Meet the social housing activist campaigning for tenants’ rights within the UK

Our Observer, Kwaju Toynboa, didn’t grow to be an activist by alternative. As an alternative, he started combating for tenants’ rights after dwelling in a London council home for years together with his deceased father and two sisters.

After watching his father being cared for by nurses in an residence that was infested with cockroaches, mice, rats and asbestos, Toynboa started touring across the UK documenting social housing situations and pushing builders to enhance them.

Lively on Twitter and TikTok, Tweneboa shares photographs and movies of squalid situations within the flats, together with mildew, leaks, flooding, bugs, and collapsed surfaces.

I have been to houses flooded with uncooked sewage and tenants compelled to stay in. You identify it, I’ve seen it, I’ve taken folks to the hospital as a result of a part of the roof collapsed on a woman whereas she was feeding and serving dinner in her kitchen.

There was a disabled tenant, for instance, a disabled man who has gone virtually a yr and not using a bathroom on his property as a result of they by no means got here to repair it.

 MTV HOUSING ASSOCIATION – Inexperienced Tubular Spiders have crashed into the partitions of a property in South London.

– KWAJO- Social Housing (KwajoHousing) November 28, 2022 His posts deliver landlords into motion, after a long time of neglect.

In a single case in February 2022, after a video of cockroach-infested housing was posted on social media, the household stated he lived there was moved to Lodge inside 24 hours by L&Q, the main residential developer, and a brand new everlasting allotment has since been allotted.

The roots of Britain’s housing disaster will be traced again a long time to the federal government of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and the Housing Act of 1980.

Since then, the social housing inventory has declined, pushing many low-income households to the decrease finish of the personal rental market, the place they’ve fewer rights. of social tenants.

Many tenants dwelling in poor situations do not feel like they will file a grievance, Tweneboa advised us, since personal landlords can difficulty no-fault eviction notices with out giving a cause.

Sadly, within the UK we see time and time once more a narrative come out the place folks die in their very own houses because of this.

I obtain folks telling me they stay in comparable circumstances, not solely within the UK, however from Northern Eire, from Paris, I’ve obtained folks from the US. They noticed the work I used to be doing right here. And what shocks me most is the variety of people who find themselves in a position to relate to it, not solely within the UK however overseas, and people who find themselves in comparable, if not worse, circumstances.