For those who don’t rent, they may think the only costs are rent and perhaps a damage deposit. However, a whole grey area of fees and charges has emerged. These mask the real costs of renting, and also mean that it is harder for tenants to get somewhere to live as there are high front-loaded fees.
“Renting is getting more expensive in the UK. The landlord lobby points to ‘below-inflation’ average rises in rent, but these are deceptive. Average rises mask big variations in the real rents being charged, nor is ‘rent’ the only cost that tenants must pay. So, let’s talk about the other costs of renting.”
Read the full article here.
As I’ve said before, food banks and food poverty among great affluence are one of the defining features of this recession. In Norwich, a couple of people, Karen and Dale, come in every Tuesday and Saturday from Dereham to give out hot meals they’ve prepared. I put together a short report for BBC Norfolk on their work. The programme is no longer available on Iplayer, but I wrote this short piece a few weeks earlier on a different night:
A cold wind was blowing through the town centre. It was already dark, and a coat and jumper weren’t enough to feel warm.
The rush had come and gone. In 5 minutes flat, forty hot meals had been given out by the Peoples’ Picnic – a small group of people who decided to take action on hunger in Norfolk.
Founders Karen and Dale come to Norwich from Dereham every other Tuesday and Saturday night. Starting with sandwiches, they moved onto to giving out hot meals prepared at home and transported by a friend.
From a stall in the old Haymarket Karen, Dale, and a couple of local volunteers dish out casserole, pairs of warm socks, and advice. The idea, explains Dale, is for for “communities to come together to help out those in need”.
There was a youngish man who had just been released from prison. He’d had little help in finding somewhere to move to, and had been crashing with a friend who had some spare rooms. Unfortunately, the friend’s house was full for the next few nights so he would have to spend a few nights outside.
An elderly man came over to talk to me. He was polite, and had a wry sense of humour. I explained that I was a writer and he told me, “You could ask for my autograph, but it would be too expensive.”
A lot of the talk was about a story in the local paper. There had been an inquest into the suicide of a man. Karen and Dale recognised him from the photo – he had been here a few times. Talk moved on to another man, a regular, who had also killed himself.
Karen explained that they see people who are in work. Sanctions, and benefit cuts are the biggest reasons they are seeing people, “The food poverty we have in this country is shocking.”
The Peoples’ Picnic has already see a big increase in elderly people coming to see them over the winter since they started doing hot meals.
As Karen and Dale closed up the stall after nearly an hour of informal counselling, the people moved on to a nearby Salvation Army soup kitchen. Karen added, “It’s about knowing people, because they are actually our friends. That’s how we think of them.”
Find out more about the Peoples’ Picnic.
In 1999 is was declared that child poverty in the UK could be eliminated by 2020. A binding legal target was set to reduce and ultimately end child poverty. However, now more children in UK rely on food aid than ever before. What happened?
Read the full article here.
Back in the good old days, renters had security of tenure (i.e. they couldn’t be kicked out without a good reason). Unfortunately, this meant landlords often turned to intimidation and violence to get higher-paying tenants to move in. Peter Rachman was the most famous example of this, and had this practice named after him – ‘Rachmanism’.
So now that landlords can evict tenants without a reason, you would think none of them would bother to do it illegally. Wrong. I contacted councils in London to see what they were doing to tackle illegal eviction, and associated complaints of landlord harassment of tenants.
“Councils in London are failing to enforce the law in private rented housing. According to Freedom of Information requests sent to all London boroughs, Councils in London have dealt with over 9000 cases of illegal eviction, harassment, and mortgage arrears in the past five years. However, many councils take completely different approaches to the problems. Some do not have staff to deal with the issues.” Take a look at the full investigation on The Rent Book.
Building on my report on Food banks, I wrote up a gendered analysis for Open Democracy.
“The reasons why up to 500,000 people in the UK need emergency food aid are inherently gendered. Low pay, the rise in food prices, and punitive welfare reforms work in tandem with regressive Tory gender policies to push women and the poor to the brink.” Read the full article here.
This was an article which took a lot of twists and turns to reach the light of day. Suffice to say, if all councils were doing this type of work then illegal evictions would be less common in the UK.
“Councils have been empowered to prosecute landlords and their ‘agents’ for harassment and illegal eviction of tenants since 1977. The Protection from Eviction Act was originally passed to counter the types of ‘landlordism’ associated with the infamous Peter Rachman. Illegal eviction is where “any person unlawfully deprives the residential occupier of any premises of his occupation of the premises or any part thereof, or attempts to do so”.” Read the full article here.
After their dramatic occupation of a two-person housing association flat being rented out for £1700, I interviewed some of the campaigners from Southwark Tenants, who are part of the Let Down Campaign. Read the full article on Open Democracy.
Continuing my tour of rented housing laws. This time I took at look at Brazil, which is notorious for its Favelas (shanty-towns), but a rising power in the world.
“Last time I looked at how renting works in Germany. This time I thought I’d turn my attention to the Global South, and examine the system in Brazil. According to UN Habitat, in 2010 73% of Brazilians are owner-occupiers, and 18% are tenants (7.8% are ‘shared households’).” Read the full post here.
Samir Jeraj - Freelance Journalist 