This year, we celebrated our 10th birthday with over 300 of our members! This is an incredible achievement for a member-run organisation of homeless families and individuals and others struggling with housing problems. But this year has been the hardest we have ever faced in terms of the housing crisis.
The housing emergency has reached terrifying levels we couldn’t imagine and we’re seeing problems that we’ve never encountered before which are further fuelling the homelessness crisis. The new problems we are seeing have included:
- Hotels are not housing! It is becoming standard practice for families to be given hotels as emergency accommodation with councils regularly breaking the 6 week limit. But even the 6 week limit is too generous. No one should be housed without basic cooking facilities.
- We’re regularly seeing families in self-contained temporary accommodation get eviction notices from the private landlord who wants the property back. This means families who are already homeless face homelessness yet again!
- The legal aid crisis means we can’t find legal aid housing lawyers to take on new cases – including urgent eviction cases. We’re spending lots of our time at the moment just contacting legal aid lawyers to try to find a lawyer with capacity.
- There’s been a huge increase in homeless families being forced out of London, far away from their lives and communities. Whilst this has been a political choice for some councils like Waltham Forest over the last decade, now more councils are sending families to places we’ve never heard of.
- In response to soaring homelessness, local councils are returning to aggressive gatekeeping tactics and making harsher decisions against vulnerable homeless people.
- Many of our members are also stuck on hospital waiting lists unable to get the medical care that they need whilst at the same time being denied the disability benefits to meet their basic needs.
Despite all of this, our members have been tirelessly supporting each other, campaigning and fighting together for the high-quality council homes we all need and deserve!
This year, our group meetings regularly had well over 100 people attending, with many of our members facing urgent housing problems. For the first half of the year our extremely dedicated organising team put lots of our energies into learning to facilitate such large meetings and by the second half of the year our large meetings were running pretty smoothly. It was vital that we put so much energy into learning to adapt and facilitate these huge meetings as our group meetings are the heart of HASL where we provide collective support and plan housing action together.
As well as running our huge group meetings twice a month we also helped to run 2 other monthly housing support meetings with our friends English for Action and Parents and Communities Together. We organised a protest of over 50 HASL members outside the Royal Courts of Justice showing our solidarity for an important homeless case taken by a single mother who was forced out of London. At short notice, we quickly mobilised to respond to Lambeth council’s housing waiting list consultation to fight for better rights for homeless households and families in overcrowded housing. We led a successful campaign to demand that a housing association stop their racist eviction of one of our members. We have worked with other grassroots groups and organisations sharing information on housing rights and our experiences of organising. We have helped our members to understand and enforce their housing and homeless rights which has stopped evictions and helped members facing unlawful gatekeeping to get temporary accommodation. With our support 23 HASL members and their families have been able to move from temporary accommodation and other poor housing conditions into permanent social housing.
Every day across south London (and sometimes beyond!) we are supporting people to understand and enforce their housing rights, we let people know that they are not alone, and we campaign for the high-quality council homes we all need and deserve.
A big thank you to all our HASL members and supporters for your continued support. Our group is run by our members and the group would not function without everyone’s participation. Thank you to everyone who has helped in any way – participating in our group meetings, helping with translation/interpretation, telling friends about the group, liking our social media posts, joining protests, cooking us delicious food, and so much more! We’ve also loved working together with our friends Public Interest Law Centre, English for Action, Z2K (for their excellent and expert disability benefits advice), Parents and Communities Together (PACT), Lambeth Mutual Aid, and many other groups and new friends we’ve made over the year.
We hope everyone can have a good rest over the winter holidays and we’re looking forward to returning with even more energy, strength and solidarity in the new year!
Here are some of our 2023 highlights.
Protesting for homeless rights and council housing
Back in July, a homeless single mother – who had been forced to take a property over 100 miles away – was taking her case against Waltham Forest council to the Court of Appeal with the help of Hackney Community Law Centre. On the morning of this important court case over 50 HASL members gathered outside the court to show their support for the family and for homeless rights for everyone. We held banners and placards with our slogans: “A Home Close to School”, “No More Long Journeys to School”, “Waltham Forest – Stop Forcing Homeless Families Out of London”! It was an incredible show of support for homeless rights. We spoke with journalists from the Guardian, the BBC, and local Waltham Forest press. You can see some press coverage here and here.
Disappointingly the decision by the Court of Appeal said it is OK for homeless single mums and their kids to be torn from their communities and sent over 100 miles away. But whatever the law says – we know that the very least every child should have is a Home Close to School! No one should be forced out of their community. We will keep on campaigning and fighting for the high quality council homes our communities need and deserve!
