Within minutes the talk had turned to rats: rats in bin sheds, rats in drainpipes, rats scratching above ceilings and behind walls. First spotted rooting in rubbish, they have since advanced, climbing, gnawing, exploring. Rats are suspected of chewing through wiring, short-circuiting the intercom system, so that neighbours overhear each other speak. Rats have died and decomposed just inches from where humans prepare food.
“The first sighting of them was reported back in April,” says Marlice Johnson (pictured), a resident of David Clifford Court, a development of 49 London Affordable Rent homes in Purley that was formally opened by housing association landlord Southern Housing in August 2022. Marlice’s recollection is that the presence of rats was initially made known to Southern by phone, but that action wasn’t taken until a follow-up email was sent during the summer.
“We had pest control come in,’ Marlice says. “They sent Southern a report to say they needed to mend a wall and fill in holes and put mesh backing on the bin store doors, because that’s how they get in from outside. But the job still isn’t finished.”
Marlice showed me in through the housing block’s front door – the door that stopped working soon after residents moved in. “We had months with it being open,” Marlice says. “It wouldn’t shut properly and the handle came off.”
On the other side of the entrance hall, a second door leads to the building’s interior. That hasn’t always functioned flawlessly either. “If it’s not one door, then it’s both,” says Marlice. “Sometimes, there has been free access from outside to the entire block.”
Today is one of the better door days – both are functioning correctly. But as Marlice and I talk in the space between them, we are joined by some of Marlice’s neighbours, half-a-dozen fellow women, black, brown, white, with young children, with illnesses and disabilities to deal with and more: people with heavy burdens and big responsibilities; people who describe being at their wits’ end simply being residents of David Clifford Court. “Just living here in general is stressful for a lot of people,” Marlice says.
From the beginning – as somehow feels inevitable with stories of this kind – the building’s sole lift didn’t work reliably. “We had issues with that very early on,” Marlice tells me, noting that it was out of use on the day she and her five-year-old daughter moved in. When we meet, it has been behaving properly for more than a week. “But the question is always, how long for?”
For some, the lift’s capriciousness has meant annoyance and inconvenience. For example, couriers might not bring packages up to people’s flats, especially if they are on the higher levels of the block, whose levels range from five to seven floors. This has resulted in parcels being left by the entrance hall post pigeonholes, which are only large enough to accommodate letters. This, in turn, has sometimes resulted in those parcels going missing, nourishing a larger sense of insecurity.
Other residents have been profoundly affected by the lift’s recurring faults. “I’m not happy at all,” says one of Marlice’s neighbours, joining the entrance hall huddle. We’ll call her Maria, to conceal her identity. Some years ago, Maria’s husband sustained a number of serious injuries, including to his spine. He is unable to walk and cannot get around without a wheelchair. They live with their 12-year-old twin daughters on the first floor.
Back in the summer, Maria’s husband had an appointment for an important surgical procedure, scheduled for Monday 12 August. He also had a hospital date a few weeks prior to that for a pre-operation assessment. That morning, he used the lift to descend to the ground floor in his wheelchair and was then driven to that first appointment. So far, so good. But while he was out, the lift packed up. Maria sought urgent help with getting it fixed, but when her husband returned that evening the job hadn’t been done. In the end, Maria called the Fire Brigade to get her husband back into his home.
Worse was to follow. A few days before the operation booked for 12 August, the lift went wrong again. Again, Maria phoned to get it mended, explaining the grave need to have it working again by the following Monday morning. Again, the job wasn’t done in time. Maria’s husband’s operation had to be cancelled. She says she has been told it cannot be rescheduled until July 2025.
Our gathering is augmented by a man, a little older than the group of women. “Don’t get me started,” he smiles, getting started. “This building’s a pile of crap. It’s just nothing but trouble.” He echoes the frustration of his fellow tenants: “There’s never a week when there’s not something. If it ain’t the lift, it’s the door. If it ain’t the door, it’s the lift.”
Another of the David Clifford Court mums has two children, one of them a nine-year-old with autism and an eating disorder, which limits the range of foods she can consume. Let’s call the mother Anne. Among Anne’s complaints about the block is a problem she had with her wi-fi. She couldn’t get a signal, even though she was paying for that service. She recounts a visit from a BT engineer: “He said, ‘Your internet line is going into the lift’.” It is wryly observed that had you become stranded in the unreliable elevator, you would at least have been able to get online.
