HOW COUNCILS DELIBERATELY SET OUT TO ABUSE HOUSING LAW

AND TO WILFULLY DESTROY PEOPLE’S LIVES WITHOUT A THOUGHT TO THE CONSEQUENCES

Dear Mr ……………,

Apologies for this being so long, but all these points mentioned are so inextricably entwined it is difficult to disentangle them to make this shorter.

I have just received this email from from the council official ………… to you below. 

She seems to be making no sense at all to me and I cannot understand why she is making problems where none would normally exist. The only reasonable explanation is that it appears she is oblivious to the facts surrounding this matter. Viz:

– She smugly announces in her email to you below that the Council has… ‘so far paid a lot of public money to store…………. belongings and he has made no attempt to arrange to pay this money back or to sort through the containers and dispose of what he will not be able to take to a 2 bed property’.

She is utterly disregarding the immense extra expenditure of public money which she has been unnecessarily responsible for in behaving in the manner she has done. So far well in excess of £10 000 of public money has been unnecessarily spent when a mere fraction of that amount could have been applied to sort the problem out differently.

– This Council official is suddenly and suspiciously stung into life by your contact with her today and on being informed the indications are that I might well be moving into settled accommodation within just seven days or so, she suddenly says, “I will confirm with the removal company tomorrow when they can make the containers available for collection and I will let you know.  If they have not been collected or payment taken over by that date, they will be disposed of the next day’.  I think you will agree that the Council has been very patient in this case and allowed far more time for storage than the statutory requirement at a significant cost to the public purse.’

She seems quite unaware that not paying a mere £63 for the final seven days of storage prior to my imminent move, measured against the existing investment in storage is an expression of pure, mindless, bureaucratic spite which I cannot help but think is quite, quite deliberate.

This Council official is also displaying incredible and obviously deliberate unpleasant inconsideration by explaining that the storage containers ‘must be collected by a certain date otherwise the goods will be disposed of the next day’.

She is consciously and deliberately inventing hurdles which she must know are insurmountable so that there can be a guarantee that she can dispose of my possessions without me having the slightest prospect of retrieving them . This is venal, dishonest and nasty.
 

The containers in which the goods are stored are specially designed to be carried around by the Removal company’s lorries and remain on those lorries while they are loaded up with items to be stored.

The lorry then returns to the removal company’s warehouse where the large sealed containers are lifted off the lorries by large machinery and placed in permanent, storage where they cannot be accessed without reversing the process and using specially designed heavy machinery to move the containers back onto lorries to drive to the location where the contents will be removed from the containers while they remain on the lorry.

These containers are likely to never be available for collection at all as they belong to the removal company and they cannot be moved without special equipment and specifically designed lorries specially designed to carry them for delivery and unpacking at the final destination.

It is not practicable or feasible to unpack the containers at the removal company’s premises and re-pack the goods in some other vehicle for delivery elsewhere, even if the removal company would allow it – which I doubt.

The only sensible option is to pay the removal company their fee for delivering the goods to their end destination.

– I currently have no means whatever of paying £2000 plus. 

– I have had no means of ‘sorting through these containers’  until I am properly accommodated. 

– All of the household goods stored came out of what was effectively a two bedroomed property as the third bedroom in that property was so microscopic it merely contained one single bed and one small pinewood storage box doubling as a bedside table and absolutely no other items at all. 

As a quid pro quo to compensate for the cubic volume of that bed & box, I left behind  quite a significant volume of items when I was forced out of the house at 24 hours notice with no time to pack etc. Included were a very large, bulky double futon  style sofa and or double bed, at least one large & bulky armchair and sundry other items which escape me at present. 

This meant that the third and very small bedroom contents of the house I vacated could be ignored as being irrelevant. It therefore follows that with just the contents of a very small kitchen, two not very big bedrooms and one lounge in my previous house, that the contents of those rooms could, should and would fit into a two bedroomed property with a kitchen & lounge.

