Restoration tragedy

Dawn and Brian Ollerhead moved into their three-bedroom terraced house in Leek Road, Stoke-on-Trent, after their wedding in 1974. It was at the heart of a close-knit community. “You’d get a loaf of bread from across the road and think nothing of leaving your door open,” Dawn Ollerhead says.

But over the years the area changed: as the city’s pottery industry declined, factories near the Ollerheads’ Victorian street closed down and were demolished, leaving plots of derelict land and mass unemployment. The established community dwindled. Local shops closed down and were replaced by furniture shops serving out-of-town customers and, when Staffordshire University expanded in the early 1990s, many of the Ollerheads’ neighbours started to move out and rent their homes to the transient student population. By 1999, 15% of properties in Hanley South were vacant.

It’s easy to see why: the area is blighted by pollution from two major roads, while houses desperately need repair and are subsiding because they’re built on waste and coal mines from the days of the pottery industry.

But Hanley South is not being left to wither. It is part of the North Staffordshire housing market renewal area, one of nine pathfinders announced by deputy prime minister John Prescott as part of February 2003’s Communities Plan. Over the next 15 to 20 years, Renew North Staffordshire will pump £2.3bn from the ODPM and the private sector into regenerating the area.

For locals, though, the most immediate evidence of the pathfinder’s work will be the demolition of 14,000 homes, 200 of which are in Hanley South. While residents’ reactions are mixed, the human cost of clearance programmes in Stoke and other pathfinders cannot be ignored. Because the North Staffordshire pathfinder is further advanced than most, as soon as the few remaining people leave Hanley South’s condemned streets, it will be one of the country’s first areas to hear the bulldozers.

It will be a distressing sound for the Ollerheads. In the past 12 months, with the advent of the pathfinder’s first compulsory purchase orders, Leek Road’s post office has closed down and most of their neighbours have moved out. They know the area is in decline and their home isn’t what it was – it suffers from damp and subsidence and has no central heating, and they haven’t been able to afford repairs since Brian Ollerhead was made redundant five years ago. Arthritis forced his wife to leave her job in a health centre in 2001 and neither expects to work again.

Nevertheless, they have strong reasons for staying. Most worrying for the couple, both in their late 50s, is the thought of leaving a close extended family who all live in Hanley.

They have a lot of family responsibilities: they act as go-betweens for their son and the mother of their granddaughter, and Dawn Ollerhead’s brother-in-law has just been diagnosed with lung cancer, so they want to be nearby to help out. But to qualify for the £25,000 relocation grant the council offers on top of the compulsory purchase order value of their house, they must move to a “sustainable” area – one that’s unlikely to be demolished in future, or a home built since 1970. None of the houses nearby qualify.

Without the relocation grant, the Ollerheads stand no chance of getting a decent home. They paid off their mortgage in 1989 and are desperate not to have to start paying off a new one when they will soon be drawing pensions. The council has offered them £40,000 for their house, plus £4000 home loss grant. The going rate for local houses in good condition is at least £70,000, so even with the means-tested relocation grant, it will be tight.

We were devastated when we were told we had to move. We had just finished renovating our own place  

David Nicholls

The alternative is to use their savings to rent social housing – a thought they dread. “We wanted eventually to leave this house to our only son, who’s a single parent. But if we took up the council on their offer of going into rented accommodation, we would have to live on the proceeds of this house and we’d lose everything. And why, when we have worked hard all our lives?” Dawn Ollerhead asks.

The pressure of finding somewhere suitable is hard to bear. “When the money we get from this house is gone, we’ll have to go cap in hand for benefits. Where’s the dignity in that?” she says. Wiping away tears, she adds: “It’s giving us sleepless nights. It just seems so unfair.”

The Ollerheads don’t have a deadline for leaving and are holding out for somewhere nearby. But they are frustrated by confused information about where else they could go. Kevin Cox, Stoke council’s access to services officer, is employed to make sure residents know about the benefits they’re entitled to, suggest sustainable areas they could move to and scour adverts for housing that meets their needs. He is sympathetic but stresses that moving to an area that could be marked for future clearance is not an option. “I can understand their plight. But we’ve got to try to find a solution that’s going to last for them. They’re at an age where they don’t want to keep moving.” But Cox has had little success finding somewhere for the Ollerheads to move to in their price range and says it’s impossible to present them with a list of suitable areas because the council has not yet drawn up a full list.

