We are warehousing poverty for profit on the edges of cities

Kasey lived there with her three-year-old daughter for eight months, complained about drugs and fights and says she saw crack being cooked in one of the flats.

A survivor of domestic violence placed there found herself living in fear in a building surrounded by domestic violence.

The reporter was offered a stab vest on his first shift working as a security guard and was told to “wear them, just for now, till you build up a rapport with people”.

But at the end of the programme Nick poses the question of who would be providing the accommodation if Caridon was not there.

“So they’re your saviour?” asks reporter Callum Tulley.

“Yes, not a very palatable one, not a very nice one, but, yes, there was no one else around,” Nick says.

“They’re not doing this out of the kindness of their hearts. They saw a gap and they took it. Caridon is doing their job, they’re making a shelter for people. The council is leasing it out and saying we’ve got available places to put people if we need to.

“Everyone is doing their job but no one is looking at the big picture. Every little part of the system is optimised, except the entering experience isn’t. The entering experience is shit and it traps people here.”

A statement from Caridon in response to the programme argues that all its properties are “built and managed to the highest standards” and that “we break the mould in social housing and the stigma given to social tenants”.

Harlow was of course (like Peterborough) a post-war new town built to solve London’s housing shortage that now finds itself at the centre of a new housing crisis.

The council says it plans to remove all its residents within two years but it takes time to deliver alternative temporary accommodation.

Wider investigation by Shelter shows that almost 90 per cent of the £1.1bn spent by councils on temporary accommodation went to private landlords and letting agents – and that Caridon is by no means the biggest recipient.

But Nick’s grim summary of how the housing system functions in 2020 also made me think of something else.

Buildings like Templefields House are regularly referred to in media coverage as “human warehouses” but it only occurred to me last night where I had heard that before.

“Harlow was of course a post-war new town built to solve London’s housing shortage that now finds itself at the centre of a new housing crisis”

In 2009, a thinktank report was published that had a big influence on the housing policy of David Cameron’s Conservatives.

Principles for Social Housing Reform argued for an agenda including a move to near-market rents for all but the most vulnerable, a right for tenants to part-buy their home, an end to security of tenure, and open market sales of vacant properties.

This was justified by the argument that: “There is real concern that the current social housing system is failing the very people it was designed to help. Social housing was meant to help lift people out of the slums. Instead many social housing estates have become the very ghettos of multiple social deprivation that they were supposed to replace.”

Council estates had, said the report, become “barracks for the poor” and “the current social housing is warehousing poverty in the core of our great cities”.

A decade on, with investment cut and switched from social to ‘affordable’ and with temporary accommodation budgets stretched to the limit, the housing system is indeed warehousing poverty.

Except that it is happening in office blocks, business parks and industrial estates on the peripheries of our cities and run for private profit.

Jules Birch, award-winning blogger