What a week. What would have been a normally busy week, suddenly morphed into an abnormally busy week with the development of the London riots, which spread across to Manchester and Salford on Tuesday night. As planned we kept well linked in to Trafford Council's Emergency Planning Team and convened an emergency meeting to discuss and publish our response to the riots. The accepted "wisdom" that social housing tenants are all rioters-in-waiting is, of course, facile nonsense, but we do know that some Trafford residents (not necessarily our tenants) were involved, even though the rioting was all outside our Borough.
Consequently, we had to have a clear view of what approach we were going to take. The decision was actually relatively straight-forward. We have stringent anti-social behaviour policies in place and it’s clear that this week's rioting is about as anti-social as it gets. So any of our tenants who were rioting should have realised they potentially ran the risk of losing their home. Quite a price to pay for some free trainers.
It’s a rather throwaway phrase “losing your home”, which somehow makes it seem like an act of carelessness, but like all housing providers, we see eviction as the absolute last resort. After all, it simply creates a different sort of housing problem that then needs solving. As I watched news of the riots breaking across Twitter one thing that struck me is that there have been two groups faced with losing their homes this week: the vandals and the victims. It’s been tragic to watch the news footage of the innocent victims coming to terms with losing their businesses and their homes.
It was Jacque Allen, who is now the Executive Director at Dales Housing who I first heard refer to the housing sector as the fourth emergency service. When we see real-life dramas like the riots played out on TV, the truth of this statement doesn’t always become apparent. Largely, it’s the frontline services that we see who deal with the immediate impact of an emergency. However, it's when the fires have been put out, the ambulances have taken the injured to hospital and the police have re-established control of the streets that the lost homes quickly become a major concern.
I’ve referenced Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs before, but a cursory look is all that's needed to see that shelter is one of the fundamental human needs and every bit as essential as air, food, sleep and drink. Remove any of those fundamentals and things start to become perilous very quickly. So, who do you reach out to when suddenly the house that you took for granted for so many years is suddenly taken away from you?
For the last six years THT have run the Homelessness and Temporary Accommodation services for Trafford Metropolitan Borough Council and our staff have been the ones responsible for hearing people’s tragic stories and healing the situations. Given the occasionally turbulent past of the North West, we have been fortunate that in those six years there have been no major incidents that have really put the excellent training of the service to the test. At times like these when riots spread through the country, these sort of services stand on high alert.
In many ways it’s a real shame that this team's work is done in the darkness and not seen by the television cameras or wider society. They should probably have a similar sort of uniform or identifying factor to mark them out as heroes, just like the other emergency services. You can probably tell, but I’m endlessly proud of their work and extremely pleased to know that the values that are embedded in everything THT does, are also at work in that team too. I would like to say a public and personal thank-you for their work and achievements both in preventing and addressing homelessness, and in giving personal, practical and emotional support to homeless people and their families as they become resettled.
The work of this team will shortly be transferred to Salford Council from September 2nd and I wish them all the best, especially as it seems likely that the handover will happen at such a fraught and turbulent time. I hope that they never have to prove their training at Salford either.
It seems wrong to strike such a depressing note and not at least introduce a silver lining. If you are on Twitter then have a look at the #riotcleanup hashtag, because it goes some way to restoring your faith in human (and British) nature. The @riotcleanup account has co-ordinated the clean-up efforts of ordinary members of the public who want to scrub away the dirty work of the rioters. The riotcleanup account jumped to 87k followers in a matter of hours and its numbers are growing by the second. It seems that for every rioter there are 20 more people who have been moved to help support the work of the housing sector and help the victims put their lives back together. There are even efforts afoot to raise money for individualsdamaged by the riots.
As communities begin the work of repairing their homes and businesses, it’s essential that we keep these more positive facts in mind, as well as the many incredible things done by the younger generation, so that we don’t write-off an entire generation as simply vandals in hoods.
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| Greater Manchester Police's Most Wanted from their Flickr profile |
Consequently, we had to have a clear view of what approach we were going to take. The decision was actually relatively straight-forward. We have stringent anti-social behaviour policies in place and it’s clear that this week's rioting is about as anti-social as it gets. So any of our tenants who were rioting should have realised they potentially ran the risk of losing their home. Quite a price to pay for some free trainers.
It’s a rather throwaway phrase “losing your home”, which somehow makes it seem like an act of carelessness, but like all housing providers, we see eviction as the absolute last resort. After all, it simply creates a different sort of housing problem that then needs solving. As I watched news of the riots breaking across Twitter one thing that struck me is that there have been two groups faced with losing their homes this week: the vandals and the victims. It’s been tragic to watch the news footage of the innocent victims coming to terms with losing their businesses and their homes.
It was Jacque Allen, who is now the Executive Director at Dales Housing who I first heard refer to the housing sector as the fourth emergency service. When we see real-life dramas like the riots played out on TV, the truth of this statement doesn’t always become apparent. Largely, it’s the frontline services that we see who deal with the immediate impact of an emergency. However, it's when the fires have been put out, the ambulances have taken the injured to hospital and the police have re-established control of the streets that the lost homes quickly become a major concern.
I’ve referenced Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs before, but a cursory look is all that's needed to see that shelter is one of the fundamental human needs and every bit as essential as air, food, sleep and drink. Remove any of those fundamentals and things start to become perilous very quickly. So, who do you reach out to when suddenly the house that you took for granted for so many years is suddenly taken away from you?
For the last six years THT have run the Homelessness and Temporary Accommodation services for Trafford Metropolitan Borough Council and our staff have been the ones responsible for hearing people’s tragic stories and healing the situations. Given the occasionally turbulent past of the North West, we have been fortunate that in those six years there have been no major incidents that have really put the excellent training of the service to the test. At times like these when riots spread through the country, these sort of services stand on high alert.
In many ways it’s a real shame that this team's work is done in the darkness and not seen by the television cameras or wider society. They should probably have a similar sort of uniform or identifying factor to mark them out as heroes, just like the other emergency services. You can probably tell, but I’m endlessly proud of their work and extremely pleased to know that the values that are embedded in everything THT does, are also at work in that team too. I would like to say a public and personal thank-you for their work and achievements both in preventing and addressing homelessness, and in giving personal, practical and emotional support to homeless people and their families as they become resettled.
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| Source |
It seems wrong to strike such a depressing note and not at least introduce a silver lining. If you are on Twitter then have a look at the #riotcleanup hashtag, because it goes some way to restoring your faith in human (and British) nature. The @riotcleanup account has co-ordinated the clean-up efforts of ordinary members of the public who want to scrub away the dirty work of the rioters. The riotcleanup account jumped to 87k followers in a matter of hours and its numbers are growing by the second. It seems that for every rioter there are 20 more people who have been moved to help support the work of the housing sector and help the victims put their lives back together. There are even efforts afoot to raise money for individualsdamaged by the riots.
As communities begin the work of repairing their homes and businesses, it’s essential that we keep these more positive facts in mind, as well as the many incredible things done by the younger generation, so that we don’t write-off an entire generation as simply vandals in hoods.
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