Thousands on the waiting list—why are these homes still empty?
Newly-built flats boarded up and empty for over a year while many live in substandard and overcrowded conditions.
Shanda Radbourne and her family live in a maisonette in Blackbird Leys and have been waiting to be rehoused for the last four years. The family of five live in a two-bedroom, first floor
property, which has not only suffered from a serious silverfish infestation and damp, but also leaves the family housebound much of the time due to the juvenile arthritis suffered by six year-old Harry.
As Harry can often not get up and down the stairs and Shanda’s bad back means she cannot carry him, if husband Lee, who works shifts, is not at home, the family cannot go out.
Around the corner is Thrift Place. For the past year, newly-built flats there, owned by the Bromford Housing Association, have been boarded up and lying empty.
Although IWCA councillor Stuart Craft has tried
to contact Bromford Housing Association on a number of occasions to find out what is happening with the new flats,
he has met with little success.
At a recent council meeting, however, Housing Portfolio holder and Labour councillor Ed Turner confirmed there were no plans to house anyone in the Thrift Place flats until new accommodation in nearby
Butterwort Place has been finished. The original Butterwort Place maisonettes were demolished in December 2002 and there are as yet no signs of any kind of work taking place on the site.
IWCA activist and housing adviser Maurice Leen said, ‘Over the last seven years New Labour has continued the Tory policy of running down council housing and residents in Blackbird Leys and many other estates
in Oxford are paying the price.
‘The current shortage of local authority housing guarantees that tenants can't be provided with the level of accommodation they are entitled to. Now that the New Labour Government's plans for council housing
stock options and promises of “decent homes”—a low enough standard in any case—are in complete disarray, the future for all social housing looks increasingly bleak.’
Given the gloomy outlook for social housing in Oxford, it is interesting to contrast the situation now with how things were in the 1970s when current New Labour MP Andrew Smith, his wife Val were given a council
house in Cowley.
Andrew Smith, a graduate of Oxford University who was until recently earning £125,000 plus pension and £108,000 expenses as a cabinet minister (and is now on a handsome enough MP’s salary), must at one time
have met the criteria that entitled him to council housing and we can also presume he was happy enough to take it at the time. But now that neither he personally nor his family are in need of social housing,
Smith has for the last seven years proudly represented a government that has accelerated the Conservative’s attack on council housing—thereby helping to deny the right to decent housing to countless
others whose need is arguably far greater than his was back then.
His wife, Val, until recently held the council’s housing portfolio but seems to have done little to improve the housing conditions of current and future tenants who are unfortunately dealt with a lot less
generously than the Smiths were in the 70s.
The Radbourne family has recently become so frustrated with the situation that when a two-bedroom house with a garden became available, they asked if they could be rehoused there. This would mean that Shanda and her children would at
least be able to leave the house when Lee was at work. Although they are currently living in a two-bedroom property, they were told that they could not be moved to the new house as they would be ‘overcrowded’.
Given the many people in Blackbird Leys like the Radbournes who are living in substandard and overcrowded conditions and the thousands of others languishing on the housing waiting list, the situation of
the newly-built but empty flats in Thrift Place is nothing short of a disgrace.
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