July was a busy month for protesting – HASL had also been on the streets the week before with Aylesbury estate tenants and other local residents for a march from Elephant and Castle down the Walworth Road to the Aylesbury Estate – standing strong against numerous downpours of rain! This protest was part of Housing Rebellion’s National Day of Action. Our message to Southwark council was: Our council housing is precious and there is huge need for more council homes – there is no excuse for demolishing the Aylesbury!
Some nice photos here and here videos here and here Press coverage of the protest featuring a HASL member here
Over 100 responses to Lambeth council’s housing waiting list consultation
At short notice, HASL organised a huge response to Lambeth council’s out of the blue housing waiting list consultation. As well as being out of the blue, the time frame given by the council was just over 1 month. After a legal challenge by PILC, this deadline has now been extended to 19th January 2024. Despite these challenges, we were able to engage with our members and prepare a collective response with families in temporary accommodation and severely overcrowded housing. Over 100 Lambeth residents used our template answers to call on the council to make the housing waiting list rules fairer, especially for those at the worst end of the housing crisis. Please do keep on using and sharing our template answers.
HASL also wrote up a detailed response to the housing waiting list consultation based on our years of experience of the current policy and all the problems we have faced. You can read this detailed response on our website here.
For a decade, HASL members in temporary accommodation have been campaigning against being trapped ‘Too Long in Temporary’. The fact that Lambeth council have now launched a consultation with one of the key proposals focussed on helping families in temporary accommodation to finally access social housing, is definitely a victory we can claim!
HASL’s 10th Birthday
We celebrated our 10th birthday in April with our biggest ever social event attended by over 300 HASL members! Thanks to the amazing organising skills of our members we had delicious healthy food for everyone, lots of birthday cake, kids activities, face painting, film making, henna, and of course our temporary accommodation pinata! It was a really special event celebrating with old and new HASL members. There are some photos here.
Our birthday celebration was followed by our next big social event in August – our summer picnic which was attended by 200 people and which also reached record breaking numbers: 90 slices of pizza, 10kg of injera, 100+ empanadas, 7 cakes (with one weighing 5kg!), 6 hours of non-stop face painting, 42 cupcakes for decorating, and 1 housing waiting list account fixed!
We stopped a racist eviction and won permanent social housing!
At the start of the year our member was facing a racist eviction by Optivo/Southern housing. After our campaign and legal action, our member finally moved into a beautiful permanent social home in his local community this summer! You can read more in our blog post here. Thank you to everyone who supported our campaign which saw almost 300 email letters sent to Optivo’s/Southern CEO!
Some of our members’ victories
All throughout the year we have been supporting members to learn and enforce their housing and homeless rights and providing each other with vital emotional and moral support. We have buddied our members at their homeless assessments, helped them to find good lawyers to challenge terrible homeless decisions, helped our members to challenge unsuitable temporary accommodation, and helped them get their correct position on the housing waiting list. We have attended court 2 times with our members facing eviction to provide them with moral support through the stressful eviction process – and we also gave practical support to 4 other people going to court facing eviction. In 4 of the cases, the eviction was stopped and the two other cases are still continuing. We have also been helping members complete the defence forms within the strict 14 day deadline for Sectoin 21 evictions (when a lawyer cannot be found quick enough). One of these has already resulted in the landlord withdrawing the possession claim!
With our support 23 HASL members and families have been able to move from temporary accommodation and other poor housing conditions into permanent social housing. We’re so happy for our members who have been able to move into secure social housing but we know the hardship and difficulties they suffered before they were finally able to get their new homes. In HASL, we know how life-changing it is to have a permanent home in our local community and each victory inspires us to keep on fighting for the high-quality, safe, secure, family-sized council housing we all need and deserve.
Fighting for ‘A Home Close to School’ has been a long running HASL campaign making sure that homeless families are given temporary accommodation in their local area. Patricia and her family were housed by Lambeth council in temporary accommodation outside of London in Basildon. The long commute meant that Patricia lost her job in Lambeth and her children faced hours each day travelling to school whilst one of her son’s was trying to study for his GCSEs. With the help of a housing lawyer and by speaking out to the press about her case, including international media, Lambeth council suddenly found the family temporary accommodation back in Lambeth. This was a huge relief for the family, especially for her son whose GCSE exams where about to start.
A new member came to our group when her homeless duty had been ended for failing to accept a private rented property in Stoke on Trent. With just one day before the Appeal deadline, we helped her to get housing lawyers to take her Appeal. After the Appeal was lodged in the court, the council withdrew their decision and her and her toddler have been re-housed in suitable temporary accommodation here in London.