Back to rats. “I think there’s a drainpipe at the back of the bin shed and there’s a hole round the drainpipe,” Anne says. “I hear them in my ceiling, scratching. Is that not a fire hazard if they’re chewing cables?” Another woman has her small child with her. She has an 11-year-old too, a daughter, another autism-sufferer: “She can hear them when she’s in bed. She wakes up every morning at four.”
“It’s so depressing, living here,” says Anne. “You don’t want to invite anyone round, cos you’re embarrassed. You walk through here, and sometimes the smell of dead rats is overwhelming. We’ve got dead rats outside, right on the pavement. No one should have to live like this.”
Also in the huddle is the lone mother of another primary school age child. Let’s called her Jane. She has escaped from domestic violence and, because of a hip problem, has difficulty walking. Jane has lots of stories to tell, including her own contribution to the rat diaries: “I’ve got a dead one in my living room wall.” On seeking help, she was advised to be cautious about plugging things in: a decomposing rat corpse can be a runny thing and you don’t want one dripping on your sockets.
*2*
Let’s hold our noses for a moment and step back. What is the backdrop to this torrent of dissatisfaction? What has led to the frustrations of those residents of David Clifford Court?
Fully answering those questions ultimately means looking beyond Southern Housing and going back some way in time. But let’s begin with Southern’s recent history.
In May of this year, the Housing Ombudsman, whose role is to resolve disputes between social housing landlords and their tenants, published a special report about Southern.
It was highly critical. It was based on an investigation of all cases brought to the Ombudsman’s attention by Southern residents it had determined between 30 June and 31 October 2023, some of them relating to complaints made as far back as late 2018. There were 77 in all. The “maladministration rate” by Southern, meaning its failure to do something it should have or taking too long to do it, was found by the Ombudsman to be 79 per cent. The rate for the handling of complaints within that total was a sky-high 92 per cent.
The special report concluded that Southern had “failed to take responsibility for complaints, delayed in responding and lacked empathy for the time, trouble and distress caused to residents”. In addition, it said Southern had “failed to proactively take effective ownership of ASB [antisocial behaviour] cases, repairs and its contractors”.
Stories of ASB featured strongly in accounts of the unhappy David Clifford Court residents I met. Jane described a fight involving knives taking place outside her flat that left blood spattered over her front door, a fight that might have involved fellow residents, people who should never have been in the building, or both. She said the ground outside her kitchen has been a landing space for dog-ends, used tampons and bits of glass that have descended from floors above.
The lure of the bin sheds for Purley’s rats, reasons Marlice, can only have been increased by the failure of some residents to place their food rubbish inside the bins provided. Residents told me it is harder to know who in the block is causing problems because CCTV cameras that might otherwise help identify culprits, are dummies – designed to deter but not to actually film. They would like Southern to do more to tackle miscreants in their midst.
Following the Housing Ombudsman’s assessment, there came another report on Southern, which made similar points. In August, the government’s Regulator of Social Housing, whose remit is wider than the ombudsman but also covers services provided by landlords to tenants, published a “regulatory judgement” of Southern, one of its first under a new inspections programme.
The judgement could have been worse – Southern was given a C2 rating in the “consumer” category, which measures landlords’ performance against four “consumer standards”. A C1, top marks, would have been better, but a C3 or a C4, the lowest rating, were also available. Even so, the regulator “found evidence of weaknesses in the provision of an effective, efficient and timely repairs service”.
The judgement said Southern was taking “appropriate steps to resolve these weaknesses”, including “resourcing its complaints team”, and had responded to the Housing Ombudsman’s investigation with an action plan. However, at that point, the regulator’s inspectors had “not yet seen sufficient evidence of improved outcomes for tenants”.
You will have noticed that the residents of David Clifford Court have had to cope with precisely the shortcomings the Housing Ombudsman and the Regulator of Special Housing identified, primarily a poor repairs service and inadequate handling of tenants’ complaints in general.
Why was such a major provider of affordable homes failing to do that very basic part of its job well? Both the regulator and the ombudsman traced the weaknesses in Southern’s very beginnings as an organisation. It was born in December 2022, the product of a merger between the Optivo housing association, based in Croydon, and the Southern Housing Group, one of the largest housing associations in the country.
The Southern Housing Group had roots in the earliest days of housing associations in London. It had grown out of the Samuel Lewis Housing Trust, founded in 1901 with an endowment by the money-lender and philanthropist from whom it took its name. The trust built homes for London’s poor in Hackney, Fulham, Chelsea and Camberwell.
