plan for new towns looks likely to focus on the Midlands as much as England’s overcrowded south-east, with planners already considering areas near Nottingham, Stafford and Northampton, the Guardian understands.

Close to the M1 and M6 motorways, some of the locations have the advantage of being in areas of Labour local political control, giving Keir Starmer’s government a better chance of delivering on its promise to have the first homes built by the end of a first Labour term.

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Labour will aim to reveal new town sites within first year in power

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Angela Rayner to promise party will build homes on sites by end of its first term and support private developers

A Labour government would aim to announce the sites for a series of new towns within a year of taking office, with the promise that homes would be built in them by the end of a first term, Angela Rayner is to say in a speech.

Giving more detail to a plan first outlined in Keir Starmer’s party conference speech in October, Rayner will tell a housing conference that Labour will strongly support private developers who create high-quality and affordable housing.

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Braverman plan to criminalise rough sleeping dropped after Tory criticism

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Proposal, condemned by homelessness charities as dehumanising, had provoked threats of revolt among MPs

Ministers will drop plans to criminalise rough sleepers for being deemed a nuisance or having an excessive smell after Conservative MPs threatened a revolt over the proposals.

The plans, originally announced by the then home secretary, Suella Braverman, had been condemned by homeless charities as dehumanising.

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