Mohammed Zaroof in his warehouse
At 8PM on the 21st of December last year, Mohammed Zaroof left the warehouse he and his brothers had recently purchased, climbed into his car and drove back to his house on the other side of Stockton-on-Tees. His plan was to relocate the repair garage for the taxi firm he and his brothers own into the building so it was only a short walk from the dispatch centre, rather than on the other side of town.
At 8.20PM he received a call telling him that the warehouse was in flames, with three masked figures spotted leaving the scene. He rushed back with his brothers to watch a fire crew wrestle the blaze. At that point, the warehouse was full of donations for Syria, collected by a charity Zaroof had given the space to before he moved in. Clothing, food and winter blankets all burned to ash. After a certain point, he could no longer bear to stay and watch.
Videos by VICE
“All this was brand new and ready to move in,” says Zaroof, showing me around his fire-damaged warehouse, five months later. “And now we’re having to re-do the lot.”
As we talk at his desk in the taxi firm’s office, a tremble in his voice hints at emotion ready to bubble over, but his words are straightforward. The warehouse fire has left him £70,000 out of pocket, he says. Insurance won’t cover it, since the storage of garments by the charity fell outside the uses of the warehouse he’d designated in his insurance policy. The police have also closed the case. As with many instances of arson, any evidence of the perpetrators’ identities burned up with the fire, although Zaroof feels there was a racial element.
“I explained to the police that it’s the seventh incident that’s happened in my family,” he tells me. “But do they care? Do they shite.”
READ ON BROADLY: Hot for Hacker – Meet The Women Obsessed With Edward Snowden
Across the country as a whole, arson is a far bigger problem than you might think: in fact, it’s the single biggest cause of fire in England and Wales. In 2014-15 there were 68,400 deliberately started fires, and in the most recent economic report (published in 2008), arson was estimated by the government to have cost the economy £1.7 billion in the preceding year, without factoring in environmental and social costs. In an average week, 20 schools will deal with deliberately started fires and one person will die in an arson attack. All things considered, it’s amazing we don’t hear about it more.
Although his case is unusual in its scale and severity, Mohammed Zaroof is just one of many victims of arson in the Cleveland administrative area – home to Middlesbrough, Stockton, Hartlepool and Redcar – which has the highest incidence of deliberate fire setting in the UK. According to the Cleveland fire brigade, seven out of every ten fires they respond to are deliberately set. Their website even features a prominent Stop Arson campaign, complete with deterrent YouTube videos and slogans: “When you start a fire, you’re not just killing trees.”
(Image: Fire Statistics Monitor 2014-15)
The slogan is apt, given the nature of deliberately set fires. As government statistics show, the vast majority of these are classed as secondary fires, a category that includes most small outdoor fires, refuse fires and fires in derelict buildings. The latter provides one clue as to why Cleveland has the country’s highest arson rate: as in many other towns and cities in the north east of England, certain neighbourhoods have high numbers of empty, abandoned or derelict buildings.
To see this for myself I travel up to Middlesbrough, where a local journalist (I’ll call him Dan, as his employer requested not to be identified) said he’d show me around. Dan confirms that many of the arson cases he’s aware of relate to abandoned properties, and to illustrate his point we take a short drive out from the city centre to an area called Gresham: a network of streets in which almost every single house is vacant, windows and doors barred with stainless steel grilles, floors strewn with broken glass, walls splashed with graffiti. (We struggle to make out the words of one large piece, which has been sprayed over many times; finally I realise that it says “SAVE OUR HOMES”). Signs of petty vandalism are everywhere, among them various blackened corners where small fires have burned.
The story of Gresham is a sad one: back in 2005, then-Middlesbrough mayor Ray “Robocop” Mallon declared that 1,500 homes in the area were going to be knocked down and rebuilt as part of a grand regeneration scheme. But the project stalled – not least due to the financial crisis that would throw the country into recession a few years later – and by 2013 only 215 properties had been demolished. In the meantime, homeowners and landlords were reluctant to invest in houses they thought might be subject to compulsory purchase orders at any moment, and an already downtrodden area fell into greater disrepair. (The surplus of housing stock in Gresham has also been put to use housing asylum seekers, and made the news earlier this year when it turned out they were identifiable by their red doors).
