Piercing the south London skyline, the tower blocks on Regina Road in Croydon give no hint of the horrors inside. Cream-coloured cladding covers the outside, red trim around each window. They are the kind of flats you will have driven past a thousand times and never given them a second thought, barely registering their existence.
As a TV journalist, when I pulled up in front of them in my car almost four years ago, my plan was to film with a young mum living in poor housing conditions with her two boys, hear how she had complained to the council, get their response, file a report and move on to another story. Stepping into flat number seven, my eyes could barely register what they were seeing. These were homes not fit for animals, a family left to rot like the walls around them, in a capital city dripping with wealth. Four years on, I am still working on the story. I can’t let it go, because everyone needs to know about it, and people’s lives depend on it.
- ‘The most vile place I’ve ever seen’: Families stuck in ‘uninhabitable’ temporary housing
- Housing crisis: Cost of buying an average home in England now unaffordable for all but very rich people
- Keir Starmer: ‘This Christmas I am pledging to make sure no one faces homelessness’
That is why we made our podcast: The Trapped. Housing, social housing in particular, is not an obvious subject for an eye-witness audio-only documentary series. But the podcast, tracking the investigation that began the day I entered Regina Road, is not really about housing. It is about power – who has and who doesn’t. It is about who gets listened to, and who is easily ignored. It is about what life is really like in the forgotten and neglected corners of a country with the means but not the motivation to change things. It is also about choices. For too long successive governments have chosen to retreat from its basic obligation to ensure its citizens are housed in decent, safe, affordable homes.
The day after airing our TV report from Regina Road on ITV News, the floodgates opened. Emails and messages from social housing tenants from across the country kept coming and coming, so much so that we set up a dedicated housing email address – housingstories@itv.com.
Nearly four years on, that inbox is still going, still being used by people contacting us about their housing situations. Whenever we thought we had seen everything, witnessed the worst housing imaginable in a rich, developed nation, we would somehow stumble upon places that would shock us further. The housing crisis is counted in lives left in limbo – trapped in squalid or unsuitable or unsafe conditions that destroy lives.
Journalism, my profession for more than a decade, has had far too little to say about housing for too long. It is treated as a specialist subject, or barely mentioned at all, when it in fact bleeds into all that we are. Without a safe, secure place to live, what are we? Our physical and mental health, our job prospects, our relationships, our happiness all depend on it – when home is chaos, so is life. It defines us. Home is where we start from.
