‘It’s killing her’: Council leaves people with mould, mice and broken toilets

Mariam Yusuf insists I put on a face mask before entering her flat – not because she’s worried about catching Covid or another illness, but for my own sake; to keep the familiar stench of mould at bay.

In October 2021, Yusuf was hospitalised after being the victim of a hit and run. When she was ready to be discharged, she was passed on to Brent Council as she didn’t have a safe home to return to.

The council placed her in a flat in north-west London run by a private landlord. It was not only riddled with serious disrepair, but completely unfit for someone using crutches and dealing with several neurological side effects from a car crash.

On the first day living there, Yusuf tried to use the shower but a major leak from the pipes meant she slipped and fell. She was told by her doctor not to use it again until it was fixed by the landlord. The toilet, too, didn’t work properly.

Yusuf is still living in the flat. Both the toilet and the shower were still broken when I visited earlier this month, almost two years after she moved in. She is forced to use a commode and to wash once a week at various friends’ houses.

The landlord even let a broken faucet leak water into the flat for almost a week a few months ago, refusing to fix the problem despite repeated complaints.

Then the mould came. It spread across the walls and ceiling, infected the bathroom and even colonised her kitchen cupboards, staining everything from pots and pans to tea bags a sickly green.

Yusuf says she feels powerless to fight the mould as it spreads in spite of her cleaning.

It increasingly takes up a larger and larger share of her home and leaves her basically stuck in her bedroom – which has only a partial covering of spores – and needing an inhaler to survive the conditions. The smell and spores are so bad that Yusuf wears a mask while at home.

Even Yusuf’s carer refuses to spend prolonged periods in the property because of the mould’s impact on her breathing.

Maybe the worst problem is the fact that the flat doesn’t have a functioning radiator, forcing Yusuf to buy two mobile electric radiators. She fights off tears when I ask what it was like trying to stay warm over winter.

“I’m upset with all of the people who put me here,” she tells me, through a friend who acted as a translator. “They said I could clean it. That this is liveable.”

Yusuf’s friend added: “This is your home, this is supposed to be your sanctuary, where you run away from all the issues outside, but it’s not for her.

“It’s killing her, slowly. I wouldn’t want my worst enemy to live here.”

The mould spread across the walls and ceiling, infected the bathroom and even colonised her kitchen cupboards

Days after I visited Yusuf, employees from the council inspected her flat and told her the mould didn’t qualify as a category one hazard. They said they “can’t” take action on anything less serious.

Around 10,000 homes in Brent, where Yusuf lives, have some form of serious health hazard, with many affecting the borough’s most vulnerable residents.

In theory, councils have a responsibility under the Equality Act to provide reasonable adjustments for those with disabilities or serious health concerns, like Yusuf, to avoid forcing people to live in homes that are unsuitable or could worsen their health.

But housing lawyers and charities openDemocracy spoke to have warned of systemic discrimination in UK housing, as councils and private landlords alike fail to act on that obligation and aren’t held to account.

One housing group in Westminster told openDemocracy that 80% of its cases now involve disabilities or ignored medical needs, while another was forced to protest outside a different London council’s building due to the number of its vulnerable members who have been left living in squalid homes.

Ammar Azeddini also lives in Brent, just a 15-minute walk across Harlesden from Yusuf. But Azeddini doesn't sleep in his studio flat, he says. The conditions have forced him to spend nights sleeping in the corridor – essentially left homeless in his own home. The mattress he would have slept on is riddled with bed bugs and droppings from the rodent infestation in the flat.

The conditions in his flat are so bad that we have to relocate to a nearby coffee shop to talk. As we chat, Azeddini shows me pictures on his phone of the multiple mice he has found dead in the flat in recent weeks.

The walls behind the wardrobes, in the bathroom and in the kitchen are blackened with mould. Then there’s the litany of other disrepair issues Azeddini rattles off to me – broken plumbing that has left a sheen of water on the floor, bulging floorboards, now-blackened plug sockets from faulty wiring. The boiler in the flat has been broken since the winter, he says, but has been left completely ignored and unfixed by the landlord, who lives just next door.

In fact, after weeks of complaining about the conditions, the landlord’s response was to send Azeddini an eviction notice. In a letter seen by openDemocracy, he said that he understood Azeddini was on a “mental health prescription” and claimed he was “a security risk” to both himself and the property.

Like Yusuf, Azeddini says he was placed in the property by the council, which has fined his landlord over the property in the past but has not yet forced him to fix all the hazards in the flat or helped Azeddini into a new property.

Both Yusuf and Azeddini are members of the London Renters’ Union (LRU), which is supporting them in trying to get the council to take action.

“Nobody should become sick because of their housing but thousands of people across Brent live in homes that present a serious risk to their health,” Jacob Wills, the Brent organiser for the LRU, told openDemocracy.

Wills added: “Disabled people and renters with chronic health conditions are often left in some of the most dangerous and inaccessible housing.”

The local LRU branch spent part of last week protesting outside Brent Council’s office to try and force the council to acknowledge and address the scale of unsafe, unsuitable homes in the borough.

But the issue is far from just limited to Brent. In neighbouring Westminster, The Westminster Hub, a housing support group, told me that “eight out of ten” of their cases now relate to some failure from a council or landlord to provide the legal adjustments or support required for tenants with disabilities or acute health conditions.

“It’s like disability discrimination [laws] have been exempt from housing,” says Vanessa, one of the Hub’s volunteers. “It’s almost a lawless sector.”

Part of the problem comes down to the fact that despite there being an array of laws in place to hold criminal and rogue landlords to account for poor conditions, enforcement is often close to non-existent.

Across 2019 and 2020, the government provided councils with an average of just £37,222 in special funding to cover the cost of housing-law enforcement, according to The Economist.

What that means in practice is that many people end up living in often severely hazardous housing. Those who are most vulnerable – in particular those with intense medical or disability-related needs – are typically worst affected, as they may have additional needs, such as accessibility requirements, or medical complications that arise from prolonged periods in hazardous homes.

Disabled people and renters with chronic health conditions are often left in some of the most dangerous and inaccessible housing

openDemocracy has previously reported on the plight of Somali families in Tower Hamlets who have faced long waiting times for social housing and alleged racial discrimination at the hands of the council’s housing service.

Since then, my reporting has found that the council demonstrated a pattern of ignoring the urgent medical needs of those seeking social housing, including by overruling the advice of doctors, in one case endangering the health of a three-year-old child with a severe heart condition.

A Brent Council spokesperson said they had “supported” Yusuf to address the problems in her flat and said some remedial works (seemingly related to the disrepair in the bathroom) has been completed at the property this month. They added that they had “provided advice” on how to prevent mould building up in the property and signposted Yusuf to the council’s adult social care team.

In Azeddini’s case, the spokesperson said that when officers last inspected the property in January “there were no serious hazards left” and claimed they had not been contacted by Azeddini since remediation works were supposedly completed.

When openDemocracy visited the property earlier this month however we saw firsthand evidence of several serious hazards, including mould, a broken unfixed boiler and rodent infestations, to name just a few.

The spokesperson added that they have arranged for a re-inspection of the property this week and highlighted that last year the council issued a civil penalty notice against the landlord over their failure to maintain the property.

They went on: “A decent standard of living is at the heart of Brent's housing strategy across all sectors – the private rented sector, new build properties and existing council homes.

“We will chase rogue landlords all the way to the courts. The introduction of the selective licensing scheme, which will become law on 1 August this year, is key to protecting vulnerable tenants from being forced to live in substandard conditions.”