It has been highlighted recently that the old County Durham mining village of Horden has been inundated with people from London, who had been sent north, by councils in London and told that if they didn’t accept a tenancy in Horden, they would be deemed as making themselves intentionally homeless.
Consequently, often very vulnerable families have been sent up from London to Horden, where they don’t know anybody and have no support networks.
I spoke to Helen Waller from East Durham Trust about the situation. She was able to update me with some news about the homeless charity Shelter beginning to get involved.
Shelter
Helen had spoken to somebody from Shelter a couple of times at meetings she sets up to bring all the community centre managers in the east Durham area together. The person from Shelter is a lobbyist, who wants to change policies.
Helen met with Shelter again recently and it transpired that in the master plan for Horden, Durham County Council is planning to knock down third and fifth streets in the village and build new houses. Shelter is proposing to Durham County Council that they do not do this. Instead, they want the council to retrofit the properties, buy them and then rent them out as social housing. A similar scheme is said to have worked in Newcastle and Helen noted that it would be cheaper for the council and better for everyone.
Work has been done on getting local businesses onside and producing an open letter to Durham County Council for different organisations to sign. Work on the master plan for Horden is quite a long way down the road, but Shelter does want to see more social housing in Horden.
Helen commented:
“Horden needs more social housing, taking things off rogue landlords who do not live in the area and just buy the housing for profit and don’t care
“Saying to people in London, if you don’t take a house in Horden you are homeless is giving them no option at all. They are not helping them to get set up with anything. They’re not helping the people who are coming it just moving them. We have to sort out the problems for the people that come up here.
“One person coming up from London was met at the train station and this person said they would come back the next day. That was six or seven months ago and he never came back. This man is now in Horden and had no gas or electricity for a couple of weeks and has a nine-year old boy with him. It’s inhuman. A social worker involved in the case put complaints in and said they’d never known such a bad situation. The guy is lonely.”
Profit before people
Across the country, the emphasis in terms of housing for decades now has been for people to make a profit, rather than on actually housing people, while social housing stock has been decimated. In Horden it seems that we can see the consequences of policy decisions made at local and national level, decisions which have been concerned with putting profit before people.
