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Housing

A young mum was left to rot in a home not fit for animals – and everyone needs to know about it

For too long successive governments have chosen to retreat from its basic obligation to ensure its citizens are housed in decent, safe, affordable homes

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.

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.

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I have spent nearly four years investigating the UK’s housing and homelessness crisis from every angle, sitting with homeless children on the streets as their parents desperately try to find them shelter for the night. But it has taken an eight-part audio series to really explore how we got here, who is to blame and what is being done about it.

In a story about power, it yanks the microphone away from those with it and hands it to those without it, the people who for too long have being ignored and dismissed and belittled. These are the stories too many people still haven’t heard, until now. In the age of true-crime podcasts, listeners won’t find anything more criminal than what we uncover about the state of Britain’s housing crisis. 

Daniel Hewitt is investigations editor for ITV News.You can hear the full series of The Trapped at thetrapped.co.uk or wherever you get your podcasts.

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