Derelict buildings in Gresham
Empty buildings don’t themselves cause people to set fires, but they’re linked to factors that do. Various academic studies on fire setting, especially in adolescents, have found correlations with the presence of “environmental stressors”: an unsafe physical environment, dysfunctional family relations, physical abuse or emotional neglect. And all of these are heightened risk factors in an area that suffers from a combination of endemic poverty, huge cuts to public services and chronic unemployment.
At a regional scale, the north east of England has the highest unemployment in UK, and within it Middlesbrough is the worst performing local authority: unemployment here is at 11.1 percent, or more than double the national average of 5 percent. Of all those who are out of work, it’s young people who are likely to come off the worst: unemployment among under-25s hit a staggering 33 percent in recent years, meaning one in every three 16 to 25-year-olds looking for work will not be able to find it. Again, it’s not that joblessness causes people to burn things; but arson falls on a spectrum of antisocial behaviours, along with vandalism, physical aggression, alcohol and drug abuse, etc., that are far more likely to occur when people’s prospects for the future – and indeed the present – are bleak.
The local police and fire services are both cagey about giving any interviews on the specifics of the problem, as are Teesside University, which conducted specific research on the topic but say they can not disclose their findings. Cleveland Fire Brigade does send a statement, in which Phil Lancaster, Director of Community Protection, says:
“Arson is a costly blight on the community and our main focus is on education and prevention. Research shows that many fires are deliberately started by young people. Through such initiatives as our Firesetter Intervention programme, we advise children and their parents or carers on the dangers of fire with the aim of addressing any potential problems at an early age and to prevent them continuing into adulthood. We also use our schools education programme to teach our young people about the impact of arson on their neighbourhoods, the environment and themselves if they are caught setting fires deliberately.”
Though no one from the intervention programme in Cleveland is available to comment, I talk to a representative from an equivalent programme in the London Fire Brigade. Tolu Arinze, Case Administrator for the Juvenile Firesetters Intervention Scheme in London, says young people can be motivated to start fires out of curiosity, anger or just a need for attention:
“I wouldn’t say that all the cases that come in are because of family issues,” Arinze says, “but there is a high percentage where there are problems in the family home. It could be parents divorcing and one of them moving out, or, in other cases, a child might be with foster parents or other family members because parents can’t look after them. Then there are things like peer pressure: some kids want to act tough and impress their friends, or just go along with what their friends are doing, and even by being present when the fire was started, they may not realise that if they didn’t do anything to stop it they’re guilty by association, and if a group of people start a fire someone could be arrested just for being there.”
In London, Arinze’s department tackles fire setting through a mix of education sessions in schools, providing support for parents and children, and reassuring young people who are tempted to set fires that they can get help in a non-judgemental way.
The remnants of a small fire in Gresham
The story of arson here is a mixed one. Every now and again, someone will set out to inflict some real, life-changing damage, as happened to Mohammed Zaroof and his family. There can be absolutely no excuse for this, and anyone involved should feel the full weight of the law. More often, though, fires will be started by bored adolescents searching for a cheap way to make some kind of excitement, or to let off steam about any one of the many reasons they have to be angry at the world. For these young people, the Firesetters Intervention Scheme is a far more appropriate response.
On the day I leave, fans across the town are getting ready for a night of celebrations after Middlesbrough FC won promotion to the Premier League. Playing in the top flight can bring big income to a club and greater acclaim for the city or town that hosts it. It’s not unreasonable to hope that along with “The Mighty Boro”, the fortunes of the region as a whole are on the up.
Previously:
Crimes Across the UK: Exploring Why Burglary Is So Common in Leeds
