My Brush with Homelessness

I have just had an email from the Big Issue Foundation warning that Britain faces a homelessness crisis (even worse than usual) this autumn, and asking me to do three things.  The first was to sign their petition asking for government reforms to prevent homelessness.  I have now done this.

Secondly, the email encouraged people to fundraise for the Big Issue Foundation, which I am already doing.  My sponsored walk grew from 200 to 300 miles, and I have currently completed 291.

But thirdly, when I clicked to sign the petition, the Big Issue Foundation asked whether I could take various actions to help them, including telling the story of my experience of coming close to homelessness.

I am lucky enough never to have had to sleep on the streets.  In 2013 I could have been at risk of homelessness, as, after four years of unemployment, I had started working on a zero-hours contract.  This made my situation much more precarious than when I was unemployed, because I might have no income for months at a time, but, because I wasn’t receiving Jobseeker’s Allowance, I didn’t qualify for Housing Benefit.  Mercifully, my landlord at the time was a friend who was very understanding if I couldn’t pay the rent on time.

In 2014, I started a job at a care home in Calmore, on the edge of the New Forest, which meant that I needed to find lodgings near my workplace, as I can’t drive.  Some of the rooms I looked at were in places I didn’t think I could face living in.  One was advertised as a ‘double room’ because it contained a double bed – which took up virtually the entire room.  As the prospective landlord pointed out, I could keep my winter clothes under the bed in summer and vice versa, so need only keep a few clothes in the tiny wardrobe.  I was more worried about having no space for my books, my desk, or anything that could make this tiny room feel like home rather than just somewhere to sleep.

Another landlord explained generously that I was allowed to use the kitchen when he and his family were out of the house, but would be expected to stay out of sight in my room whenever they were around.  It reminded me of Harry Potter – except that at least Harry is expected to stay hidden only when the Dursleys have important dinner guests whom they want to impress, and not all the time!

At last, I saw a room advertised in the cheerfully untidy house of a friendly-seeming older woman who had a collection of classic novels (which looked an encouraging sign), and a tiny garden which managed to grow an astonishing variety of fruit and vegetables.  She was happy for me to have the run of the house and garden, and for us to watch television together, play board games and cook for each other.  It seemed idyllic.

I moved there in July 2014, and by the end of the year, my landlady was reluctant to renew my lease.  At the time, I didn’t think I had done anything to upset her, though occasionally I had accidentally woken her up in the morning.  The kitchen was just under my landlady’s bedroom, so the sound of me switching the radio on, singing, or just pottering around with pots and pans if I decide to make porridge for breakfast, could disturb her sleep.

Generally, though, we seemed to get on fairly amicably, and I had sometimes even helped my landlady out by playing with her granddaughter.  I suspected that the real difficulty was that she just wasn’t used to having a lodger, and didn’t feel comfortable about leaving me to my own devices.  So, when she announced in April 2015 that she was going away on holiday in August, she ordered me to move out by July at the latest.

Also because she wasn’t used to being a landlord, we had a few misunderstandings about paperwork and rent, and I was uncomfortable about a room which had originally been advertised as costing £300 per month having crept up to nearly £400.  Nevertheless, as I couldn’t find anywhere else, I agreed to pay the increased rent.  Eventually we managed to agree to renew the lease until July 2016, and my landlady even trusted me to feed her tropical fish while she was on holiday.

With hindsight, my mental health problems were making me stressful to live with.  I tried not to scream or hit myself when I was in the house (even if I was doing both while running to and from work), but I was frequently so agitated that my landlady had to tell me to go out for a walk and not come back until I’d calmed down.  She didn’t like it when I cried, or thumped my mattress as an alternative to thumping myself.  After a while, she was so used to finding me stressful that she became annoyed if I made any sound, such as coughing or even laughing. 

She certainly didn’t like it when I invited a friend to stay for a week over New Year 2016.  She had given me permission, but had probably assumed that he would only be there for a couple of days.  She also hadn’t realised that I would be at work, leaving her to be hospitable to my guest.

I was finally evicted in March 2016.  My landlady’s son’s marriage had broken up and he had moved back into the spare bedroom, and needed my room for his daughter.  I searched on the Internet, and, after visiting various rooms being rented out by private individuals wanting a lodger or flatmate, all of whom said, ‘Well, I’m interviewing several tenants... I’ll get back to you,’ and never did, I decided to find a room through a letting agency, Progressive Lettings. 

I went to see the house they had available on Monday 21st March at 12 noon, and we agreed that I would move in on Thursday 31^st March.  In the meantime, I had to pay £140 to Progressive Lettings as an agency fee, in order to reserve the room.  I gulped slightly when I realised that, on moving in, I would have to pay the landlord not only £380 (one month’s rent in advance) but also another £380 as a deposit, which added up to most of my wages for a month.

