‘mould is making us sick’ schoolgirls demand a stop to insufferable living conditions

By Isabel Ramirez isabel@southwarknews.co.uk

girls FroM a local secondary school, who found all but two of their class had experienced severe issues with mould, damp or flooding, went to the council offices to demand change to the way repairs are done in southwark council homes.

Students from Notre Dame RC Girls School joined community leaders and residents at the Southwark Council offices to raise the alarm about mould, damp and repairs issues.

They began working on this campaign, after discovering that, in a group of 37 students, all but two have experienced these issues.

The group - led by Southwark and Peckham Citizens, a local alliance of Citizens UK - gathered at the offices on Tooley Street last Thursday, March 9 to demand change to the current repairs service.

Albinia Stanley, Community Organiser at Citizens UK, said: “Our key demand is for each Southwark home to have a named ‘caretaker’ who works within the Council Repairs Service and is responsible for holding cases and improving the communication with residents and the standard of repairs.

“Last April, [Council Leader] Cllr Kieron Williams promised to work alongside Southwark and Peckham Citizens to improve the repairs service - yet nothing has been done to work with community leaders to improve housing conditions in Southwark homes.”

The call for a caretaker will take some long-standing council tenants back to a time decades ago when all housing estates usually had a council caretaker, often living on the estate, who would be a point of contact for residents with problems ranging from repairs to anti-social behaviour.

Nowadays Resident Services Officers - more commonly known as housing officers - are often responsible for referring repair cases to maintenance teams, many of which are outsourced by the council.

Residents complain that there are not enough of these officers to meet current demands of issues around mound, damp, heating and hot water repairs.

The News is often inundated with people wanting to highlight the problems they face in their homes and the lack of communication over repairs from the council. In a bid to understand the pressures being faced by these officers, we submitted a Freedom of Information Request to Southwark Council to see just how many households each Resident Services Officer is responsible for.

It has revealed that there are just 78 Resident Services Officers responsible for 48,164 council homes, an average of 617 each. And on large estates like the East Dulwich Estate one officer covers 806 homes, on the Aylesbury Estate in Walworth there is one officer for 738