Then, exactly one hundred years after its creation, the Samuel Lewis Trust changed its name to Southern Housing Group, reflecting its ongoing amalgamation of other, smaller housing associations and the wider geographical area in which it by then operated.
The newly-formed Southern Housing, although it didn’t have the word “group” in its title, was therefore a still larger and rather complex organisation, owning and managing around 78,000 homes and operating not just in London but also the wider south east of England, the Midlands and the Isle of Wight. Based in Sittingbourne, it has the full-time equivalent of around 2,400 staff and had a turnover for the year ended 31 March 2024 of £609 million.
The regulator’s judgement recorded that, post-merger, Southern consisted of no fewer than 31 different entities, a structure it was in the process of simplifying. It found Southern to be financially viable and governed well. However, it said the new association, not helped by the weaknesses in its repairs service, was struggling with a backlog of complaints inherited from the pre-merger period.
The Housing Ombudsman’s special report, solely about complaints, covered the same point in depth. It said the whole approach during the merger did not “extend sufficiently to complaints handling and achieving a positive complaints handling culture”. There was a “lack of ownership” at play, a view its investigation found among residents and, indeed, within Southern itself (page 12).
A “lack of adequate communication” was apparent even on Southern’s website, said the special report, as it was “not immediately obvious how to contact it to complain”. There was a case study of a lone mother of two young children who couldn’t get a response to her complaint about her heating and hot water not working for eight months. Members of Southern’s own staff reported internally that there was “no sense of urgency” from service delivery teams.
It is ironic that an argument made in favour of the merger was that better, more cost-effective services could be provided if a single, larger housing association was formed.
In April 2020, pre-merger, the Regulator of Social Housing had downgraded the Southern Housing Group because its governance and risk management needed improving. The response to this and other concerns, including about fire safety and the condition of its stock, prompted the group to restructure at the top and freeze recruitment further down in an effort to improve efficiency.
But the ombudsman’s report records Southern itself saying this “ultimately caused detriment to service delivery and an increase in complaints which it was not properly resourced to handle” (page six). The group had a bad pandemic, in sharp contrast to Optivo, those erstwhile chief executive, Paul Hackett, took up the same position at Southern Housing when it was formed.
Both the ombudsman and the regulator noted the readiness of Southern to be open to their inquiries and give assurances about putting things right. But their landlord has some ground to make up with the unhappy tenants of David Clifford Court.
*3*
Jane invites me into her ground floor flat. The kitchen windows, which extend to the floor, open on to a children’s play area. The play area is attractive. The windows, though, don’t look in great shape. Plastic wedges hold the glass in place and moisture appears to have seeped into it. Jane says the windows leak, allowing damp into atmosphere, leading to mould which she periodically wipes away.
She shows me a photo of her and her mother standing next to the windows, in a puddle. She also shows me pages from the findings of a surveyor sent to inspect them, set out on Southern headed paper.
Jane isn’t satisfied with everything in the surveyor’s report, but draws my attention to a striking finding: “It was apparent that the windows installation was incomplete.” Jane says she would like to open the windows, “but I can’t because I’ve got rats running up the outside walls”.
This isn’t Jane’s only complaint about her home. Like Maria, she had previously rented privately and was offered her place at David Clifford Court by Croydon Council, having bid for it in the normal way. “This was meant to be my forever home after escaping domestic violence,” she says. “But it can’t be.”
During my short visit, Jane struggles round the flat, dragging her bad leg behind the other. It is what she describes as one of her good days with her disability. But not all days are good. On others, she needs a wheelchair to get about – something that is easier said than done. She says the doorways are too narrow (“I’m scraping my arms on the frames”), it is difficult to navigate round some of her basic furniture, the cooker is too low for her to reach down to, and there is no storage space for her chair.
When we meet, Jane is expecting to have surgery on her hip in a few weeks’ time. She says, though, that it won’t happen; that she’s been advised that her flat isn’t suitable for her to return to as, following the operation, she would be fully wheelchair-bound while recovering. Croydon’s website lists a ground floor flat in the block as “wheelchair adapted” and limits bids to applicants in need of that type of property. But as far as Jane is concerned, her home doesn’t do the job.
Jane used to work full-time as a chef, but those days are gone. She says she’s fallen “many times” while in the flat and had to get her daughter to help her to get up again, and even to call an ambulance. She has a carer, and her mother, who lives and works nearby, sometimes comes in before work to do some cleaning. Jane says she wants to live as independently as she can, but “tomorrow morning, I might not be able to get out of bed. I’m 28, but sometimes I wet myself because I can’t get out of bed quick enough. It’s degrading.”
