Government announces new scheme to curb youth homelessness | Communities | SocietyGuardian.co.uk: "Government to offer housing to homeless under-25s
Hélène Mulholland
Wednesday March 7, 2007
Guardian Unlimited
The government today announced measures to stop young people who have been kicked out of their homes by their parents ending up on the streets.
The housing minister, Yvette Cooper, unveiled an England-wide National Youth Homelessness scheme that will offer temporary lodging to those under 25 with nowhere to go.
A service giving free homelessness advice will also be set up in partnership with Shelter, the housing charity, and the Citizens Advice Bureau, Ms Cooper added.
Speaking at a conference organised by Centrepoint, the homelessness charity, the minister said that young people being forced to leave the family home was now one of the biggest causes of homelessness.
"We are seeing a persistent problem of young people moving from one place to the next without ever having a proper home, which can impact severely on their life chances and put them out of reach of support services," said Ms Cooper.
The minister signalled hopes that the supported accommodation scheme, run in partnership with YMCA England, would give young individuals the breathing space to "work through problems" and increase their chances of going back to the parental home.
More than a third of new cases of homelessness last year were young people aged under 25.
Just under a quarter of people who became homeless over that period were forced to leave their last home because their parents were no longer willing to accommodate them.
The latest measures form part of the government's commitment to eliminate the use of bed and breakfast accommodation for all 16- and 17-year-olds by 2010.
Ms Cooper said: "We need to do more to help young people who find themselves homeless alone. This new partnership with the voluntary sector will help young people move away from the damaging cycle of homelessness through schemes like supported lodgings, giving them the stability and support they need to move back to a settled home."
Other measures unveiled today include a committee of former homeless young people to advise ministers on homelessness policy, and a Centre of Excellence in every region to enable councils who have made good progress in tackling homelessness to share their expertise with neighbouring councils and agencies.
A spokesman for the Department of Communities and Local Government said that all the measures would be funded out of a ringfenced £74m homelessness grant allocated to local authorities in England this year."
Wednesday, March 07, 2007
Learning from experience | Society | SocietyGuardian.co.uk
Learning from experience | Society | SocietyGuardian.co.uk
Learning from experience
Ex-drug users are advising addicts how to tackle an overdose and how to treat their dependencies
Learning from experience
Ex-drug users are advising addicts how to tackle an overdose and how to treat their dependencies
EU enlargement hits charities' pockets
EU enlargement hits charities' pockets
Mark Gould
Wednesday March 7, 2007
The Guardian
Charities providing employment and training for homeless people and the long-term unemployed are predicting mass redundancies and cuts in services as a result of delays in setting European social fund (ESF) budgets.
Homelessness charity St Mungo's faces an 86% cut in ESF cash and says it will be forced to shut projects that last year secured jobs for 125 long-term homeless people and provided training for 1,000 more.
Andy Shields, St Mungo's director of work and learning services, says the charity receives £640,000 a year from Europe, but due to the expansion of the EU there has been a delay in setting the social fund budget, which should run from next month. He says charities have been told money will be available from January next year, but fears this will be too late as staff will have to be laid off.
St Mungo's concerns are echoed across London. A survey to be published later this month by the London Voluntary Sector Training Consortium reveals that of 82 organisations in the capital, running 204 employment and training projects, 73% said the immediate lack of European funding would lead to redundancies. And 88% of charities said they would face funding gaps if they could not bid for money until next year.
Charles Fraser, St Mungo's chief executive, is calling for government crisis funding to tide them over - as is happening in Scotland - and for policy changes to protect charities from financial uncertainty. "Addressing the issue of homelessness is a long-term project that needs a long-term solution and sustained funding. It is no longer good enough to provide ad hoc funding dependent on political expediency."
The Department for Work and Pensions, which administers the fund, denies there is a funding gap, as the 2000-06 and 2007-13 programmes will overlap. But it warns: "There is no guarantee that providers that received ESF funding under the 2000-06 programme will be successful in applying for funding under the 2007-13 programme. This is particularly the case given the substantial reduction in ESF funding for the UK because of EU enlargement. We are therefore strongly encouraging all providers to prepare succession or exit strategies for when their ESF funding finishes."
Mark Gould
Wednesday March 7, 2007
The Guardian
Charities providing employment and training for homeless people and the long-term unemployed are predicting mass redundancies and cuts in services as a result of delays in setting European social fund (ESF) budgets.
