Too close for comfort

Thirty-year-old Elizabeth Clackson stands at the kitchen window of her sixth-floor council flat in London, her baby daughter clasped to her chest, and gazes down at a maisonette being refurbished across the quad.

“It’s been empty since November and would be perfect for us. I’ve written to the council about it several times but have heard nothing. If I think about it too much, I’ll probably end up in a mental ward – it’s driving me crazy living like this.”

“This” refers to the fact that Clackson and her five children are crammed into a two-bedroom flat in Westminster. They live in much the same way as the 387,000 other families described as living in overcrowded homes in the 2001 English census – piles of washing in the kitchen, a sofa bed and the baby’s cot in the living room plus bunk beds for the four older children in two bedrooms.

Yet Clackson is part of a hidden problem, one the government has only recently acknowledged. The standard that determines whether a family is overcrowded was laid down in 1935, and not only is Clackson below the threshold, another adult could live with them and they would still not breach it (see “What needs to change”, overleaf).

Clackson’s case has been taken up by Karen Buck, MP for Regent’s Park and Kensington North. She blames the government for the fact that only 25,000 of the overcrowded families measured in the 2001 census are breaching the statutory standard. Buck says: “For a family to be living in this chronic condition of overcrowding, yet still not breaching the law, shows the law to be a joke. We cannot expect the Victorian standards of a century ago to still govern the rules by which people are housed today. We have changed our expectations of decent housing, yet shrug our shoulders at people sleeping in kitchens and living rooms.”

Buck forms part of what has become known as the “gang of four”. They are a group of MPs who have campaigned for the government to recognise that overcrowding – a problem that was supposed to have been left behind with such social ills as rickets and malnutrition – is on the rise again.

According to the Association of London Government, overcrowding – according to the census, families living with more than one person per room – has grown by half since 1991. Severe overcrowding – families with more than one-and-a-half people per room – affects one in every 50 of the capital’s households. Black and minority ethnic households are the worst hit. The 2000/1 Survey of English Housing says Bangladeshis and other minority groups are seven times more likely to live in cramped conditions than their white neighbours. There is also worrying evidence of links with illnesses such as asthma and even tuberculosis.

As a result, Andy Love, MP for Edmonton in north London, launched a private member’s bill in January last year demanding a change to the 1935 standard to end what he called “Dickensian living conditions”.

Although it was backed by a campaign by charity Shelter, the bill did not progress. But it did cause the ODPM select committee to demand that the government commit to altering the 1935 standard as part of the housing bill passing through parliament. The government declined, saying: “To raise the overcrowding standards in isolation from other factors would be essentially symbolic and would lead to an increase in demand for housing, to the detriment of other people whose living conditions may be worse and would make it more difficult for local authorities to juggle their priorities”.

In other words, the government is worried that changing the standard would put its housing policy under unbearable pressure – it is already struggling with the target to get all homeless families out of temporary accommodation by the end of next month.

Housing providers are torn between concern for their tenants and the reality of dwindling stock and the concentration of investment in key-worker flats.

“We need a more modern standard, but a change in the definition will only highlight the extent of the problem,” says Bernadette O’Shea, head of housing at Hounslow council in west London. “We’ve got to be able to match that with new development. There are very few large family units. There’s pressure to develop one and two-bedroom homes, but these people turn into families.”

Buck – backed by MPs Love, Oona King and Sally Keeble – does not buy these objections. “There are many thousands of households whose housing needs are worse than families in temporary accommodation – we have to look at these on an equal footing,” says Buck. “The government has to update the 1935 legislation. After that, it must use this power to start issuing detailed guidance – saying kitchens and living rooms are not suitable sleeping accommodation would be a start.

For a family to be living in this chronic condition, yet still not breaching the law, shows the law to be a joke. We cannot expect Victorian standards to still govern today 

Karen Buck MP

“We are dealing with a dramatic fall in the number of social homes built. However, a priority has been missed. Proper priority has to be placed on overcrowding on the waiting lists and to ensure more family-sized homes are built through the Housing Corporation.

“I am not criticising councils for what they do – they have other priorities such as housing homeless families in temporary accommodation, and asylum seekers.”

But there is some hope. Housing minister Keith Hill has pledged to investigate the potential for raising the standard “incrementally, over a period” and the ODPM is conducting research into overcrowding that is scheduled to be completed by today.

ODPM sources say overcrowding has shot up the agenda and a lot of mandarins are wracking their brains for solutions. Hill is due to present his proposals at the report stage of the housing bill – set to start next week.

While the debate rages, Elizabeth Clackson, sitting at a table wedged into a corner of her living room, tells a story of a typical night. She sleeps in the living room with baby Millie. Her four older children sleep in the two bedrooms. Three-year-old Benjamin suffers from asthma and spends most nights coughing. He shares a room with his brother William, 11. Both boys wake up, and so do Christopher, 6, and Catherine,5, in the room next door. They shout at Benjamin to shut up and he starts to cry. It takes half an hour to get everyone calmed down and back to bed. Then it begins all over again.

Clackson picks up a bulging folder. It contains sheaves of paper charting her three-year struggle to get a bigger home. She has applied for a transfer – ideally to the maisonette she can see from her window – but because Westminster has to prioritise families in temporary homes and asylum seekers, her claim is shunted to the back of the queue. “I’ve always known I would have a long time to wait. But I have jumped up and down the waiting list every week – it seems like a randomly generated number. I’m at 149 this week. The week before that I was 50.”

A spokeswoman for Westminster council says: “I have no doubt people are in accommodation that is overcrowded, but Westminster has a real shortage of three-bed homes. We are doing our best to tackle this by increasing the number of three-bed homes we require from developers.

“Next year, we are looking to increase the number of tenant transfers to free up underoccupied homes. However, relatively few people in overcrowded accommodation breach the overcrowding standard so not very many are prioritised on our waiting list.”

Clackson says her family’s living conditions have affected every aspect of their lives. It prevents her five-year-old daughter from having “a touch of femininity and pink in her room” and forces Clackson to padlock one of the bedrooms so William can study without being interrupted by the younger children.

“It’s just a hurdle when it comes to doing any specific task,” she says. “It always involves some sort of rearrangement of the set-up in the house. The table has to come out; he can’t use the computer as there’s never a good time to use it. It is definitely affecting my children’s education.”

She recognises that some would say she could have controlled how many children she had but says that, until two years ago, she was living happily with her partner and raising their family. She didn’t plan for this to happen and is now typical of the majority of social housing tenants – a single mother raising a young family.

“I can keep myself going as long as I keep campaigning,” says Clackson. “If I got the property across the way that would be the last the council would ever hear from me. I’d be so made up it would be unbelievable.