Judi Love has revealed that she was previously banned from her local social housing authority after confronting them with a tupperware full of maggots.
The Loose Women star, 46, lived in social housing in London with her two children before finding success as a comedian.
While Love has spoken about her past living conditions before, she’s now revealed that she was banned from receiving social housing for over a year after a row over an insect problem led to her walking into the local authority’s office with a tupperware full of dead flies and maggots.
Speaking on The Romesh Ranganathan Show, Love said: “I got banned from the local housing. They lifted it after three or five years, or was it a year?
“Basically, my last house that was social housing, I moved in – it was just me and the kids, we had hardly anything. About two days later, I started to see some flies.”
Love said that when she initially complained to the authority, they told her that an increase in flies was normal considering it was summer and she had just moved into a property with a garden. However, the problem didn’t resolve itself.
“There were loads of flies and it was like a horror movie,” she said. “There were maggots on the floor. I phoned the housing and I said, ‘What the hell is this?’ And they said, ‘You need to clean the house.’ I’ve got nothing in the yard. I’ve got kids there. There’s obviously something and then I was like, ‘Oh my God, there must be a dead person.’”
After going back and forth with the housing authority, her home was treated with pesticides but the pest problem persisted. “No one is listening to me so I got mad,” she said. “I covered my head in a balaclava and put on some gloves. I went into the bedroom and collected all the flies and the maggots and I said to the kids, ‘Come on,’” she continued, adding that she stormed down to the housing authority’s office with containers of dead flies.
“They all thought I was doing witchcraft. They ran into the back, called security, tried to escort me out the building,” she added, laughing. “I slammed [the tupperware] down and said, ‘Get someone now. Look at the flies in this yard, are you mad?’”
Love and her kids were placed in a hotel for two nights and the authority eventually found a dead bird decomposing behind the chimney – however, the comedian was banned for a period from using their services.
“They had to dig up all the floorboards, it was insane. They’d covered the chimneys, they took that down and what they found was a dead bird. It was a massive bird and the time the bird had been there, four or five weeks, it really was decomposed and that’s where all the flies and maggots had come from,” she said.
While Love went on to stress that authority staff “need to be respected and kept safe at all times”, she could no longer live in those conditions. “At the time I was emotionally high, my babies needed protecting,” she said.
Love did not specify which local housing authority she was using the services of. The Independent has contacted the London Assembly and the Mayor of London’s office for comment.
Love previously spoke about the poor living conditions she faced in social housing, revealing that her son “ended up in intensive care” due to damp taking over a home she was allocated. “No one should be forced to live in such conditions,” she said in her 2022 OK! magazine column.
She is now a regular face on our TV screens, presenting ITV’s Celebrity Sabotage and appearing on the Loose Women panel, while last year, she competed on Prime Video hit Last One Laughing UK.
