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Clarion apologises to residents after ITV investigation exposes squalid conditions in London estate
Clarion, the UK’s largest landlord, has apologised to residents living in an estate in south London which was found by an ITV News investigation to be infested with vermin and plagued by damp issues.
Vicky Bonner, director of housing at Clarion, said the service to residents living in the Eastfields Estate in Mitcham, south London, “had not been to the standard that the association would have liked” and that the housing association is “really sorry” to residents living there.
The apology came in a video on the Clarion’s website following investigations from ITV News and My London looking into the terrible conditions that residents of the 500-home estate have had to live in.
Images from the ITV News piece and the My London story reveal an estate infested with rats and mice, while other images show widespread disrepair, including holes in the walls and ceilings, damp issues across the block and ongoing leaks.
In one case, Janet Amedline, who has lived in the block for 27 years, revealed that she had been living with a hole in her wall since she moved in. Other images show her ceiling covered in black mould and a rotting bathroom, which led to Ms Amedline being forced forced to wash with a bucket of water.
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She also said that she could hear the sound of rats moving around in her walls at night, which has given her sleepless nights.
In another case, Juliet Arthur along with her husband and their three children have been living for eight months without any lights on the top floor of their house, which includes the family bathroom and children’s bedroom.
Ms Arthur, who pays £1,300 a month for her home, said the lights cut out after a leak in her living room caused the ceiling to collapse when her son was doing homework. When asked whether she worried about the safety of her children, she said “every day”. The hole in the ceiling also has not been fixed, despite it being eight months after it occurred.
Both Ms Amedline and Ms Arthur said they had made repeated calls and complaints to Clarion to fix the issues in their flats but these had still not been rectified.
Responding to the evidence, Ms Bonner said that Eastfields Estate has been earmarked for regeneration but the progress in moving forward with the plan has been slower than on other nearby estates.
She said: “The reality is Eastfields Estate is coming to the end of its life and the kind of issues we’ve got can only best be tackled by demolition and wholesale regeneration.
“When you are faced with regeneration, there is always a balance to be had in terms of how much short-term and long-term investment you make. It is clear to use that on this estate we haven’t got the balance right and that means some residents have had to put up with some repairs taking longer to complete and sometimes we haven’t done as much as we should have done in their homes.
“I’d like to say on behalf of Clarion, I am really, really sorry about that and I think the service they have been provided with hasn’t been to the standard that we would like.”
Clarion said it has now put in place an action plan to address some of these issues, which includes writing to residents to apologise and the local team would be knocking on every residents door to find out what the issues are.
The association added that it would be opening an estate office on the site where residents could visit and discuss housing issues, as well as setting up a dedicated email address where repairs could be reported.
The story of Eastfields Estate is the latest investigation by ITV News looking into the squalid conditions of residents living in social housing. In March, it exposed the appalling conditions that social housing tenants of a Croydon Council-owned block were living in. The issues included mould and heavy leaks.
The expose led to housing secretary Robert Jenrick to say he was appalled by what he had seen and demanded urgent answers from the council.
The investigation resulted in the English regulator stepping in and saw Croydon Council become only the second ever registered provider to be found in breach of the Tenant Involvement and Empowerment Standard.
In its report, the Regulator of Social Housing said that some of the homes the local authority managed were “uninhabitable and unsafe” and that some tenants were at “risk of serious harm” as a result of the conditions.
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