As Angela Rayner returns to the housing brief in Andy Burnham’s new government, the reporter who exposed the scandal of Britain’s worst homes says he knows exactly what she needs to do next
Angela Rayner is back in the job. Less than 24 hours after Andy Burnham was confirmed as prime minister, he handed her the keys to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government – the role she was forced out of last September over a stamp duty scandal, and which she returns to after being cleared by HMRC in May.
It’s her second shot at fixing a crisis I’ve spent five years documenting from the inside of Britain’s worst homes. I’ve stood in bedrooms blanketed in mould so thick I mistook it for fire damage. I’ve watched children cough through the night in flats too damp to live in. And I’ve heard, over and over, the same question Rayner will now have to answer: what actually changes this time?
Because here is what the crisis still looks like on the ground, cabinet reshuffle or not.
When I stepped inside Leroy’s flat, I thought there had been a fire. I parted the beaded curtain hanging in the doorway to his bedroom and failed to hide my shock. The walls of his South London home were stained black, with what looked like smoke and ash.
Mould growing in Leroy’s flat pictured in March 2021. Photo: ITV NewsImage supplied via Daniel Hewitt, Investigations Editor and political correspondent for ITV NewsAs I got closer, what I had assumed was soot was a thick blanket of furry mould, not an inch of the room spared. This was mould writ large, as if by design. My chest tightening, my breathing becoming more laboured, I asked Leroy how long his home had been like this.
“Months,” he replied. “I’ve told them, but they don’t do anything.”
It wasn’t just Leroy’s flat. The whole tower block in which he lived was plagued with leaks so severe they risked tenants’ lives. His neighbour, Fransoy, feared for her children’s lives in a home so damp that the walls fizzed with electricity. Light bulbs filled with water, slugs slid down her kitchen walls and sodden carpets squelched underfoot. The baby bath she once used to wash her two sons collected dirty water in her living room. She had begged for help, but none came.
I had arrived at Regina Road in Croydon after being given a tip-off about poor housing conditions. It was March 2021: lockdown laws still lingered, and some landlords were using them as an excuse not to make repairs to properties. That was meant to be my story – one of poor conditions and bad landlords. Instead I walked into some of the worst homes in Britain, stumbling upon a national scandal.
Fast forward five years and the incoming prime minister, Andy Burnham, has promised his government will fix the housing crisis – but here’s what it actually looks like.
It wasn’t a private landlord ignoring the desperate calls of the Regina Road residents, refusing to carry out repairs to save money. The landlord was the British state, the block owned and managed by Croydon Council. This was taxpayer-funded neglect in the sixth-richest country in the world, in a capital city dripping with wealth.
Croydon Council did not deny it. In a statement issued the same day our report aired in 2021, the council said the situation had “deteriorated rapidly” since a contractor had carried out repairs in February, and confirmed it had “moved these residents out while we carry out further investigations and repair their properties.” It added: “We are very sorry that these residents have not had the proper level of care and the standards at these homes are not what we would want or expect for any of our tenants.”
Regina Road was not one story. What we exposed in Croydon led to thousands of other social housing tenants contacting me with their stories. Croydon was a clarion call into the ignored corners of Britain.
Over the next three years, I travelled the country and heard the stories of people like Terri in Bristol, who was forced to listen to her children coughing up their lungs at night in a flat so damp she hammered nails into the wallpaper to stop it peeling off.
Daniel Hewitt has travelled across the country reporting on the housing crisis. Photo: Peter Searle for ITNIn Manchester, raw sewage poured into Angela’s home, but her housing association left her living in it for weeks. The ceiling in Adeola’s bedroom in Brixton collapsed on top of her, inches from her four-year-old daughter’s cot. All made multiple complaints and warnings, but were ignored.
It is the kind of neglect my family lived through in another century. My dad grew up in slum housing in the 1950s – rat-infested, overcrowded, dangerous. It caught fire once, killing the lodger who helped my grandparents pay the rent. They kept living there anyway. There was nowhere else to go.
What saved them from the slums was not the market; they could never have afforded to buy. It was a new three-bedroom council house, built in the post-war boom – a boom Burnham says he wants to revive.
Five years on, the tower block that housed Leroy and Fransoy no longer stands. It was demolished, reduced to rubble behind metal fencing, after residents banded together, formed a campaign group and marched through Croydon, forcing a referendum on the block’s future. They voted overwhelmingly for demolition; London’s mayor put £53m towards clearing the site and rehousing everyone who lived there.
Fransoy and her boys were moved into a hotel within hours of her story going public, and today she’s settled in a two-bedroom maisonette owned by the council. Her sons still love their “nice house,” she says – and she’s talked about wanting to become a journalist herself. Leroy was rehoused too. But what finally moved them wasn’t years of complaints, emails or begging. It was one phone call from us.
An independent inquiry followed and in May 2021 the council accepted its findings in full.
Terrie, in Bristol, was also moved out, after an apology from her housing association’s director who visited her flat in person days after being approached. The company publicly pledged £2m to tackle damp and mould across its properties.
Angela, in Manchester, fared worse. The sewage stopped for a while, then started again months later, this time because a repair job on her plumbing had been badly botched. Her home was never restored to what it had been before any of this began. Neither, she says, was she.
Andy Burnham has brought Angela Rayner back as Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government. Photo: AP Photo/Kirsty WigglesworthUnder the new Decent Homes Standard due to come into effect in 2035 – a minimum, legal set of rules to ensure homes are safe – 45 per cent of social homes would now fail to meet it, rising to 48 per cent in the private rented sector. But tenants have no other choice: for many it is squalor or the streets.
This is what happens when successive governments spend five decades retreating from the basic duty to house their citizens properly – selling off social homes under Right to Buy without replacing them, cutting regulation on social and private landlords, watering down renters’ rights, and simply not building enough homes.
So what does Burnham’s government, with Rayner leading the charge, actually need to do this time? Building homes of “all types” won’t touch the urgency of this emergency – only the most affordable homes can and the most affordable homes are social homes.
That means facing down a stigma around social housing that I’ve seen in my reporting, and treating it not just as a safety net or a last resort, but as the springboard to a better life, it was for families like mine. Social housing was and should again be aspirational.
It also means money: solving problems in future similar to Leroy’s or Fransoy’s needs investment Burnham almost certainly doesn’t have room for under the current fiscal rules and getting anywhere near the 100,000-plus council homes a year Britain built before 1979 will mean rethinking how the state borrows to build, not just how much it spends.
Rayner returns to the brief knowing all of this already – she was the one who pushed through the Renters’ Rights Act and the planning reforms last time round. The question now is whether Burnham gives her the room, and the money, to go further than she did before.
Doing nothing is not an option, nor is carrying on with the same failed reliance on the market. Home is where we start from.
Otherwise, as Fransoy once said to me: “When does it end?”
Left to Rot: How Governments Have Betrayed Us and How We Fix It by Daniel Hewitt is available to buy now.
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