A historic housing association is facing a revolt from tenants who are tired of living in cramped, damp and mouldy homes that some say are damaging children’s health.
Residents of Evelyn Court estate in east London are calling on the Industrial Dwellings Society (IDS) to fix their homes after years of complaints about mouldy walls, and damaged furniture and clothes. The first Lord Rothschild was among philanthropists who founded IDS in 1885.
The society built the estate of 320 flats in 1934 to ease overcrowding and offer affordable rents. But some of the flats are now overcrowded, say tenants, who include care workers, cleaners and security guards.
About 120 have signed a petition demanding better conditions and improved responsiveness from their landlord, after the London Renters Union helped them to organise. They staged a protest on Wednesday outside the landlord’s offices.
They complained that the landlord and its contractors usually offered only temporary fixes of washing and repainting walls and sills, which left fungus to reappear.
Romaine Murray, 42, a healthcare assistant, said she had struggled with mould for over a decade and described the fungus as “a monster”. She said her eight-year-old son had breathing difficulties throughout his infancy and she had also developed breathing problems.
View image in fullscreenRomaine Murray. Photograph: Christian Sinibaldi/The Guardian
“I feel not even an animal should live like this,” she said. “I come into the house and smell damp and mould. My clothes smell of mould. I work nine to five, I don’t depend on the government to pay my rent, and this is not liveable for a human being.”
She said she felt let down by IDS. “The chairman of the board should come out and see what is happening. These are hardworking people on the estate. Our money has value. We mean something.”
IDS is a community benefit society whose declared purpose is to “provide social housing for people who would not be able to afford commercial rent levels or who cannot afford to purchase outright their own homes”. The Rothschild family is understood to have ended its connection with IDS at least 20 years ago.
Tenants described rents of between £600 and £800 a month for two-bedroom flats, which is less than half the market rates in the area. IDS’s latest annual report for 2020 shows a turnover of £10m and an operating surplus of more than £2m. It had cash balances of more than £1.8m and net assets of nearly £36m.
View image in fullscreenOne resident described the fungus as ‘a monster’.
Fatima, 43, a single mother of six who has lived on the estate for 19 years, has mould regrowing around her windows after recently cleaning it up. She said her 14-month-old daughter had a wheezy cough and had been diagnosed with bronchitis, and two of her sons had previously had the same diagnosis. “I give up,” she said. “IDS don’t help.”
IDS said it was “incredibly sorry” to hear of residents’ concerns and it would “investigate and respond to each and every one”. It said: “The damp and mould issue is mainly due to the age and construction of the estate. While we have been proactively repairing individual cases as they were reported to us, we have been concentrating our already constrained budgets towards upgrading the fire safety features in the block, which can save lives on a large scale.”
It said its spending had been restricted by loan covenants and it was “in discussions with lenders to release more money for us to use on improving our properties”.
After the protest, it said: “We have now had our minds focused by our residents and vow to instil within our teams an ongoing culture of prompt and positive action towards repairs requests and complaints.”
Social housing providers are facing growing pressure over unfit homes, and soaring energy prices have raised fears of worsening mould and damp problems as low-income tenants turn off heating and keep windows closed to save money.
According to government figures, 13% of dwellings in the social rented sector failed to meet the decent homes standard. Last summer the government said unsafe conditions including mould and vermin exposed by ITV at housing run by the UK’s largest social landlord, Clarion, was “completely unacceptable”. Clarion apologised to residents at the Eastfields estate in south London.
The Housing Ombudsman, which investigates tenants’ complaints to determine maladministration by landlords, told a House of Commons select committee that inquiries and complaints had “increased substantially”. The most common complaint was landlords’ failure to respond to requests for repairs. It said landlords were “fatalistic” about damp and mould and must stop blaming tenants’ “lifestyle choices”.
