Up to a dozen men who escaped a fatal fire in an overcrowded flat in east London described by one as being “worse than slums in Bangladesh” are facing homelessness from Monday because they cannot find affordable housing.
In a case marking a new low for Britain’s housing crisis, they are among 18 students and workers of Bangladeshi origin that were squeezed into a two-bedroom flat in the Maddocks House council block in Shadwell. An e-bike battery caught fire last month, killing Mizanur Rahman, who only days earlier had moved into the flat that was packed with bunk beds.
Since the fire on 5 March, the London borough of Tower Hamlets has put up the survivors in hotels, but that support ended on Sunday night, meaning that on the weekend of the Islamic festival of Eid, they face homelessness. They told the Guardian they were depressed and worried.
Several are students from Bangladesh, studying for degrees in law and business studies, while others work in catering and as delivery couriers for Uber Eats and Deliveroo. Several said they paid a private landlord £100 a week because they could not afford a conventional home, lacking deposits, references and salary records that landlords usually now demand in an overheated private rental market. The flat was licensed for five occupants, but residents said as many as 22 were squeezed in, sometimes having to sleep two to a single bed or on the bathroom floor.
“This was worse than slums in Bangladesh,” said Namush Shahadat, 25, who arrived last year to study law at Hertfordshire University. He showed the Guardian arms covered with bed bug scars from mattresses he said the landlord had dragged off the street. “In slums you might be sharing with two to three people [in a room] but I had eight people in this room – sometimes more than 10.”
Shahadat said the landlord “was making so much money on the flat and he could have installed some safety measures – some fire blankets or a fire extinguisher. There was none of that. I think the smoke alarm was fault, too.”
Seven weeks after the fatal fire, many of the men have nowhere to live. Some are citizens of France and Italy and so have the right to temporary accommodation, but the majority do not.
“We are searching Zoopla, SpareRoom and we went to estate agents,” Shahadat said. “There is nothing in the price range [we can afford], they need payslips for 12 months and references from the previous landlord. We haven’t got a place. If we don’t get a new place, maybe the town hall is a good place to sleep at night.”
Soaring rents in London mean that the average household rent of about £1,430 a month takes up 40% of the household median income – close to double the proportion in the West Midlands, official data shows. Across England, about 732,000 households are overcrowded, according to official figures.
Nazmul Chowdhury, 27, who is studying international business, arrived from Sylhet in Bangladesh in October 2022. As a student he can work only 20 hours a week and from his jobs in McDonald’s and Subway he makes about £180 a week. The average private rent in the borough is £2,560 a month (most likely a two-bed flat in that area), up 33% since 2021, according to Hamptons.
The council says it has spent £100,000 on hotels and cash payments for the survivors and has “done what we can to help signpost tenants to find alternative accommodation”.
Hussain Ismail, a community activist assisting the men, said: “The rental market in the last year has gone crazy and they are at the bottom rung.”
Chowdhury said that at first he slept on the floor, paying £90 a week. “The landlord rented out the kitchen [floor] for one or two nights,” he said. “I haven’t seen that in Bangladesh. It’s worse. It’s a humiliation. We weren’t allowed to use the washing machine or the heaters. 21, 22 people using the same toilet … It was so dirty.”
Some said they could not understand why the council had spent so much on hotels when that cash could have helped them pay deposits and rent for several months.
A spokesperson for the council said: “We recognise the extremely difficult situation the survivors of the Maddocks House fire have been faced with, and have done our utmost to ensure they have been supported … We have made sure that everyone has been informed ahead of time regarding the arrangements for the hotel. We have been in regular contact with the survivors and provided as much notice as possible, so they have time to find their own accommodation ahead of the hotel booking end-date.”
The council, which is responsible for housing enforcement, is meanwhile running a criminal investigation into the case. It has already admitted it had received complaints about the flat as early as September 2021. Overcrowding was a cause of problems, with flooding due to overuse of the bathroom. The council leader, Lutfur Rahman, who returned to power as mayor of the borough in May 2022, also launched an independent inquiry, saying the case was “symptomatic of a catastrophically broken housing market and the greed of rogue landlords that it encourages”.
A council motion passed last month decried the abuse of vulnerable workers by a “greedy, vulturous and predatory class of landlord”.
The landlord did not respond to a request for comment.