She says her previous flat was easier to live in than this one. “This is horrible,” she says. “Horrible.”
*4*
Next, I go up to Maria’s flat, taking my chances in the lift. I meet her husband, who is propped up in bed. Maria shows me some of the problems they have with the flat itself. Moving around it in the wheelchair is more difficult because it has carpet on the floors. The biggest problem, though, is the bathroom.
To bathe or use the toilet, Maria’s husband needs help with getting in and out of his wheelchair. They asked Southern for grab rails to be installed, but the job has only been partly done. The wall next to the toilet was, Maria says, judged not strong enough to support a handhold to bear her husband’s weight. This means Maria must accompany him on every visit. She says the effort of lifting him is taking its toll on her back.
“I asked them to remove the carpet,” she says, “because it’s very hard for him to manoeuvre. I didn’t ask for them to do that in the whole flat, only his room and the hall. And then to come and check the bathroom and do what need to be done for a disabled person.” I ask her what had happened since. “Nothing,” she says.
However, despite these difficulties, the lift emerges as the couple’s greatest source of distress. “There are so many issues, but the lift is the major one,” Maria’s husband tells me. Maria elaborates. Hospital appointments of various kinds are an ongoing feature of her and her husband’s lives. As dates for them approach, their anxiety levels rise.
“I am not sure, when the time come whether the lifts will be working,” Maria says. “I’m just putting my hand on my heart and praying that it will not be broken.” She makes a pointed contrast with Southern’s efficiency as a rent collector: “When we moved here, they were very quick, very sharp. For the rents, they were showing their face. But once they got the rent running, they disappeared. It’s not fair. Nobody will come and speak to us.”
Looking after her husband is not the only major caring responsibility Maria has, as one of her daughters suffers with a kidney condition. Life would be so much easier for the whole family if they had a ground floor home, with easy access to the outdoors.
How did they end up where they are? Although Southern Housing is their landlord, the flat was allocated by Croydon Council. Like other local authorities, Croydon designates households with disabled people as a high priority group, but explains that that doesn’t rule out offering them dwellings that aren’t at ground level, once an applicant’s needs have been assessed.
Low-cost council or housing association homes are in short supply for everyone in Croydon – the council currently has over 8,200 households on its waiting list – and Maria and her husband, unsurprisingly, leapt at the chance to move in to the brand-new Southern block. However, the suitability of a first floor flat for a wheelchair user is, of course, severely compromised if the lift service is fitful. Having encountered so many problems, Marie and her husband would like to move.
*5*
I am relaying in detail only some of the stories I was told during my two-hour visit to David Clifford Court, and primarily those that directly involve Southern Housing’s customer services and residents’ concerns about the building’s quality.
Another story concerns what a resident regards as Southern’s failure to act speedily after sprinklers were activated by a cooker fire, resulting in the water damage being worse than it might have been and a disagreement about compensation.
Marlice is involved in a dispute about the aftermath of returning from a holiday to find her flat drenched due to a leak from the flat above hers. Southern is paying for her repairs, but Marlice thinks her landlord hasn’t properly investigated whether the leak came from her upstairs neighbour’s washing machine or from a pipe connected to it. This leaves her worried that it might happen again.
Is Southern getting to grips with the shortcomings found in its service to tenants as both the Housing Ombudsman and the Regulator of Social Housing hoped?
Last month chief executive Paul Hackett said on LinkedIn that as “post-merger integration” – presumably the simplification process the regulator mentioned – continues, their customer contact centre is upping its game.
He commended a description on Southern’s website by its Head of Performance Optimisation, Dave Harney, of an “exciting journey” towards this goal, mentioning, among other things, “designing, developing and delivering a quality assurance framework” for the Customer Transactions Directorate and maintaining “knowledge bases” to “support a resident centric response”. Harney pointed out that “customer contact centres are known for having high turnover rates of advisors”. He pledged to slow this down and “accelerate our ‘speed to competency’.”
Perhaps progress is being made. My visited to David Clifford Court was on 18 October. Since then, the lift and the two entrance doors have been working properly and Maria has received a response to her complaints. In that response, Southern apologised about the lift, acknowledging that “it has intermittently been out of service for several months”. It apologised, too, for not having completed all agreed “minor adaptations” to the flat by the end of January 2024 and for having failed to review their case for moving elsewhere.
