Written evidence submitted by Handsworth Helping Hands [EXA 018]

My witness statement is based on family residence in Handsworth and Birchfield in Birmingham's inner suburbs for over 40 years, and from 10 years working together as part of a small charity I helped found, Handsworth Helping Hands (HHH - winner in 2020 of the Queen's Award for Voluntary Service), carrying out environmental work, whole street ‘skip-it don’t tip it’ days, ‘green-up clean-up projects’, as well as a miscellany of services for vulnerable people in Handsworth, Birchfield. Lozells and part of Aston.

We know Exempt Accommodation, managed by Registered Providers, is exempt from regulations and Local Housing Allowance caps that apply to HMOs, but, for the purpose of this statement, Exempt Accommodation and HMOs are in effect synonymous, creating similar issues for residents and other agencies such as the police, social and ambulance services.

‘Rachmanism’ was a term given in the 1960s to the exploitation of tenants of slum properties by unscrupulous landlords. Scrutiny members are now examining a problem that matches the social depravity of Peter Rachman, but one made worse by the complacency, even the support, of government - a messy, mostly unwilling, collaboration - blighting the social capital of Birmingham’s inner suburbs.  By ‘social capital’ we mean those residents of an area who have roots in it, have lived there with their families, worked there, and have invested their time and their money in an area. They know the neighbours, know the local shops, take part in voluntary activity, send their children to local schools, attend public meetings, attend local places of worship. They may be defined as belonging to and sustaining a community, enjoying where they live, valuing the network of relationships that enables society to function. 

The social capital of any one street might be measured by the capacity of the people who live in it to look after neighbours and be looked after by them. If the ratio of residents who constitute a street’s social capital, compared to those individuals living in Exempt Accommodation and HMOs, becomes imbalanced, as has happened in many streets in Birmingham’s inner suburbs, then what was once a neighbourhood with the resources, in partnership with local government services, to look after its most vulnerable neighbours, becomes a population of strangers.

As numbers of these categories of property increase in an area, eventually a tipping point is reached. Neighbours become overburdened with appeals for help from the vulnerable in their midst - requests for food, cigarettes, money, the use of their phones. They get tired of calling ambulances for people collapsed on the pavement, seeing drugs traded openly in the street, are vexed by pilfering of anything left in their front gardens, having their car doors tried, seeing police cars parked in their street, being kept awake by loud music late at night, or annoyed by it on summer afternoons. They despair at seeing bulky objects dumped in streets, at having to pick up rubbish spilling onto the pavement from over-filled bins, at bins being left unemptied by Fleet and Waste when recycling and household waste have been mixed. They become suspicious of strangers and worry about the safety of their children going to and from school or playing in the streets. The extra insult is to find that such concerns, when voiced as objections to an HMO conversion, are not acknowledged under planning law.

As family properties are converted for multiple occupation, the loss of accommodation for more stable residence negates the sense of place that is part of community. Houses for sale in Handsworth are visited by a queue of potential buyers interested in converting the property, initially to an HMO, with the possibility - in many cases the intention - of it later becoming Exempt Accommodation.  Every decision by city planning services, to allow conversion of a family home to an HMO, has the secondary effect of driving from the area the last remains of the stable 'community of place' that could otherwise have supported lower numbers of transient residents, many of whom hardly know where they're living. Our elected members are seldom able to vote against officers' 'legal' recommendations.

When residents move in and out of Exempt Accommodation and HMOs, bulky objects and other belongings are abandoned on the frontages of properties, spilling onto pavements. Fly-tipping in the area becomes endemic, exacerbated by the activities of unlicenced waste collectors, who, for ‘cash-in-hand’ from a colluding landlord, remove beds, used mattresses and cut-rate furniture, and dump it close to where it was collected.

The transient tenants, who constitute our area's 'population of strangers', are, more often than not, uninformed, and, through such vulnerabilities as mental ill-health, drug dependency, alcoholism, learning or language difficulties, uneducable about waste disposal arrangements. Fly-tipping and littering become a chosen method of waste disposal. Waste collection and street cleaning services are made less effective. Streets become a wasteland, strewn with litter, bottles, piles of foul-smelling black bags filled with who-knows-what, soaking-wet carpets, old clothes and mattresses and mountains of broken furniture. The correlation between the character of this street environment and levels of crime and violence can’t be ignored. At this point, neither householders nor tenants of Exempt Accommodation and HMOs can be assured the same promise of ‘a good quality home and neighbourhood to live in’, made to social housing tenants in the government’s November 2020 ‘Charter for social housing residents’

I would have liked to enliven this evidence to present a sample of mine and other's many photographs taken in May 2021 and early January 2022 in Greenhill Road, Holyhead Ward, Birmingham and 9 months later when Birmingham City Council (BCC) Fleet & Waste workers, with relevant council officers, began overseeing the clearance of waste from several rubbish choked rear and side alleyways identified by our member Nina Hayr and myself.

This astounding accumulation of waste has been building up over a decade, causing a risk to residents and emergency services by blocking rear access and egress in the event of fire. One West Midlands fire officer described these choked rear and side alleyways between terrace houses in Birmingham's inner suburbs as a 'horizontal Grenville waiting to happen'.

What's unprecedented is that access to these rear alleys is problematic for the Council as they are not public spaces. Up to now BCC staff have been saying they can do nothing about this problem for this reason.  Such alleyways run between and behind terrace housing all over the inner suburbs of our city. We encounter it over and over and are helpless to clear it away as HHH's tipping licence relates to disposal of waste from public spaces.

An amplifying hazard is created by the iron gates on most alleys installed 30 years ago by BCC as a very popular multi-million pound urban security measure. The problem now is that with a far more transient population in these areas (people living in HMOs and exempt accommodation; with vast private rental expansion, Birmingham being a target city for rental property investments from across the UK faced by skeletonised regulatory and enforcement services) the keys to these alleyway locks have often disappeared or are held by one person who may well have ended up chaining a gate with a padlock, perhaps to block access to a cannabis 'factory', and keeping the key to themselves.

Cllr Paulette Hamilton (Holyhead Ward Councillor) recognises, as do all involved in this excellent clearing operation, that these alleyways may not remain clear despite all this graft by the F & W teams, because so many adjoining rear gardens are also up to the gunnels with yet more accumulations of waste, just waiting to be chucked into the now un-choked rear alleys.

To get rear gardens cleared, so children have a little more space to play outdoors where they can be overseen, is another challenge requiring pressure on largely absentee landlords to provide stewardship of their profitable investments. Enforcement and regulation are essential if this excellent investment in time and energy is not to be wasted.

It is ironic that when local philanthropists in Handsworth in the 1880s were arguing for the creation of Handsworth's Park they could read a letter in the local press that spoke of the state of new built terraces and their back gardens: "In such a parish as Handsworth, in which there is a great quantity of small house property, a park is much required, for this class of property rarely has any garden, or truly speaking, the back yard and its out-buildings frequently have to suffice for several tenants jointly. It is to be regretted that law does not compel a given area at the back of cottages, as it now compels it in each room; but such is the demand for houses in some parts that houses renting at from £40 to £70 are being erected with such minute back gardens or yards that one could cross them with a hop, skip, and jump.' (Daily Post, March 23 1883 - Birmingham Community Library)

January 2022