Homelessness charity St Mungo's faces an 86% cut in ESF cash and says it will be forced to shut projects that last year secured jobs for 125 long-term homeless people and provided training for 1,000 more.
Andy Shields, St Mungo's director of work and learning services, says the charity receives £640,000 a year from Europe, but due to the expansion of the EU there has been a delay in setting the social fund budget, which should run from next month. He says charities have been told money will be available from January next year, but fears this will be too late as staff will have to be laid off.
St Mungo's concerns are echoed across London. A survey to be published later this month by the London Voluntary Sector Training Consortium reveals that of 82 organisations in the capital, running 204 employment and training projects, 73% said the immediate lack of European funding would lead to redundancies. And 88% of charities said they would face funding gaps if they could not bid for money until next year.
Charles Fraser, St Mungo's chief executive, is calling for government crisis funding to tide them over - as is happening in Scotland - and for policy changes to protect charities from financial uncertainty. "Addressing the issue of homelessness is a long-term project that needs a long-term solution and sustained funding. It is no longer good enough to provide ad hoc funding dependent on political expediency."
The Department for Work and Pensions, which administers the fund, denies there is a funding gap, as the 2000-06 and 2007-13 programmes will overlap. But it warns: "There is no guarantee that providers that received ESF funding under the 2000-06 programme will be successful in applying for funding under the 2007-13 programme. This is particularly the case given the substantial reduction in ESF funding for the UK because of EU enlargement. We are therefore strongly encouraging all providers to prepare succession or exit strategies for when their ESF funding finishes."
Nietzsche
Tuesday, March 06, 2007
Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | So now we've finally got our very own 'white trash'
Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | So now we've finally got our very own 'white trash': "So now we've finally got our very own 'white trash'
So now we've finally got our very own 'white trash'
The demonisation of 'chavs' as a way of writing off those at the bottom of the social ladder has reached epidemic levels
John Harris
Tuesday March 6, 2007
The Guardian
For 20-odd years my mum has taught chemistry at a Catholic sixth-form college in Manchester. I did my A-levels at the same place: Loreto, a state-funded institution with a multiracial, multifaith roll, in inner-city Hulme. Since the early 90s, the area has been outwardly transformed, though its social indicators still speak volumes: at the last count, 65% of Hulme's residents lived in rented social housing. Set against that backdrop, Loreto is a beacon of Tony Blair's beloved opportunity society - two years ago, it was awarded the Queen's anniversary prize for higher and further education, thanks to "Educational provision in an urban context [and] raising achievement and aspiration".
It seemed a good a place to do an experiment: getting my mum to write "chav" on the whiteboard, and seeing what came back - from GCSE retake students, and a class taking its weekly dose of A-level general studies. And out it all came: many preferred the specifically north-western epithet "scally", though the distinguishing features of both archetypes were apparently the same - clothing brands Nike TN, Rockport, Paul & Shark, and racial profile (the unanimous answer came back in a flash) white. Chavs, the students said, are in the habit of "causing trouble, hanging round the streets, drinking and taking drugs". They are "working class, they live in council houses". Their parents "don't care, and they don't work".
"Some might change and go to uni," said one girl. "But not many. They're the exception." So how might they go up in the world? The only options were "theft, robbery, drug money or the lottery". In terms of background, these kids seemed as diverse as any opinion-poller could wish for - but what was fascinating was a shared indifference to the people they were talking about: neither threatening nor deserving of sympathy, chavs and scallies were simply a distant other.
Here, then, is a modern folk devil maligned just about everywhere, from schoolyards to the offices of upscale newspapers. The Daily Telegraph's venerable Simon Heffer, for example, almost exactly echoed the students' responses back in January: "Our underclass has been allowed to get out of control ... They and their children regard school as optional. Drug dealing and theft are the main careers, nicely supplementing the old staple of benefit fraud." He might loudly harrumph; millions crystallise the same sentiments in the habitual use of a single word.
Just lately, it's become unfashionable to worry about all this. A spurt of unease last year momentarily recast chav baiting as "nu-snobbery". This year hand-wringing about the bullying on Celebrity Big Brother - led, of course, by "queen chav" Jade Goody - found even the Sun appearing to call time on the term.