Months of worry

The Nicholls family has already moved. Until March this year, David Nicholls, his wife Liz and their three children lived in a two-bedroom house near the Ollerheads. Now, sitting in the large front room of a newly built three-bedroom house, it looks like they’ve landed on their feet. But the family only found this place after months of worrying because of inflexible rules about where they could move to, says Nicholls. When they first heard about the demolition, the Nicholls had just finished extensive refurbishments including re-roofing, adding secondary glazing and a loft conversion. It was a massive shock. “We were devastated. The house had just been rebuilt,” he says.

They had hoped to get a good price for the house, but the council bought it for just £45,000 – not much increase on the £30,800 purchase price they paid more than 15 years ago. And to qualify for the relocation grant at that time, they had to move to a property that was less than 10 years old and within Stoke’s boundaries. It took months of frantic searching to find anything at all, Nicholls says. “I was looking for a brand-new property under £70,000, and you can only really get a garage for that. I was very scared. Every morning for two months I was ringing estate agents from work, but it was virtually impossible to find a new place for that price.”

Finally, after his wife got a job, they found a new house for £95,000. Now the stress of that period is over, things have worked out for the best, he admits, and the value of the house has already risen to £130,000.

But Nicholls still blames the council for setting unreasonable criteria for the grant and also for not providing more guidance.

If we go into rented accommodation, we'll lose everything. And why, when we've worked hard all our lives? 

Dawn Ollerhead

Not everyone living on the condemned streets is unhappy about the changes: a few doors down from the Ollerheads, 23-year-old Zahaid Hussein is biding his time. Having bought his three-bedroom house – which he shares with his brother, his brother’s wife and three children – one and a half years ago, he is less attached to the street. He bought the house when his brother fell into arrears in London. “It’s not pleasant to live in. Despite damp coursing, it still feels cold and I wanted a place with a garden at the front and back.”

Since he moved from London, the house’s value has shot up: “I bought this for £26,000 and it’s now valued at £45,950,” he says. “I was amazed.” Now he is looking to buy something better. He has already paid off £13,000 of his mortgage, so with home-loss grant plus relocation grant, he’ll have £42,000. He plans to use this for a mortgage on a property worth £120,000 nearer the takeaway business he has a stake in, in Newcastle-under-Lyme.

Home alone

Those living in or moving to social housing have a different set of concerns, but they are still struggling to find suitable new homes. On the next street, Cathy Bourasseau had been a tenant of Touchstone Housing Association for 12 years when her house was sold to Stoke council in preparation for clearance. She and her two children are the only people left on her road.

“Because no one’s around, I feel threatened. At night when you hear a door banging or shouting in the street, you wonder if they’re after you,” she says. Uncomfortable though she is, Bourasseau has not yet moved because she says the alternatives are even worse. “Everything offered is in rough areas,” she says. “One dilapidated house had an unsafe garden gate and no privacy. I don’t want my kids to be an easy target. If I’ve got to take a chance, I’d rather do that where I am.”

On the council’s advice she’s also applied to local housing associations, but has found they are oversubscribed. Cox says while associations may have limited stock, lots of council properties are available through Stoke’s choice-based lettings system. Tenants can bid for these, or refuse homes offered to them that they don’t like, as many times as they want without being penalised. “I’m always looking at places,” he adds. “If I see one that fits Cathy’s criteria I can put a bid in for it. She won’t lose anything by that.”

But Bourasseau also struggles to understand why people are being asked to move before any replacement housing has been built for them to move into. At Renew North Staffordshire, interim director Ken Ivatt says there are plans to do just this. “We will be sequencing demolition and new build so when we have to demolish houses, we can move people,” he says. But it may be too late for the Bourasseaus – the details won’t be clarified until summer 2005.

In the meantime, Ivatt emphasises that there is no deadline by which people must move. “We don’t want to force people out of their homes. We want them to go when they’re happy.”

But this won’t prevent areas becoming targets for vandalism and crime as more homes fall empty, and it doesn’t clear up the confusion of families left behind. The Ollerheads and Bourasseaus still face months of uncertainty over their fate. As Dawn Ollerhead says: “OK, they’ve got to knock a house down for progress or whatever, but find us somewhere decent within the area we know and love. I don’t think that’s too much to ask.”