Category Archives: Communities

‘A source of national shame’: shelters in England turn young people away as number of rough sleepers soar

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Charities across the country highlight the rising demand for emergency accommodation as costs spiral to care for those most in need

Holly Udobang is packing the last bag: a sleeping mat, gloves, woolly hat, waterproof poncho, hand warmers. It’s the sort of kit that teenagers might need for a Duke of Edinburgh trip.

But this bag is for young homeless people, to give them a fighting chance of getting some sleep on the streets of London. Holly and her colleagues at the New Horizon Youth Centre are packing them to give to the young people they now have to turn away every day, as an increasing number of emergency shelters shut their doors.

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Rogue landlords in England to face curbs on housing benefit income, says Labour

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Deputy PM Angela Rayner announces plans as she presents £350m funding increase for affordable housing

Rogue landlords in England will face curbs on how much housing benefit they can receive if their properties are substandard, Angela Rayner has said as she announced an extra £350m for affordable housing.

The deputy prime minister presented the funding increase, adding to £500m already announced at the budget, as part of the government’s drive to build 1.5m homes.

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‘This is sacred land’: an off-grid Wales community battles to keep their home

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Legal action has begun to remove the tenants after the 80-acre site was sold to be turned into a healing retreat

Lunch around the huge sycamore and oak table in the farmhouse kitchen of the off-grid Brithdir Mawr community in the Preseli mountains of west Wales is a warm, gentle affair.

Members of the housing co-operative share soup made from leeks and potatoes grown in the gardens, served with crumbly goat’s cheese from its own herd, all washed down with mugs of mountain spring water.

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Spooky kettles and a girl in white: Adele’s ‘scary’ mansion not all that’s haunting Sussex village

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Owners claim singer ‘blighted’ sale of property she once rented but Partridge Green has no shortage of ghostly tales

At first it was the strange rumblings that would wake her. Then bright lights would fill the bedroom as a face appeared, looking down on her. Her husband, who worked nights, never believed her until one day, he saw it too.

Shaken by the sightings, the couple sold the cottage and moved far away from Partridge Green, a quaint, isolated village in West Sussex. Thirty years later, a short distance away from where these night-time hauntings took place, the village welcomed a surprising new arrival.

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‘A vicious circle’: how the roof blew off Spain’s housing crisis

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Rents spiral and neighbourhoods lose charm as cities report tourist flat boom and surge in housing speculation

Ciutat Vella, the old city of Barcelona, was once quirky and mysterious.

Now it has become a parody of itself, a place from which the local population has been exiled in the interests of tourism and maturing investments. Doorways have sprouted combination key safes, a telltale sign of an apartment given over to tourist lets. A 100-year-old apothecary and shirtmaker that stood on La Rambla for two centuries have been replaced by shops selling flamenco dolls and ceramic bulls.

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‘Hotel of mum and dad’ in UK at its fullest in two decades, study finds

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Almost a fifth of adults aged 24-34 are living with parents, particularly in areas of high-cost housing

The “hotel of mum and dad” is the busiest it has been for two decades as an increasing number of young adults in the UK choose – or are forced by low wages and rising rents – to live with their parents, research has found.

The prohibitive cost of renting, let alone buying, a home explains why more twenty- and thirtysomethings are “co-residing” with family at an age when their parents would have been living independently, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) said.

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UK ministers warned housing crisis puts plans for NHS and economy at risk

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Damning report reveals millions in England are living in poor-quality housing that threatens their health

Ministers have been warned that efforts to save the NHS and grow the economy will fail unless they tackle the housing crisis, as a damning report reveals millions of people are living in substandard homes that risk worsening their health.

In total, 4.5 million people aged 50 or above with an existing health condition in England are living in poor-quality housing with one or more problems such as rising damp, rot or decay that may be making them even sicker, the Centre for Ageing Better analysis found. Of those, 1.7 million are aged 70 or over.

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‘We live on Pot Noodles’: rickets hits homeless families with no kitchen

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Families placed in hotels in England are being forced to live on snack foods, putting young people’s health at risk

Homeless children placed in hotels are developing rickets and other diet-related health problems because their parents lack anywhere to cook.

The Magpie Project, which works with homeless mothers in the east London borough of Newham, where more households are living in temporary accommodation than anywhere in the country, said families living in hotels were eating an unhealthy diet of takeaways and snack foods because they had no cooking facilities or anywhere to store fresh produce.

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Yvette Cooper to set out crackdown on antisocial behaviour including jail terms

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Persistent offenders will face up to two years in prison under Respect orders, as police get powers to seize vehicles

People who persistently demonstrate antisocial behaviour will face up to two years in jail under Labour’s Respect orders, the home secretary will say on Friday.

Yvette Cooper will also announce that police will be given new powers to immediately seize off-road bikes, e-scooters on pavements and street-racing cars as part of the clampdown.

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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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