The response seems to say that a mix-up meant adaptations to the flat were not carried out precisely because an urgent move was accepted as being needed as “the property was deemed unsuitable”. It appears to have been concluded at one stage that Maria’s family would be moving soon, so “no adaptations minor or otherwise were undertaken on that basis”. Maria has been offered £230 in compensation for these failings. Southern’s response to her added: “We have undergone a restructure since the merger to help improve our service to all our residents”.
Asked about the family’s situation, Southern told me that if residents feel their home doesn’t meet their needs “we can run through their housing options and discuss what support we can offer”. Maria told me that a conversation of that nature with someone at Southern had left her with the impression that actually getting rehoused would entail starting all over again with a fresh application to Croydon. Last week, she called me to say that in a subsequent phone call she’d been assured that that was not, in fact, the case and that Southern could in principle move her and family to more suitable home from its stock. A panel, she said, would be considering their situation.
For the time being, though, Maria, Marlice, Anne, Jane and others have been feeling like victims of an unresponsive and even obstructive bureaucracy that has repeatedly failed to get a decisive grip on their often very distressing situations. They, and others, feel the building as a whole is of poor quality. And they question the housing association’s commitment to their happiness in general.
“It feels like it’s very discriminatory, how we’re being treated,” Marlice says. Anne’s view is similar: “When you’re a social housing tenant you’re made to feel you ought to be grateful. The attitude is ‘Why are you moaning?’”
For Marlice, “It’s gone past the point of complaining. For a while, you could kind of filter lots of it out when you walked into your own flat, but now you can’t because there are so many problems with rats in the walls or repairs that haven’t been done and people above you who are just loud and have no care for anybody else.”
*6*
I contacted Southern about the situation with the block, initially asking them to comment on the problems with the doors, the lift and the rats, and with antisocial behaviour. In a statement dated 25 November 2024 they said they were “working closely with our residents at David Clifford Court to resolve the issues they’ve raised with us”.
On rats, the statement said that additional bins have been ordered in an attempt to reduce “overflowing rubbish” and added that their pest control contractor was “due to visit several times over the next two months to carry out treatment” and also conduct “proofing works” on order to “seal off any entry points for pests”.
Southern apologised for the problems with the lift, but said it has been fixed and working properly since 8 October. They acknowledged receiving “reports of damage on multiple occasions to the communal entrance door due to the closing mechanism being tampered with” but said it was now fixed and secure. The statement expressed confidence that the door entry system as a whole which, as Marlice had explained, has been changed since the block was opened.
The statement also said Southern takes reports of anti-social behaviour “extremely seriously” and that there were no outstanding cases at that time, having closed the most recent one in June. Unexpectedly, it said Southern was “unaware of any issues with the windows” and urged any resident with such concerns to get in touch.
I had asked if someone in a senior position at the housing association would speak to me, but this request was not taken up. Puzzled by the reply about Jane’s windows, I sent Southern a photograph of one of the pages from the surveyor’s report – the one with Southern’s logo at the head of the page shown above that said the installation of the windows was incomplete.
I also asked Southern if it was happy with the standard of the building work, which was done by Guildmore Ltd, a company based in Bromley, at a cost of £40 million. And I asked if it was correct that some, perhaps all, of the block’s CCTV cameras were dummies. Southern replied, saying that they would not be providing me with any further statement.
*7*
These are, without doubt, very difficult times for all providers of affordable housing, councils and housing associations alike. Financially, like the homebuilding sector as a whole, they are struggling to make their numbers add up. Along with the generally unhelpful economic conditions, Grenfell’s legacy casts a long shadow – removing combustible cladding and needing to adapt to new safety requirements cost money and cause hold-ups.
Addressing these problems can, in turn, generate further ones. In a recent talk for The London Society, Richard Blakeway, the Housing Ombudsman himself, anticipated more and more mergers of housing associations as a way to relieve financial pressures and these, in a context where London’s various housing crises are so overwhelming, producing “a creeping normalisation of responses, a sort of tolerance of things that aren’t tolerable”.
The horrors Grenfell, of course, also haunt the thoughts of disillusioned residents of David Clifford Court – a sad state of affairs for a block named in memory of a former Optivo board member. They are determined and they are persistent. Having already approached local MP, Chris Philp, to come to their aid, Marlice has now contacted one of her three local councillors and awaits his reply.
Meanwhile, Southern Housing continues to pledge to improve its service to those living in its homes. Marlice, Maria, Anne, Jane and fellow residents will be following their progress closely.
Many thanks to the residents of David Clifford Court for giving their time.
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