Mental health experts have called for people on the Rochdale estate where tragic Awaab Ishak lived to be rehoused at the town’s Seven Sisters tower blocks - where hundreds of flats are being held empty ahead of demolition. An inquest into the death of little Awaab found the two-year-old's death was caused by a severe respiratory condition after living in damp and mouldy conditions at the Freehold estate - just a mile away from the doomed high rises at College Bank.
Rochdale Boroughwide Housing (RBH) - which owns and manages both estates - is planning to drop four of the Seven Sisters as part of its controversial plans for regenerating the 'town centre area'. Some 400 homes have been left empty as RBH rehouses residents ahead of pulling the blocks down and refurbishing the three remaining towers - a strategy that has already invited fierce criticism given there are 22,000 people on the borough’s waiting list.
RBH insists it is ‘committed to creating homes of the highest quality’ and residents’ wellbeing remains its ‘top priority’ as it embarks upon its long-term regeneration programme. But now the mutual - which sacked CEO Gareth Swarbrick in the wake of the Awaab Ishak tragedy - is coming under pressure to open up the Seven Sisters to Freehold residents from the British Association for Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapies (BABCP).