My parents offered to drive over to help transport my belongings to my new home.  Meanwhile, I had a certain amount of electronic ‘paperwork’ to do, filling in computerised forms for Progressive Lettings, but I was pretty sure that when I’d done that, they’d phone or text me to tell me my landlord’s contact details.

I ought to have checked my emails more carefully, but I was busy spending much of my free time from 28^th-30^th March packing, or at least thinking about packing.  When I woke up on Thursday, I decided to start by checking my emails to see whether I had been emailed my landlord’s contact details.  Instead, it turned out that what I had been emailed (on Tuesday 29^th March, so I really should have spotted it earlier) was yet another set of online paperwork to fill in. This came from an organisation called UK Tenant Data who vet the suitability of tenants, requesting a copy of my passport and the contact details of my employer and of my current landlord.  I filled them in on all these (feeling very relieved that I hadn’t done my packing yet after all), and was irritated to find out that I had to pay a further £14.40 to have my passport processed to demonstrate that I was a British or EU citizen.

As there was now no chance of moving house just yet, I apologised to my landlady for the delay and wrote her a cheque for another week’s rent.  Then, on Sunday 3^rd April, I discovered (again, I should have been checking my emails), another email dated Thursday 31^st March from UK Tenant Data, which must have been sent to me as soon as I filled in the forms on Thursday morning.  This was a permission slip for me to print out, sign, scan and email back, giving permission for UK Tenant Data to contact my employer and my landlady to ask for references.  I had assumed that the fact that I had filled in forms giving their contact details, and that I obviously wanted them to be contacted because I couldn’t move house until they had provided references, made it clear that I was happy for them to be contacted, but apparently nothing could happen until I’d signed the form.  I hoped I could move into the new place by Thursday 7^th April, as my landlady said that whatever happened, she needed me to be out by then.

UK Tenant Data kept dragging their feet about finding my details, until the revised date on which I was supposed to be moving, by which time I had just about finished packing everything up.  About the only things I couldn’t pack away were my desk and my computer, because I still needed internet access.  I phoned UK Tenant Data repeatedly throughout Thursday, dealing with all kinds of last-minute requests for contact details that I thought I’d already given them, and proof of my former landlady’s purchase of her house (which was problematic as she had owned it from new, therefore didn’t have a contract from its previous owner).

It was early evening, when I finally managed to get through to Progressive Lettings, who informed me that UK Tenant Data had advised them not to recommend me as a tenant.  My mother (who had driven over with the intention of loading my belongings into her car and driving them over to Causeway Crescent), drove me over to UK Tenant Data’s office in Southampton instead, to find out what had happened. 

It turned out that they had concluded that I wouldn’t be able to afford to pay the rent, because they were basing their estimate of my earnings on the basic salary I would be earning if I worked only my contracted 20 hours per week.  In fact, on an average week I tended to work between about 30 and 36 hours per week, but the rent was only the amount I was already paying anyway.

I also saw my former landlady’s letter to them, in which she warned that I was much too emotionally disturbed to live with other people, and needed to be on my own.  I realise she was being honest about her experience of living with me, and one of my previous housemates had nicknamed me MAC (Malfunctioning Alarm Clock) for my tendency to wake up screaming at odd hours of night.  All the same, I certainly couldn’t afford a flat of my own, and usually became much more depressed when I was on my own.

At any rate, I had nowhere to live.  It looked ominous that UK Tenant Data’s office was in a block right next to Patrick House, one of the many hostels that several of my friends have stayed in when homeless. 

My parents let me stay with them a few weeks while I searched around.  It was comforting being with them, especially as we found time to go for walks together on days when I wasn’t working.  My mother very kindly offered to drive me to and from work (she had plenty of free time now, having retired at Easter), as long as I paid her £100 per week to cover food and transport.

After a couple of weeks, I saw another rented room advertised, which was nearly perfect.  My new landlord was a musician and music teacher who lived on the ground floor with his girlfriend, and rented out the upper floor.  Unlike Progressive Lettings, he was very easy and informal about taking me on without asking about references, and said he preferred to be paid in cash. 

I settled in happily, without ever being the troublesome housemate that my last landlady had forecast.  The only difficulty came on the first night, when my Muslim housemate found me accidentally using his personal set of utensils to cut up a pepperoni pizza.  He threatened to move out, but by the next day he had calmed down, and accepted that it had been an accident.  I lived there without incident until the following January, when I got married and moved to Somerset and was finally done with rented lodgings.

So, I was lucky because I happened to have family who lived fairly nearby and could help me out in an emergency.  If I hadn’t had friends or family, I could very easily have ended up on the street – and so could any of the other low-waged workers (let alone the ones on zero-hours contracts, or those whose jobs have disappeared during lockdown) in Britain today.