A very old member of the group – who was involved in our successful Lambeth legal challenge and campaign when Lambeth unlawfully removed hundreds of families off the housing waiting list – finally moved into a 4 bed council home back in Lambeth this winter. This would never have happened if he and other HASL families had not taken legal action and launched a campaign against Lambeth council when they were wrongly kicked off the housing waiting list.
A HASL member who had spent over a decade in temporary accommodation recently moved into a 3 bed social housing home came to the group to share her news and told us:
“It’s a beautiful home. I waited 11 years in temporary accommodation being evicted 6 times. I never imagined I would get such a beautiful home in this country. I didn’t have anyone to support me apart from this group. I don’t have any family here. The group was my family. When it was Christmas, I had to go to court and they came to court with me and supported me when I had no one else.”
Fighting for our rights to disability benefits: HASL 5 – DWP 0
Homelessness and other terrible housing conditions and long NHS waiting lists, along with other factors means that many of our members are experiencing long-term ill health and struggling with disabilities. We’ve been supporting our members to access the disability benefits that they need but are regularly refused by the DWP.
With the help of the amazing Z2K disability benefits experts, 5 of our members have been successful at the Disability Tribunal and won the disability benefits they need. The DWP make claiming disability benefits unnecessarily cruel and difficult and it has often taken over 1 year before our members received the benefits they should have been entitled to all along.
The fight for disability benefits can also be an important step in getting the main homeless duty and long-term temporary accommodation. Single people face the cruel prioirty need test which lets councils say people are helthy enough to live on the streets. Once a member obtains disability benefits, it makes it harder for the council to refuse a person homeless assistance. One of our members has got a full homeless duty this year after we helped her to get the disability element of Universal Credit.
Outreach and workshops
Throughout the year, we have been busy meeting up and making links with other community groups and social justice organisations and campaigners so that we can learn from each other and find ways to work together.
Back in March, Public Interest Law Centre helped to co-ordinate a meeting at Sylvia’s Corner of grassroots homeless groups including us, Focus E15, Streets Kitchen, and Museum of Homelessness to reflect on our current struggles and look at the issues we face in the future. Together, we had decades of experience of grassroots housing organising to share with each other!
We ran a workshop reflecting on our 10 years of organising mutual support and collective action on homelessness and housing at the incredible Fight4Aylesbury council home exhibition in May. We were invited to speak on a panel about homelessness at the Junior HLPA event for people interested in becoming legal aid lawyers alongside the brilliant Project 17. We were really excited to visit our friends Magpie Project out in East London where we met their Reach campaign team and shared our experiences of campaigning together and tried to answer their really thoughtful questions. We visited east London again to go to the UCL East campus where we spoke with students on a great panel which included our friends Public Interest Law Centre and London Tenants Federation where we discussed organising on housing in London and the strengths and limitations we face. All of the events had really engaged audiences and interesting questions which is a really promising sign for the London housing movement.
In October, along with our friends Lambeth Mutual Aid we helped to organise the London premiere of A Bedroom for Everyone – a short animation film looking at the UK’s housing movement which features HASL!
It was great to join the first London Radical Bookfair since 2019. HASL had a very colourful stall with HASL stickers, badges, fridge magnets, posters, and pamphlets. We had lots of good engagement from people speaking about the housing crisis and about our group.
Some of our other activities
In January, we joined the inspiring nurses picket outside King’s College hospital. The NHS is very close to HASL’s heart. Members of our group who are living in temporary accommodation, overcrowded and other poor housing also work in the NHS as cleaners, nurses and healthcare assistants. Many of our members are also patients, some are struggling to access the high-quality care they need and are stuck on long waiting lists. We need high quality council housing and high quality health care for everyone!
We started 2023 strongly, running two training sessions with our members covering homeless rights and how to effectively run our support groups. Later in the year, we ran another homeless rights training in Spanish. And we had our fourth training learning housing rights through looking at case studies together. We’ve also started running monthly work sessions where we can work on tasks together to build our skills and learn new ones.
We have been building a campaign with our sister group Haringey Housing Action Group against private sector discharge which is where homeless families have their homeless duty ended with private sector housing. When this happens, families lose their homeless rights (such as the ability to request a suitability review) and usually their chance to bid for social housing on the housing waiting list. And then after a short period of time, they face eviction and end up back at the housing office. HASL and HHAG have had meetings discussing our direct experiences and also tactics of how to fight it and are currently working on Freedom of Information request research to help build our campaign.
One of our members also organised HASL’s first ever seaside trip for our HASL organisers and family members with over 50 of us heading to the coast by coach for a wonderful day trip.
Our long read article about our successful campaign with families in some of Southwark’s most overcrowded housing was published in Justice Gap.
Housing Action Southwark & Lambeth 