A couple of months on, the issue lies somewhere between passe and closed down, but scan the news wires, and the continued ubiquity of the chav is revealed. The Sun still uses the word with glee ("the transformation of Coleen McLoughlin from chip shop chav to catwalk queen has amazed critics," it marvelled last week). Elsewhere, the references pile up: "Bar bans 'chav' clothes," reports Blackpool Today; " 'Chav culture' crooks jailed," says the York Press; "A storm is raging this week, over claims made on a website that Burnham is a 'chav' town," reckons the Burnham and Highbridge Weekly News. The concept seems so ingrained as to be immovable.
What that says about modern Britain seems pretty straightforward. How else to understand it than as more evidence of our embrace of an increasingly American social model, in which there is opportunity for all - apart from the undeserving rump too feckless to seize it? In short, we've finally acquired our own equivalent of that dread term "white trash". As Lynsey Hanley's superb book Estates - superficially about council housing, but actually addressing much more - points out, at the bottom of the social ladder, class has been supplanted by caste, thanks to a con trick whereby successive governments have "hived off poorer working-class people from affluent society ... when, all the while, they have claimed that we are progressing inexorably towards a state of classlessness".
Given that Alan Milburn has again crashlanded in the news, this may be an apposite moment to recall one of his key contributions to the last election campaign: a call to allow "more people the opportunity to join the middle class" - such are the affectedly aspirational politics, running across all three main parties, that start out well intentioned but end up looking hopelessly crass; and there is something particularly depressing about leading members of the Labour party presenting the essential solution to poverty as individual escape. But that argument is for another time. What's relevant here is the way that the rhetoric dovetails with the "c" word, and where the latter sits in the culture: as a signifier used by millions for some of the unfortunates who have absolutely no chance of making that imagined leap.
As proved by the views of those young Mancunians, they're occasionally prodded and demonised, but largely left alone. The rest of us - in theory, anyway - can join the meritocracy and acquire the trappings of at least modest success; to paraphrase George Orwell's 1984, chavs and animals are free.
john.harris@guardian.co.uk"
So now we've finally got our very own 'white trash'
The demonisation of 'chavs' as a way of writing off those at the bottom of the social ladder has reached epidemic levels
John Harris
Tuesday March 6, 2007
The Guardian
For 20-odd years my mum has taught chemistry at a Catholic sixth-form college in Manchester. I did my A-levels at the same place: Loreto, a state-funded institution with a multiracial, multifaith roll, in inner-city Hulme. Since the early 90s, the area has been outwardly transformed, though its social indicators still speak volumes: at the last count, 65% of Hulme's residents lived in rented social housing. Set against that backdrop, Loreto is a beacon of Tony Blair's beloved opportunity society - two years ago, it was awarded the Queen's anniversary prize for higher and further education, thanks to "Educational provision in an urban context [and] raising achievement and aspiration".
It seemed a good a place to do an experiment: getting my mum to write "chav" on the whiteboard, and seeing what came back - from GCSE retake students, and a class taking its weekly dose of A-level general studies. And out it all came: many preferred the specifically north-western epithet "scally", though the distinguishing features of both archetypes were apparently the same - clothing brands Nike TN, Rockport, Paul & Shark, and racial profile (the unanimous answer came back in a flash) white. Chavs, the students said, are in the habit of "causing trouble, hanging round the streets, drinking and taking drugs". They are "working class, they live in council houses". Their parents "don't care, and they don't work".
"Some might change and go to uni," said one girl. "But not many. They're the exception." So how might they go up in the world? The only options were "theft, robbery, drug money or the lottery". In terms of background, these kids seemed as diverse as any opinion-poller could wish for - but what was fascinating was a shared indifference to the people they were talking about: neither threatening nor deserving of sympathy, chavs and scallies were simply a distant other.
Here, then, is a modern folk devil maligned just about everywhere, from schoolyards to the offices of upscale newspapers. The Daily Telegraph's venerable Simon Heffer, for example, almost exactly echoed the students' responses back in January: "Our underclass has been allowed to get out of control ... They and their children regard school as optional. Drug dealing and theft are the main careers, nicely supplementing the old staple of benefit fraud." He might loudly harrumph; millions crystallise the same sentiments in the habitual use of a single word.
Just lately, it's become unfashionable to worry about all this. A spurt of unease last year momentarily recast chav baiting as "nu-snobbery". This year hand-wringing about the bullying on Celebrity Big Brother - led, of course, by "queen chav" Jade Goody - found even the Sun appearing to call time on the term.
