Children walk in the snow to find a homeless shelter until their feet pucker. A father dying of cancer is bedbound in a house filled with mould and vermin. A tower block burns with 72 people inside. A family are too afraid to sleep at night for the cockroaches scuttling across the mattress. A man is forced to defecate in a plastic bag and throw it out the window in lieu of functioning plumbing. A baby dies from black mould.
This is not a Dickensian tale but the reality of social housing in Britain today. But rather than being a national shame at the top of the political agenda, it is greeted with a collective shrug. The shame in social housing is in all the wrong places, as housing activist Kwajo Tweneboa shows in his first book — Our Country in Crisis: Britain’s Housing Emergency and How We Rebuild. Equal parts memoir, reconnaissance, reflection and manifesto, it is a clarion call for urgent change in policy and perspective.
Instead of the politicians, the landlords, the housing associations, the councils, the private developers who bear public shaming, it is the social hosing tenants themselves who suffer the stigma. If they complain about the shocking conditions they are given the runaround by a Kafkaesque bureaucracy that seeks to shift the fault.
“If they complain about the shocking conditions they are given the runaround by a Kafkaesque bureaucracy that seeks to shift the fault.”
Tweneboa’s mission is personal. Despite both parents working in the social and health care sectors, they were evicted when Tweneboa was 12. He recalls the crushing shame of declaring homelessness to the council, the misery of walking between hostels in the winter after school. He watched Grenfell burn on the morning news when he was in sixth form, from the mouldering garage they’d been housed in. His father was eventually moved to a rotting, insect-infested property run by Clarion Housing Association, only for Tweneboa to watch him die from cancer and a cyst caused by an infection he is convinced came from the squalid conditions. Tweneboa went to war with the landlords who had ignored him.
As an activist, he has turned this shame around, weaponising it against the cruel housing associations and landlords who have been content to leave society’s most vulnerable in squalor. When he documents the horror on social media, officials are suddenly compelled to act. But his scorn is mostly for the political class.
With short, punchy chapters and plain language, Tweneboa lays bare how badly Britain has fumbled the bag when it comes to social housing. All the post-war enthusiasm for safe and dignified housing for all has been squandered, combined with Thatcher’s Right to Buy and the elevation of the Great British Dream of homeownership. Tweneboa builds a compelling case for a strong foundation of decent homes for the poorest.
Tweneboa’s suggestions go beyond housing, highlighting how healthcare and healthcare are inextricably interlinked. A population that lives in damp homes with sewage leaking down the walls cannot possibly be a healthy one, and children who spend their nights in cold and unhealthy homes can’t possibly focus at school. This alone should be a watertight moral argument, but Tweneboa is generous enough to make the case for capitalism.
The money that would go into improving homes would be repaid in a healthy and productive workforce that would boost the economy and take pressure off the NHS. The book has a curious structure. Although bookended by Tweneboa’s emotional account of his father’s death and a heartbreaking letter to his late parent, there is a lot of data to wade through before four case studies at the centre of the book. As a journalist who covers housing, I am not the intended audience of course. But Tweneboa is understandably protective of his sources, unwilling to expose their suffering until the reader has fully absorbed the scale of the crisis.
Part of this protectiveness seems to come from his brushes with the media. As someone who covers this beat, it stings — especially as the as author quotes liberally from our work.
We try our hardest to shine a light on the families stuck in dangerous temporary accommodation and homes covered in dangerous cladding.
“Every new sitting MP should be given a copy of this book.”
Black mould is a constant threat in Our Country in Crisis, seeping through the pages like a horror movie protagonist. Tweneboa describes the thick layers of the stuff with stomach-turning detail. It is difficult to root out, too often painted over. A metaphor for Britain’s unhealthy obsession with homeownership as a sign of moral good, and endemic racism and prejudice towards social tenants, refugees, the homeless.
Our Country in Crisis comes as the country voted for change. Whether its author will find a more receptive ear in parliament remains to be seen.
Labour has promised to build 1.5 million homes, sure, but there’s not provision for social housing there and every suggestion is that they’ll be coming from private developers. Starmer wants his party to one of homeowners, not tenants. Every new sitting MP should be given a copy of this book, to read before the rot sets in.
Our Country in Crisis: Britain’s Housing Emergency and How We Rebuild by Kwajo Tweneboa (Trapeze, £20) is out now
