Once upon a time it seemed like the vagaries of the London housing market were only whined about by the same rich tosspots who thought Nick Hornby invented soccer, but in the last couple of years that’s all changed. Housing in the capital is now a problem for the masses: in the last two years, much of central London has been bought up by foreign investors and with the government capping Local Housing Allowance, an increasing number of poorer households are being squeezed out into the city’s peripheries. Thanks to the central borough of Westminster offering cash incentives for people to relocate to smaller flats and houses—nearly all of which are located in the city’s outer reaches—areas such as Newham, already suffering from homelessness and high levels of illegal immigration, are being stretched to their absolute limits.
The situation is getting so bad that earlier this year the Guardian reported that the Newham council had been sending dozens of homeless people to live in a hotel in Birmingham’s red light district. When I called the hotel to find out what was going on, the receptionist panicked and threatened to sue me if I came anywhere near the building, which would have been tough for her since at that point she didn’t know my name or what I looked like. When I tried my luck with Newham officials, however, I was told that the council’s housing department was in a state of crisis. Sending asylum seekers and claimants looking for subsized housing to another city over a hundred miles away was, they claimed, the only option left to them. To hammer their point home, they invited me on a raid of illegally rented properties earlier this month.
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I gratefully accepted.
Turning up to meet the reps from the Newham council, I saw that I wasn’t alone. Eight ludicrously bulked-up officers from the UK Border Agency were also there to greet me, crammed into two black people carriers like a Navy Seal team sent to protect the British public from—shudder—the threat of financially incapacitated foreigners.
It seemed odd to me that UKBA would want a journalist along for the ride, given that they seem to have spent the last few months making themselves as unpopular as possible—with the “go home” vans parading through immigrant communities, paper checks that amounted to racial profiling at tube stations, and a Twitter feed that often read like it’s being manned by someone whose usual political communiques are swastikas scrawled in pub toilets. But anyway, here we all were, a merry gang of #immigrationoffender hunters.
The thing is, immigrants are a fairly low-key bunch on the whole who are generally just trying to fit in and, you know, not get deported. There might have been a few windows covered by newspaper rather than curtains on this road in Newham that was supposed to be an illegal alien stronghold, but honestly it looked a lot like any other street in suburban London. In order to get the police into the houses, the meek-looking council workers would knock at people’s doors, then when they opened up the giant robocops would spring out of nowhere and force their way inside. The plan seemed somewhat questionable to me.
I followed the police up the stairs to the first of the flats being inspected that morning. The air was stale and it felt like the window had been closed for days. The cramped, sparsely lit space wasn’t great, but it was liveable, at least by the standards of anyone under the age of 25. The border police, though, clearly weren’t impressed—they looked horrified as they considered the unfolded duvets in the hallway, the curry splattered over the walls, the shocking spectacle of paper towels, in packets, stored in a broken cubbyhole above the stairs.
Unsurprisingly, the occupants of the flat weren’t into my camera. The police assured me I had a right to be there, but after taking a couple of photos I left and went outside anyway, not wanting to invade their privacy as they were being interrogated. That’s when a council rep told me about a property they’d recently discovered housing 38 people, 16 of whom were children.
Despite their dilapidated state, rooms in flats like that one were still going for £300 (about $460) a month, lining the pockets of property owners who in many cases rely on them as their sole source of income. The council worker told me that one landlord, who owns an extensive network of properties across Newham and who lives in a large estate in Essex, is currently under investigation. However, as the police piled out ten minutes later with one of the men in cuffs, it was hard to tell who this raid was meant to punish: dodgy landlords, or the desperate illegal immigrants they lease their properties to.
The man pictured above, who was suspected of overstaying his visa by a matter of weeks, joked with his friends as he was bundled into the back of a police car. A female officer explained that they were students here to find work and a better education for a few years before heading home.
We continued on and knocked on the doors of a bunch of properties on the same road, but around 10 AM things went quiet and people stopped answering. If I was an illegal immigrant going about my morning routine—making some eggs, picking up a few tips from Cowboy Builders—I’m not sure I’d have opened the door to the border police either.
Minutes after knocking on one door, however, the sound of a struggle could be heard over the traffic from the main road. We made our way to the back of the property and climbed onto the roof. A window was open and the border control police shrugged. Their verdict? The occupants had either a) scaled the building and run off down the street, or b) gone to their neighbour’s house. Apparently there was no point in testing the latter theory, because they were “obviously not going to open the door to us now.”
The police looked forlorn. They had been defeated by nothing more formidable than a locked door. There we all stood, conspicuous and stumped, on the roof of the empty house. From our vantage point we could see rows of cheaply built sheds thrown together in the flats’ narrow yards—most weren’t larger than a single small room and didn’t have any windowns. The police told me that they’d been put up by landlords to maximize the number of people they could pack onto one property. I was led downstairs and shown one that had seemingly been abandoned at short notice, with blankets strewn across the floor and an iPhone 5 playing an incessant marimba.
Back on the other side of the street, an Indian woman opened the door, insisting that only she and her grandmother lived there. After some persuasion, the police and council workers went inside and I followed. We found two men asleep in a bedroom at the end of a long corridor. A policewoman roused them and asked for their names and ages. The first cooperated, but the second apparently got his story jumbled: he said in a Punjabi accent that he was 22, then changed that to 25. The mood didn’t improve when he insisted that he was English but had forgotten how to spell his own name. The woman who had invited us in didn’t seem to know very much about her two male housemates, backing away into a living room decorated with large, brightly colored posters of Hindu gods.
While I’m aware that my presence probably meant that the day’s hunt was at least 30 percent PR exercise, the police hadn’t really grown aggressive at any point. But here things went a bit wrong. A second policewoman barged her way into the room and threatened the one who’d fluffed his lines. “You don’t really want to upset me, mate,” she growled.
What would she do if she got upset? None of us knew. The man garbled some more, he was garbling himself into a hole. “I’m getting angry, mate,” she said. “Don’t try to lie to me, mate.” At this point, the poor guy wasn’t making much sense and decided to adopt a strategy of appeasement. “I’m sorry, my darling,” he said.
This isn’t a good thing to say to a female police officer. “I am not your darling!” she screamed back, before launching into a bewildering speech on the basic tenents of women’s lib. As you can imagine, this was awkward and I kind of wished someone would deport me out of the room. Even her colleagues began to shuffle and fidget nervously.
The other cops were keen to placate her and get me as far out of hearing distance as possible. A few more piled into the bedroom to play peacemaker, which meant there were now six cops on hand to deal with two nonviolent men, which seemed a bit excessive.
When the hysterical policewoman refused to leave the room for a minute so the two men could get dressed, I turned around and left. In a bedroom at the other end of the corridor, a kid-sized England soccer hat hung from one of the room’s four bunkbeds. The woman who had answered the door to us stepped inside with her husband and explained to me that the hat belonged to her son, who lived in India with his grandmother. They try to visit him as often as possible, she said, and hope that one day they can bring him to the UK to live with them permanently.
The Newham council invited me on these raids to show what a tough time they were having with the area’s housing situation. More than anything, though, it reinforced how fearful we still are of displaced people just trying to improve their own existences. As I left the bedroom, the woman followed me back down the stairs, past the police, and onto the street outside. Before I left, she wrote directions back to the station on a piece of paper and wished me a safe journey home. Which, to be honest, was more than the police had said to me all morning.
Follow Nathalie on Twitter: @NROlah
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