A couple of months on, the issue lies somewhere between passe and closed down, but scan the news wires, and the continued ubiquity of the chav is revealed. The Sun still uses the word with glee ("the transformation of Coleen McLoughlin from chip shop chav to catwalk queen has amazed critics," it marvelled last week). Elsewhere, the references pile up: "Bar bans 'chav' clothes," reports Blackpool Today; " 'Chav culture' crooks jailed," says the York Press; "A storm is raging this week, over claims made on a website that Burnham is a 'chav' town," reckons the Burnham and Highbridge Weekly News. The concept seems so ingrained as to be immovable.
What that says about modern Britain seems pretty straightforward. How else to understand it than as more evidence of our embrace of an increasingly American social model, in which there is opportunity for all - apart from the undeserving rump too feckless to seize it? In short, we've finally acquired our own equivalent of that dread term "white trash". As Lynsey Hanley's superb book Estates - superficially about council housing, but actually addressing much more - points out, at the bottom of the social ladder, class has been supplanted by caste, thanks to a con trick whereby successive governments have "hived off poorer working-class people from affluent society ... when, all the while, they have claimed that we are progressing inexorably towards a state of classlessness".
Given that Alan Milburn has again crashlanded in the news, this may be an apposite moment to recall one of his key contributions to the last election campaign: a call to allow "more people the opportunity to join the middle class" - such are the affectedly aspirational politics, running across all three main parties, that start out well intentioned but end up looking hopelessly crass; and there is something particularly depressing about leading members of the Labour party presenting the essential solution to poverty as individual escape. But that argument is for another time. What's relevant here is the way that the rhetoric dovetails with the "c" word, and where the latter sits in the culture: as a signifier used by millions for some of the unfortunates who have absolutely no chance of making that imagined leap.
As proved by the views of those young Mancunians, they're occasionally prodded and demonised, but largely left alone. The rest of us - in theory, anyway - can join the meritocracy and acquire the trappings of at least modest success; to paraphrase George Orwell's 1984, chavs and animals are free.
john.harris@guardian.co.uk"
A doleful tale from which no one benefits-Comment-Columnists-Libby Purves-TimesOnline
A doleful tale from which no one benefits-Comment-Columnists-Libby Purves-TimesOnline
A doleful tale from which no one benefits
The pessimism of unemployment
Libby Purves
Launching the Freud report, the Work and Pensions Secretary, John Hutton, got strict about welfare reform. “The status quo is not defensible,” he said severely, seeming not to notice how odd that statement sounds from a Government that has had ten years of comfortable majority in which to change that status quo.
He said much the same thing in December — pledging to end the “can work, won’t work culture” and “hardcore” benefit claimants who won’t compete with East European migrants. Indeed, you could conclude that it is only the sight of foreigners finding jobs in two days that has made the Government notice our own shortcomings. Now the finger is pointed accusingly at the long-term unemployed, the 100,000 able-bodied and unencumbered who have spent six of the past seven years on benefits, and at the boom in incapacity benefit (currently three million claimants). We are promised “initiatives”, involving firms and charities being paid bounties to persuade people into work, combined with benefit cuts, unlovely bullying of single mothers and American wheezes like free haircuts and tattoo removal.
Well, Mr Hutton didn’t confirm the tattoo removal, not being a fool, but we get the idea. And — leaving aside the complex matter of single parents — we should all feel sympathy with the general aspiration. Long-term unemployment is a curse: it not only bankrupts the state but leaches self-respect, health and hope from the individual. Often enough it leads straight on to claiming incapacity for depression and stress (such claims have risen by a third since 1997). The bald fact is that anybody able-bodied, with no serious domestic caring to do, should earn their keep. Daytime TV is no life, nor is the well-documented route whereby the young untrained unemployed — “Neets” — are 50 per cent more likely to drink heavily, take drugs and fall ill.
There are always exceptions, but it cannot be denied that thousands are not trying very hard. In times and places with a general expectation that every herring hangs by its own tail, the most surprisingly encumbered or disabled individuals manage to earn. Just glance back in time at a prewelfare Britain, or across the world, at African women running microcredit businesses while supporting half-a-dozen Aids orphans.