Whether it might be desirable or not for me to root through everything I own and chuck some of my possessions out is entirely a matter for me, without the necessity of council officials  interfering and becoming involved in micro-managing my personal domestic life on my behalf. That is quite ridiculous.

It is therefore the case that the Council official is entirely misinformed on this point she raises.

– The Council  led me to believe that I was eligible to be housed by the Council by virtue of priority housing need and that this included the storage of my household possessions by the Council. The Council housing officer and other council officials told me unequivocally on more than one occasion that this was the case and I was never, at any stage, warned that the Council were seeking to avoid their legal duty as proscribed by Parliament. There was also an absolute and clear statement by the housing official to me that the Council would bear the cost of household goods storage and she specifically told me to make a list of all my possessions with this in mind.

Her precise words were ‘the Council will pay for the removal and storage of your possessions, but only an amount which will be able to fit into a two bedroomed property, as that is all you will get. So you will have to get rid of some of your things as you have far too much and it will not all fit into a small two bedroomed flat’.

When I asked her for clarification of this as she, as far as I am aware, had never visited my house, and could not possible know anything at all about the contents, she repeated that I should make a list of everything I owned and intended to take to another two bedroomed property and forward it to herself for her approval and determination that, in her opinion, there were not too many items for a two bedroomed property. She made a categoric statement that she needed to approve my list of possessions and tell me exactly what I could and could not take.

I was unable to make a list of everything I owned and this request had the effect of exacerbating the state of stress I was already experiencing to produce a state of mental and physical paralysis which could only be dealt with by completely blotting out such mindlessly destructive bureaucratic nonsense and doing something more useful, while taking great care not to even think about such ludicrousness because if I did allow myself to think about it, it immediately had a very damaging effect on me.

– Having completely misled me (as I only now realise for the first time) as to my position in terms of being housed and the storage of my household goods and who would be paying for them, it is the case that nobody at the Council ever informed me at any stage of anything concerning the correct procedures or lawful rights etc that might be relevant, and should be taken into account by me in terms of whether I might or might not have to pay for my household effects, and whether the Council might seek to weasil out of accepting any legal liability for priority housing need by virtue of mis-applying previous case law surrounding other cases of Councils turning to the courts in seeking ways of carrying out Central Government instructions to turn away people in otherwise legitimate ‘priority housing need’ to leave them to fend for themselves with a blatant disregard of the obvious intentions of the Housing Act.

Specifically, for instance, that absolutely no explanation was given to me about the fact I might be refused housing by the Council on spurious legal grounds or that the Council would refuse to pay for the storage of household goods, having already expressly told me they they would, in fact pay for that storage, and that I was being told I was obviously in ‘priority housing need’ by virtue of having a child to look after.

With hindsight, I can now see it would be normal human decency for a council housing official to point out that although I was on the face of it guaranteed housing by virtue of priority need, there was a minefield of legal hurdles I knew nothing about, specifically conjured up by many Councils seeking to avoid housing people in manifestly obvious ‘priority housing need’ as defined by the Housing Act, because they had been told by Central Government to reduce housing costs by arbitrarily refusing to house various categories of people previously granted priority need council housing accommodation.

And that also, common human decency would dictate that council housing officials would advise people as to the true nature of what may happen in terms of paying for the removal and storage of household goods and not mislead them in the outrageous manner I was misled.

There was at no time any statement to me of what the law or council rules might have applied about what might or might not happen to domestic house contents in situations like this. In fact I was even further misled by many people I talked to who had experienced similar situations of priority housing need and subsequent re-housing by the Council, who told me all their storage and removal costs were paid for by the council, even including the costs of kenneling dogs or cats.

I was at some point also informed by the housing charity that the Council had a legal obligation to remove and store all domestic possessions, and that also included pets such as dogs.

This issue of kenneling dogs seemed to be confirmed when the Council at first produced a wide variety of excuses and difficulties to not provide any assistance whatever to kennel my large dog, but without ever making any clear statement of outright refusal to assist. And then subsequently, appearing to accept their liability to house my dog when the housing charity made vigorous representations to them.

