Michelle Bromley is terrified she will be homeless by Christmas. For nine years she has lived in a smart Edwardian house near Blackpool’s seafront but she has been told to leave by Friday. If she refuses, the landlord will go to court to evict her.
The four-bedroom property is where Bromley raised her son and two daughters, joined latterly by three excitable chihuahuas. Her children now have their own babies – an 18-month-old, 17-month-old and a four-month-old – and they all lived under the same roof until two weeks ago when the daughters and grandchildren moved into temporary accommodation.
Their house once felt like a family home, Bromley says. Now it is “the house from hell”.
Dark patches of damp and mould loom across the staircase, kitchen and bedrooms. The cooking area and dining room are out of bounds, covered in plastic sheets as thick dust blows in from the brickwork.
In the bedroom where two of Bromley’s grandchildren slept, the mould around the windowsill is so potent that the Guardian’s photographer chokes back a cough when he enters.
One of the babies, six-month-old Kingsley, spent two days in hospital last October after being admitted with acute bronchiolitis and a respiratory infection – conditions known to be linked to damp and mould.
That same month, inspectors from Blackpool council assessed the property to be “in a state of disrepair” and found damp and mould that could cause “a serious and immediate risk to a person’s health and safety”.
The landlord was given a formal improvement notice and started work soon after. But a year later, amid an acrimonious battle between Bromley and the letting agent, the repairs have stalled and the ground floor resembles a building site.
For months, the family have had to cook meals using camping stoves on the landing outside the toilet, washing up plates in the bathroom sink. “I’m mentally exhausted,” Bromley says, breaking down in tears against the din of an industrial dehumidifier in the cold, dark dining room.
The former beautician is locked in an interminable battle with her letting agent, Stephen Coles, who accuses her of persistently blocking the repair work and making life a misery for his staff – claims she denies.
“I’ve done nothing wrong apart from asking them to fix the house. I’m not in the wrong here,” she says.
Coles served Bromley, 47, with a section 21 no-fault eviction notice on 15 September, two days after she gave an interview to the Blackpool Gazette about her situation.
She described it as a “retaliatory” move, a claim denied by Coles. He said she was served a separate section 21 last March – although this too came after her complaints about the property.
Bromley plans to fight the eviction order “all the way” but the threat of homelessness is enough to keep her awake at night. “I don’t sleep. I’m in absolute agony. In the evening I could cry in bed at night. I’ve felt like ending my life because I feel I can’t help my kids,” she said.
Bromley’s family are at the sharp end of a housing emergency that experts say is leaving hundreds of thousands of people trapped in squalid or dangerous private rented homes with little protection in law.
Faced with the threat of eviction or – a newer phenomenon – a “revenge rent hike”, tenants are choosing to live with serious problems such as cold, damp and mould lest they be forced out when they complain.
Their fears appear to be justified: landlords took more no-fault eviction notices to court this year than at any time since 2017.
Dr Andy Knox, a GP who leads on population health for the NHS in Lancashire and South Cumbria, said the impact of having to put up with sodden homes was having a profound effect on people’s health, especially children – and was getting worse.
“People are stuck between a rock and a hard place,” he said. “This is becoming a really major health issue for us as a nation and we need legislation that is going to properly deal with it.”
Blackpool’s mould crisis
Blackpool, long known as England’s favourite traditional seaside resort, has become a hotspot for some of the country’s most hazardous rental properties.
Every single one of the town’s 18,000 private rented homes has a damp and mould problem, according to council figures published by the government in September.
One in four – about 4,500 homes – were so badly affected they were classed as category 1, a serious threat to health and safety.
The true scale of the problem is worse still. Proactive inspections of about 250 properties by Blackpool council have found that 70% of private rented housing in its most densely populated areas have a category 1 health hazard, a large proportion being damp and mould.
Even for a council commendably willing to lift the rug on its deep-rooted housing and social problems, the results were a shock.
The causes of Blackpool’s mould crisis go back a century or more. The tourism boom of the late 20th century led to an explosion of housebuilding, with Edwardians erecting countless homes in the resort.
Blackpool’s golden era lasted longer than the nerve-jangling wait at the top of the Big Dipper rollercoaster (100 years old this year), but it came plummeting down with the advent of cheap foreign holidays in the 1990s.
The rise of budget airlines left behind a surfeit of ageing hotels, B&Bs and residential properties in Blackpool, cheaper than almost anywhere else in England.
But the visitors kept coming – and investors spotted an opportunity. Former guesthouses were turned into homes of multiple occupation, where landlords now make a profit of up to 20% (four times the average UK rental yield).
A room in a 21-bed former guesthouse in the centre of Blackpool costs £350 a month to anyone willing to share five bathrooms with the other tenants. That equates to a third of the average UK rent outside London, or the same price as a parking space in north London.
Blackpool is also the victim of geography. It is one of the wettest sea-level places in Britain, buffeted by the unforgiving Irish Sea in the rainiest region of England.
The council, faced with this formidable challenge, has waged war on bad landlords, taking more to court for renting out damp and mouldy properties in the three years to March 2022 than any other local authority in England.