Background
* Anger over benefit reform plans
* Benefits rules will hit single parents
* Free haircuts to help jobless
We all know that, really. But crunching through statistics and economic papers I found myself musing on less solid things: attitudes, feelings. One figure that sprang from the thicket was that whereas in the 1960s and 70s the average duration of UK unemployment was under one month, in the next two decades it rose to nearly seven. Doesn’t sound much, but that is an average: it hides the fact that through the Eighties and Nineties it became commonplace in many areas to be without a job or much hope of one.
It also hides creeping incapacity benefit: as mines and factories closed, doctors in depressed areas began signing sick notes for social reasons. “There’s no work here for a man pushing 50,” said one GP when the Corby steelworks closed. “So I sign him off sick. He does better that way.” He probably feels better too, officially labelled as Not A Well Man.
In 1973, I was sent to interview 17-year-olds who — shock horror! — had left school a whole year ago and never worked. “Jobless youth” was much discussed as a novelty. I remember those kids well: they were pitifully ashamed, and vainly applied to shops and hairdressers and British Leyland. A couple of years later the Today programme sent me north to interview another new species: a man in his forties, a former shipyard worker who had been looking for work for two whole years! More shock. He described his life without self-pity — the boredom, the embarrassment, too much time to worry about aches and pains, the sense of rejection when the Jobcentre could not offer even menial work. His wife, who had a cleaning job, sat quiet beside him and once said gently: “It’s not your fault, pet, everyone knows that.”
If you are under 30 and incredulous, let me reiterate that these were news stories: they surprised people. Today they would be unremarkable. And because of that — because of what happened to working people in the faltering 1970s and then the brusquely callous 1980s, when tens of thousands were thrown out of the steel, coal and manufacturing industries — the stigma of unemployment faded. It had to. Mere humanity demanded it. For a couple of decades we had in our midst a vast number of people excluded from work by circumstances beyond their control.
Thus evolved a sense that living on benefits, even without young children or a verifiable illness, is OK. Not perfect, not luxurious, but no disgrace. The euphemism “unwaged” handily put carers under the same umbrella. But a nihilistic sense of benefits as a permissible way of life got passed to the next generation. At the same time a poverty trap developed whereby a low wage brought in less than benefits. Gordon Brown’s working families tax credits (although sometimes chaotic) have helped, but the trap still exists: if a single unemployed parent gets even a tentative job, the free school meals, transport, dentistry and prescriptions abruptly stop. Meanwhile, fussy and prescriptive workplace law makes employers ever less willing to take a chance on any but the star candidates. The long-term unemployed rarely look starry.
John Hutton is right: the status quo is unacceptable both in economic and in humane terms. But those who brandish carrots and sticks and hair-clippers must understand that often their enemy is a fatalistic state of mind which, though unhelpful, is explicable. That, not simple idleness, is the difference between a second-generation British refusenik and an ambitious Pole who still believes, owing to his very different national history, that life’s natural path leads upwards.
A doleful tale from which no one benefits
The pessimism of unemployment
Libby Purves
Launching the Freud report, the Work and Pensions Secretary, John Hutton, got strict about welfare reform. “The status quo is not defensible,” he said severely, seeming not to notice how odd that statement sounds from a Government that has had ten years of comfortable majority in which to change that status quo.
He said much the same thing in December — pledging to end the “can work, won’t work culture” and “hardcore” benefit claimants who won’t compete with East European migrants. Indeed, you could conclude that it is only the sight of foreigners finding jobs in two days that has made the Government notice our own shortcomings. Now the finger is pointed accusingly at the long-term unemployed, the 100,000 able-bodied and unencumbered who have spent six of the past seven years on benefits, and at the boom in incapacity benefit (currently three million claimants). We are promised “initiatives”, involving firms and charities being paid bounties to persuade people into work, combined with benefit cuts, unlovely bullying of single mothers and American wheezes like free haircuts and tattoo removal.
Well, Mr Hutton didn’t confirm the tattoo removal, not being a fool, but we get the idea. And — leaving aside the complex matter of single parents — we should all feel sympathy with the general aspiration. Long-term unemployment is a curse: it not only bankrupts the state but leaches self-respect, health and hope from the individual. Often enough it leads straight on to claiming incapacity for depression and stress (such claims have risen by a third since 1997). The bald fact is that anybody able-bodied, with no serious domestic caring to do, should earn their keep. Daytime TV is no life, nor is the well-documented route whereby the young untrained unemployed — “Neets” — are 50 per cent more likely to drink heavily, take drugs and fall ill.