The Council continued to fail to do anything about paying for the kenneling of the dog by claiming they required a vaccination certificate – although the dog was already placed in kennels by me and the kennels had already inspected a vaccination certificate to their satisfaction which was still valid for at least the next six months.

Even when the Council were given a copy of a current duplicate vaccination certificate they still claimed not to have seen a vaccination certificate (which they did not require anyway) as a spurious, purely imaginary, bureaucratic excuse not to pay for the kenneling.

When the housing charity advised me the Council did, in fact have a legal duty to keep safe all of my domestic possessions, and this included pets as indicated by the very large number of cases whereby Councils do take on this obligation to house pets without trying to avoid it, I never for one moment imagined the Council would become increasingly truculent and determined to refuse to accept any of their legal obligations as set out by statute.

– Furthermore I also have several previous money claims against the Council  which have not yet been resolved. These claims exceed by a large margin the amount that the Council have spent and are spending on the storage of my domestic goods.

– It is also the case that I am challenging the unlawful decision of  ‘intentional homelessness’ dreamed up by this Council in the courts and if it this matter is found in my favour the Council will be asked to both pay compensation and damages for their behaviour as well as the costs of storage.

– That it is a deliberately and immensely spiteful  and a breathtakingly monstrous decision of the Council that, after taking these domestic household effects and storing them for seven months, misleading me into believing they would store them until I was properly accommodated, to then wilfully and maliciously deprive me of all my Worldly domestic possessions by giving them away to a charity shop just a few days before I can move into settled accommodation is a gross abuse of their power and obviously malicious and must therefore be actionable in law under the circumstances. 

– It would also appear to me to be an obvious abuse of the Human Rights Act in terms of both proportionality and the concept of a respect for a right to unfettered domestic and family life which the Council seem to be going out of their way to unnecessarily destroy, which has been amply demonstrated in every aspect of my housing application to the Council.

This final declaration by the Council Housing Department in the shape of this housing official, for it is her that makes these decisions and issues these diktats, really takes the biscuit for it’s wicked spite and deliberately constructed awkwardness designed to do nothing but obstruct, obfusticate and deliberately leave me entirely destitute by the brazen wickedness of stealing all my possessions; as well as thwart my moving into the unfurnished accommodation which has been arranged.

This will, of course, ensure I will become street homeless and my son will be obliged to move into Council care at a vast cost to the State, which this spiteful, braindead woman will have deliberately engineered with a pious whine that she was ’just doing her job’ and just obeying the rules’ etc etc.

Idiots like this deserve to be shot, at least metaphorically so, for the immense harm they do to society as this horrible and nasty person will be doing to me and my son – destroying his family life in it’s entirety and forcing lifelong disadvantages upon him which will colour his whole existence and dog him for his entire life.

What a thoroughly miserable, nasty person this Council Housing official is.

LETTER FROM THE COUNCIL HOUSING OFFICIAL TO OTHER PARTY

Dear Mr…….

 
I confirm that the Council is not prepared to further fund storage or removals for Mr…….
 
We have so far paid a lot of public money to store Mr …..’s belongings and he has made no attempt to arrange to pay this money back or to sort through the containers and dispose of what he will not be able to take to a 2 bed property. 
 
To date, the Council has not acted on the Section 41 notice served on Mr …… stating that his goods would vest in the interest of the local authority on August 1st as the outcome of the review had not been determined.  This authority can no longer justify paying £63 per week storage for Mr…………’s belongings. 
 
Given that the Council is not prepared to pay any more money to fund Mr…………., the options as I see them are:
• Mr …….. pays for himself
• Social Services pay
• The housing charity pays
• Combination of the 3 options above
 
I will confirm with the removal company tomorrow when they can make the containers available for collection and I will let you know.  If they have not been collected or payment taken over by that date, they will be disposed of the next day.  I think you will agree that the council has been very patient in this case and allowed far more time for storage than the statutory requirement at a significant cost to the public purse.
 
Regards
 
A miserably, mean minded and destructive Council Housing official

Tags: family, Homelessness, Politics