You will read the grim facts about Chanel Sultan’s life in a minute, but first let’s talk about her dreams. Like the law degree she has just started, or her hope to buy her own home. Like her years spent driving buses by day and working on her construction business in the evenings, all to feed her three children. Like reading self-help books and doing penance at the gym. “We can live lives that we really want to live,” she says. “Not the ones we’ve been given.” We sit in a house so run-down it laughs at any dreams, and I can’t tell whether such faith is born of determination or delusion.
At night she can hear rats scratching around beneath the floorboards under her bed. She and her children have seen them scuttling about and found their rotting corpses, have even had their belongings chewed up. Over the few months they have lived in this Victorian terrace, the ferocious damp and mould have ruined their clothes and their furniture. The headboard and base of Sultan’s own bed are so spoilt that they have been thrown away. In her bedroom, the mattress now sits atop cardboard packing boxes.
For the past few months, I have been talking with Sultan about this home that feels anything but homely. I’ve seen dozens of photos and videos of what she found on moving in last summer: exterior doors that don’t lock, electric wiring exposed, rat droppings everywhere and a toilet bowl encrusted with faeces. And I’ve read emails and letters and all the back-and-forth as she’s tried to get things fixed. With only partial success: visiting last week, I saw the damp on the walls, the plugged up rat holes, and, in the garden, the big black traps warning of poison inside.
This squalor was supposed to be her fresh start. After some hard years, the 38-year-old had just got remarried and fancied a new life in the suburbs of London. On viewing, she’d had some worries, but the family were assured that central heating and double glazing would arrive at the property before they did. They were even asked to pick a colour for the new door. And since those promises came from the country’s biggest housing association, Clarion, Sultan believed them.
Bad move. Not only were the works not done, but the previous resident left behind decades’ worth of belongings. More extraordinary still was Clarion’s response. Because Sultan had swapped with another tenant to move into the home, the housing association quoted the law that said it was up to the two of them to sort out the mess. After Sultan pleaded with the previous tenant, they moved everything – as far as the front yard. Some promised work was done but on other jobs Sultan kept getting fobbed off.
The filth drove the family to angry rows. Her eldest daughter moved out, while her teenage son tried sofa-surfing. The baby of the family, a shy fawn of a girl still in primary school, kept breaking down in tears. A longtime sufferer of poor mental health, Sultan felt herself slide into despair.
In emails she sent to the housing association, which I have seen, she reports a manager shouting down the phone: “I don’t care about your mental health, your mental health condition has nothing to do with the house,” and: “You will live there with the rats until we come and get rid of them.”
She tried to kill herself three times. After walking out into oncoming traffic, she wrote to Clarion: “I want to take my life. I am just too sad … I don’t think I will ever be helped or understood.” The reply began: “I’m sorry to hear that the messages you received from [the previous tenant] caused you to want to end your life.”
When I contacted Clarion, it said: “We sincerely apologise to Ms Sultan. Every resident should be treated fairly, with respect and compassion.” It disputes some parts of her story that I haven’t mentioned, yet adds: “We are determined to continuously improve the service we provide and we will learn from this case.”
It has made several similar statements over the past couple of years, as stories of appalling treatment of other tenants are splashed on telly or brought to regulators. At the offices of Sultan’s Tory MP, Stephen Hammond, staff have to deal with Clarion on residents’ behalf every day. In the constituency next door, Labour’s Siobhain McDonagh made the papers in 2021 for estimating Clarion comprised half her casework. It’s just as high today, the MP tells me: “I don’t think that their tenants and leaseholders will have seen any improvement.”
We could park all this at the door of a housing association that is too big to fail, yet is a serial failure. Its board features such establishment figures as Gavin Barwell, the housing minister just before Grenfell went up in flames, as well as big names who worked at Rothschild and Savills – but not one tenant. The chief executive of this charity, Clare Miller, took home over £369,000 last year.
Yet, ultimately, Chanel Sultan has been failed by a society that scarcely notices people like her, let alone protects their rights. The weekend papers carry their property supplements, the BBC brings you Homes Under the Hammer. No such loving attention is paid to the 4 million households in England alone who rent from a housing association or a council.
For this piece, the Guardian’s archivists went through five years of national newspaper stories and totted up how many focused on social housing. In a period that includes the aftermath of Grenfell, the cladding scandal and the death of the toddler Awaab Ishak from respiratory failure in a mould-infested home, there were 1,315 reports. Over the same period there were 6,312 articles – five times as many – on house prices alone.
In a country sharply divided between those who own assets and those who don’t, the media and political system stands squarely behind the asset-owners. Looking at the first year of the pandemic for her new book, Stay Home, Prof Becky Tunstall documents how far the then chancellor Rishi Sunak and the Bank of England governor, Andrew Bailey, went to prop up the housing market: cuts in stamp duty, mortgage holidays, lower interest rates, quantitative easing. The expensive medicine worked a treat. Where house prices had been forecast to plunge, the average home instead rocketed by £37,000 in one year. For households, she calculates, that sum “dwarfed” the value of furlough, help for the self-employed and the uplift for universal credit.
Meanwhile, renters are so unprotected that, to get a home fit for a human, Sultan had to go to superhuman lengths: numerous emails to Clarion, to the regulators, taking on solicitors, even complaining on TikTok – for which she was hit with a letter from Clarion’s lawyers, even as its contractors set about doing more repairs. Hours after receiving my questions, the housing association got in touch with the family again – even offering to proof the house against rats. Clarion says: “We are pleased that the majority of work is now complete, with full completion due next week.”
Sultan reads books with titles such as Think and Grow Rich, yet the lives of her and her children have been stunted by not being rich – and no amount of magical thinking will change that. In a society that tells everyone they can be whatever they want, she still aspires to be an entrepreneur, but she and her family have learned the hard way that promises are not reality. “I feel like I’m a prisoner of my circumstances,” she says. “Like, if you’re not a certain class, you’re not taken seriously.”
Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist
In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
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