Kwajo Tweneboa interview: ‘Poor conditions have been brushed under the carpet for so long’

Worsening conditions

The council wanted to send the family to Luton, despite both teenagers being in exam years. “Our school had to intervene to say, ‘They’re in the middle of their exams, you can’t just send them off,’” Mr Tweneboa recalls.

Then they were finally offered a flat on the Eastfields Estate, opposite the children’s school. It should have been a relief. But when they moved in, the state of the property was appalling. It smelled of damp. A nest of mice was in the kitchen, “so you can hear the mice going between the cupboards”. The kitchen itself was falling off the walls and had wood lice infesting it. The bathroom was full of mould and tiles were falling off the wall. When it rained, the light filled with water.

“I do believe deep down – and that’s why I continue to do what I’m doing – that it contributed to the speed at which his cancer progressed. Because no one should live in those conditions”

The garden fence was broken and the back door would not shut. “Someone did try actually to break in once… they used a crowbar on the front door. However, if they’d gone around to the back, they would have just walked through into the house,” Mr Tweneboa says.

At this point, his father, Kwaku Robert Tweneboa, fell ill with oesophageal cancer. Although the family was trying to report the home’s awful state, their priority shifted to treating the cancer. It progressed rapidly, and his father had a hospital bed in the midst of the disrepair. “He was being fed through his stomach because there was a tumour in his throat. He couldn’t even swallow his saliva. He was vomiting every 10 minutes. He had lost so much weight… he couldn’t even get out of the bed and walk,” Mr Tweneboa says.

While he was going through all this, “there were cockroaches, those mice running around the house. Completely unsanitary. And there was damp, there was mould. Then nurses struggled to even bathe him in the bath upstairs”.

“No one should have been receiving medical or hospital care in those conditions, and I do believe deep down – and that’s why I continue to do what I’m doing – that it contributed to the speed at which his cancer progressed. Because no one should live in those conditions and it cannot help at all – he was constantly in and out of hospitals with infections,” he states.

His father tragically passed away in February 2020. That same month, a leak caused damage to the flat’s ceiling. No one came to repair it until October. At this point, Clarion removed the ceiling. Mr Tweneboa thought it would be fixed the next week, but “the guy showed up with a bit of putty and [said] he thought he was coming to fill a small hole in the ceiling. He didn’t realise it was the whole ceiling that needed to be replaced”.

Later, the operative advised Mr Tweneboa that “you need to double-check that this ceiling wasn’t asbestos because the only reason they tend to remove ceilings, if it’s just a small issue they need to deal with, is because it’s asbestos”. No one mentioned this to the grieving family. Mr Tweneboa says he was initially told by Clarion it was not asbestos.

However, a few phone calls later, Clarion confirmed the deadly substance was present. “The ceiling didn’t go back up until January, February of the following year,” he says.

A Clarion spokesperson says: “In 2020, we undertook an asbestos survey in his home, as is standard practice following damage to a ceiling on this estate. It was fairly common to use a material called Artex to coat ceilings when Eastfields was refurbished. Artex is an asbestos-containing material, but it is low risk and does not need to be removed if intact. Following a leak in the property, the ceiling in one room of the property was repaired in full. Patch repairs are not recommended on this material.

“We also carried out an additional air test at the property. This test confirmed that there had been no release of asbestos and no traces of asbestos were present on surfaces or in the air within the property.

“Clarion has rigorous policies and procedures for checking homes for asbestos and doing so in a controlled and safe environment. These policies were followed in this case.”

“That was like the light-switch moment where I said, ‘I’ve had enough, literally there’s nothing more that I can do with these people’” 

Meanwhile, the siblings were still trying to get the other disrepair issues fixed. Mr Tweneboa phoned about a bathroom repair and he says the person he spoke to was “really rude”. “They said they’re busy and they haven’t got anyone that can come out, and hung the phone up on me,” he recalls.

“That was like the light-switch moment where I said, ‘I’ve had enough, literally there’s nothing more that I can do with these people.’” All these experiences were taking a toll on him, too. “Bearing in mind, I was suffering with depression, extreme anxiety; I was on medication at that time, I was suicidal,” he says.

It was then he decided to post about his situation on social media. “It got shared thousands of times within the first day.” The story was picked up by a news agency.

Clarion’s response to press queries about this situation did not satisfy him. “It was very patronising. I said, at that point, I’m not done with them,” he recalls.

He printed out 500 letters to other residents on the estate, asking if they had similar problems, to send him photos as evidence. He walked out of his door and ran into two people from the estate’s residents’ association, and told them what he was doing. They offered to help. “We went around the whole estate, 450-something properties, and posted a letter through every single door. Within the first 20 minutes to half an hour, I was getting texts, [calls and emails]. It didn’t stop for months.”