ao link
Twitter
Facebook
Linked In
Twitter
Facebook
Linked In

You are viewing 1 of your 1 free articles

Housing officers suffered more than 200 physical attacks last year

UK housing workers suffered more than 200 physical attacks in the past year, research has revealed.

Linked InTwitterFacebookeCard

Freedom of Information Act requests sent to every council and 180 housing associations found there were 239 recorded physical assaults against staff in 2016/17.

The numbers almost certainly don’t tell the full extent of the problem, despite the fact that almost 300 councils and 27 housing associations responded.

 


READ MORE

Feeling the strain: assaults on frontline staffFeeling the strain: assaults on frontline staff

The enquiries also showed that a housing worker is verbally assaulted every 35 working minutes. More than 3,000 such incidents occurred in 2016/17.

Two-thirds of almost 300 frontline housing workers surveyed separately by Inside Housing said they were verbally assaulted in 2016/17.

Several people said they suffered on a daily basis, with examples including racial abuse, being spat at, having furniture thrown at them, receiving death threats and being told they would be responsible for someone’s suicide.

One in six frontline housing workers who responded to the anonymous survey said they had suffered lasting health impacts as a result of being assaulted by a tenant. Of these, 91% said the effects were mental health-related, with symptoms including anxiety, insomnia, depression and even post-traumatic stress disorder.

One respondent, a housing manager in the East Midlands, said being kept hostage and physically assaulted by a tenant led to a breakdown – and that mental health issues had left him approximately £40,000 in debt.

John Gray, London housing association branch secretary at trade union Unison, said: “It’s not surprising that when housing officers have years and years of continued low-level abuse, that is going to have an effect on their mental health.”

A third of respondents to the survey said they felt less safe doing their job than a year earlier, with just 1% saying they felt safer. The majority saw no change.

About half of respondents said their employers were doing enough to protect them against further incidents but a fifth said they were not, and another 20% said they were only sometimes doing enough.

Paul Sultana, head of health and safety at WM Housing, said disregarding a minor verbal assault could be a “green light” for tenants to abuse other staff, possibly with more serious consequences

Linked InTwitterFacebookeCard
Add New Comment
You must be logged in to comment.