It is, however, a low bar: only 14 of 306 English councils took any landlords to court in the year to March 2022, despite thousands of complaints, according to government figures.
‘It’s getting worse’
The streets behind the town’s famous promenade are some of the poorest and most unhealthy in England. Many are home to people running away from problems elsewhere, some drawn by the good-time nostalgia of their youth, but who find themselves in properties riddled with damp.
Nearly half of the children who live in the poorest part of Blackpool experienced extreme poverty last year, meaning their families were unable to meet the basic needs of keeping them warm, fed and clothed.
Those living in the worst housing are known to have the poorest health. In Blackpool, tenants crammed into mould-ridden rentals suffer from some of the highest levels of asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and depression in England.
Men are lucky to turn 70, with a life expectancy 10 to 15 years younger than the national average.
At Blackpool Victoria hospital, a quarter of emergency admissions every year come from the town’s five most deprived wards, four of which line a two-mile stretch of the promenade. In some areas that equates to one in seven people needing unplanned hospital treatment, many for respiratory conditions.
The effect of poor housing on health has been recognised for years but has not yet triggered a joined-up national effort to tackle it, despite rising up the agenda with the Covid pandemic and the inquest into the mould-linked death of two-year-old Awaab Ishak, who lived 50 miles away in Rochdale.
Leaders in some parts of England, including Blackpool, say they are doing what they can but are hampered by local authority budget cuts and record pressures on the NHS. About 60% of the 306 English councils who responded to a government review this year said a lack of resources was the biggest barrier to tackling rogue landlords.
“Damp and mould has been an issue for a number of years and it is definitely getting worse,” said Knox, who focuses on health inequalities for the NHS.
“If we look at these communities where the housing is the worst … they have even higher admissions than you would expect for the level of disadvantage those communities are living with.”
Decision-makers in Whitehall have “not a clue” that housing exists like that in the worst parts of the private rented sector, Knox said. “People who live in Blackpool love Blackpool and are proud of living in Blackpool. But they are being forced to live in conditions that are honestly not fit for most human habitation.”
‘We’re stuck in a rut’
Bromley’s smart terraced property was built in the early 1900s. Her family moved in in 2013, renting initially with the help of the council.
The house and its two adjoining neighbours had previously been a retirement home, called the Laurels, before it was bought in 2009 by a local businessman, Simon Timothy Billington, and converted into three separate properties to rent out.
Billington, 56, said Bromley’s home had been “completely refurbished before she moved in” and that he had spent more than half of the tenant’s rent on repairs.
He accused her of “creating” problems with the lettings agents and tradespeople and acting aggressively towards them, which she denies. He said repair works were due to resume this week.
He added: “As an owner I am keen to keep my tenants happy and always agree to any work that the property management companies have requested.”
The Guardian spoke to tenants at four other rental properties owned by Billington and found three who had raised concerns about damp and mould, one of whom said their issues had been addressed – while two felt they had been ignored. One had had no problems.
One mother of two said she had reported complaints to her letting agent, Coles Property Management, but that it was “a nightmare” to contact and that they had tried to blame the moisture on the brand of tumble dryer.
The thought of her son, four, and daughter, six, getting ill was “one of my worst fears,” she said: “They’re so young and so vulnerable to getting certain illnesses. My health’s not great as it is but I’m not in the position to move. It’s so hard to find somewhere round here near their school and within our price range. We’re stuck in a rut.”
A short walk away, a 76-year-old widow gestured to the layer of thick black mould covering her bathroom wall, which she said had destroyed a shower curtain and a washing basket since she first complained.
Her husband died from COPD and her son, who lives with her, has asthma but she is reluctant to complain in case her £540-a-month rent is increased or she is evicted.
“Someone told me to do an improvement notice but I thought well I don’t want to do that just in case I get evicted,” she said.
“Rents have gone up. Mine hasn’t but I don’t want it to. I would be struggling. It’s bad enough with gas and electric and food. I would be the same as a lot of other people in Blackpool.”
The Guardian is not naming the two tenants because they fear being evicted.
Billington said he was not aware of their concerns. Coles, the letting agent, said every report on its portfolio had been “investigated and works scheduled where required”.
He added: “Some tenants don’t think they can report issues because they may be in arrears or fear a rent increase etc, but this isn’t the case.
“We haven’t raised rents in two years for any of the existing tenants even with the mortgage rates nearly doubling, but we can’t do works if repairs [are] not requested.”
Bromley is facing a bleak winter. She has been looking for somewhere else to live for over a year, fearing her days in her current home are numbered.
But she is one of more than 6,400 households on Blackpool council’s bulging housing waiting list, one of the lengthiest in England and which has grown from 5,200 in 2017.
Bromley says she cannot afford to put her possessions in storage, and it is doubtful any temporary accommodation found by the council will allow her to keep her chihuahuas.
The house where three generations lived together until weeks ago will soon be cast adrift. Bromley stares blankly at the iPad she is using to search for a new home: “I don’t know where I’m going to go. There is literally nowhere.”
