Movie magic

You used to know where you were with tenants. The council was in charge and they got what we deigned to give them.

These days we are more sensitive. We claim that we listen to tenants’ panels, residents’ groups, action campaigners and, no less, the tenants themselves.

But do we? I am in favour of tenant empowerment but I wonder if sometimes only lip service is paid.

A colleague in a neighbouring authority has sent me a DVD, which illustrates how loud some tenants need to shout, if their voice is to be heard.

It isn’t a high-tech, flashy creation and won’t win a Bafta, let alone an Oscar. It was made on a mobile phone camera and cobbled together on a PC. But it is attention grabbing all the same.

Helen’s story

It is the creation of a young woman, I will call her Helen, who has just moved into her first tenancy. She says she is grateful for her new home and, as the DVD shows, keeps it very nicely. It is clean and tastefully furnished. There are pictures on the walls and carpets on the floor.

But there is also the noise. The thumping and banging that comes through her bedroom wall in the early hours. Engagingly and with great assurance, she explains her situation, ‘You see I am a student nurse and I work shifts, and this is techno music… listen you can hear it.’ The phone is moved closer to the wall. ‘Actually, it is quiet tonight, usually it’s much louder. I really need my sleep, especially when I have to get up early and most of the time now, I am not getting any.’

So, what did Helen do about it? Her first move, and a brave one for anyone living alone, was to confront the tenant and his rowdy pals. In her dressing gown, at 2 o’clock one morning, she asked him to turn the music down. ‘He told me to “f-off”,’ she explains. ‘He said he’d been here a year-and-a-half and as I was new I didn’t have any rights.’

Undaunted, Helen made a call to the local housing office the next day. ‘They were very nice and they appeared to be listening, but they didn’t exactly say what they would do, other than making a vague promise to speak to my neighbour.’

Politely, Helen chronicles what happened next. Nothing much it seems, since she continued dealing with noise, and harassment from the rogue tenant as well.

Bad state of affairs

But Helen’s complaint wasn’t only about anti-social behaviour. She wanted to draw the council’s attention to some other issues too, especially the state of the building. Her DVD takes us on a guided tour of the block, and it isn’t pretty.

‘This is the front door and you can see there isn’t any glass where the pane should be, so you can get your hand in and open it from the inside. There’s no security.’

‘Even if the glass was there it wouldn’t help much, because the lock is broken… look you can see the splinters where it has been smashed in.’

Then we move into the stairwell. Helen has to use a torch because the lighting is broken to show us that the walls are only partially cleaned.

‘I spoke to the cleaners and they told me they aren’t allowed to clean above a certain height; I’m not sure why, something to do with saving money on materials.’

One consequence is that gang graffiti about sex and violence is left untouched. ‘I had some above my door, telling me to “F*** off,” but it came off quite easily when I cleaned it,’ she says, matter-of-factly.

Throughout her description of squalor, Helen is calm, composed and articulate. If she is angry, it is masked by her pleading politeness, which quietly demands that notice is taken of her complaints.

She isn’t anti-council. She takes us on a comparison tour of the identical block next door. Here things are ship-shape. There is little graffiti; the doors front and back have locks and the back garden isn’t littered with broken glass.

Perfectly reasonably, she asks why her block isn’t kept in the same condition.

Take responsibility

Housing professionals will have answers for Helen’s questions. We know that one bad tenant can ruin a block; we know maintenance budgets are tight and contractors don’t always come up to scratch. We know how difficult it can be to evict a lousy tenant.

But, to Helen, none of this matters. She feels she is entitled to a quality of life that we are not providing and it is hard to disagree.

Helen spoke to the other tenants. She found that the council had been told many times about the problems and that their complaints had not been acted on. The residents felt the block had been going downhill for years.

Hence, Helen’s video. Sent to a prominent councillor, it had an immediate effect. The stair was cleaned, the locks repaired and the rowdy tenant threatened with an ASBO. He has quietened down. Helen now gets her sleep and clubbing music no longer interrupts her studies.

Without Helen’s persistence though, and her powerful DVD to get the message across, her block might still be crummy. Persistence paid off. But should she have been forced to go to such lengths? Despite our carefully contrived communication strategies, do we always listen?

Inside Housing’s anonymous columnist is a senior housing officer