There are always exceptions, but it cannot be denied that thousands are not trying very hard. In times and places with a general expectation that every herring hangs by its own tail, the most surprisingly encumbered or disabled individuals manage to earn. Just glance back in time at a prewelfare Britain, or across the world, at African women running microcredit businesses while supporting half-a-dozen Aids orphans.
Background
* Anger over benefit reform plans
* Benefits rules will hit single parents
* Free haircuts to help jobless
We all know that, really. But crunching through statistics and economic papers I found myself musing on less solid things: attitudes, feelings. One figure that sprang from the thicket was that whereas in the 1960s and 70s the average duration of UK unemployment was under one month, in the next two decades it rose to nearly seven. Doesn’t sound much, but that is an average: it hides the fact that through the Eighties and Nineties it became commonplace in many areas to be without a job or much hope of one.
It also hides creeping incapacity benefit: as mines and factories closed, doctors in depressed areas began signing sick notes for social reasons. “There’s no work here for a man pushing 50,” said one GP when the Corby steelworks closed. “So I sign him off sick. He does better that way.” He probably feels better too, officially labelled as Not A Well Man.
In 1973, I was sent to interview 17-year-olds who — shock horror! — had left school a whole year ago and never worked. “Jobless youth” was much discussed as a novelty. I remember those kids well: they were pitifully ashamed, and vainly applied to shops and hairdressers and British Leyland. A couple of years later the Today programme sent me north to interview another new species: a man in his forties, a former shipyard worker who had been looking for work for two whole years! More shock. He described his life without self-pity — the boredom, the embarrassment, too much time to worry about aches and pains, the sense of rejection when the Jobcentre could not offer even menial work. His wife, who had a cleaning job, sat quiet beside him and once said gently: “It’s not your fault, pet, everyone knows that.”
If you are under 30 and incredulous, let me reiterate that these were news stories: they surprised people. Today they would be unremarkable. And because of that — because of what happened to working people in the faltering 1970s and then the brusquely callous 1980s, when tens of thousands were thrown out of the steel, coal and manufacturing industries — the stigma of unemployment faded. It had to. Mere humanity demanded it. For a couple of decades we had in our midst a vast number of people excluded from work by circumstances beyond their control.
Thus evolved a sense that living on benefits, even without young children or a verifiable illness, is OK. Not perfect, not luxurious, but no disgrace. The euphemism “unwaged” handily put carers under the same umbrella. But a nihilistic sense of benefits as a permissible way of life got passed to the next generation. At the same time a poverty trap developed whereby a low wage brought in less than benefits. Gordon Brown’s working families tax credits (although sometimes chaotic) have helped, but the trap still exists: if a single unemployed parent gets even a tentative job, the free school meals, transport, dentistry and prescriptions abruptly stop. Meanwhile, fussy and prescriptive workplace law makes employers ever less willing to take a chance on any but the star candidates. The long-term unemployed rarely look starry.
John Hutton is right: the status quo is unacceptable both in economic and in humane terms. But those who brandish carrots and sticks and hair-clippers must understand that often their enemy is a fatalistic state of mind which, though unhelpful, is explicable. That, not simple idleness, is the difference between a second-generation British refusenik and an ambitious Pole who still believes, owing to his very different national history, that life’s natural path leads upwards.
Sunday, March 04, 2007
Islington Gazette - Residents' fight over estate plans pays off
Islington Gazette - Residents' fight over estate plans pays off: "Residents' fight over estate plans pays off
nlnews@archant.co.uk
21 February 2007
CAMPAIGNERS - (left to right) Kathy Donald, Cheryl Gillett, Bill Newman and Terry Lewis
CAMPAIGNERS - (left to right) Kathy Donald, Cheryl Gillett, Bill Newman and Terry Lewis
AN ASBESTOS-RIDDLED estate that could collapse if there was a gas explosion is finally facing demolition - if Islington Council approves the redevelopment plans.
It is almost four years since it was revealed the Packington Estate, off Essex Road, Islington, was at risk of collapse if there was a gas explosion.
But now residents say they are delighted with redevelopment plans submitted by housing association bosses at Hyde Housing - who will take over control of the estate from council chiefs in the spring.
The proposals will see the sprawling 539-flat estate replaced by a mixture of 840 houses and flats on a street-based scheme.
Cheryl Gillett, chairwoman of the Packington Square Shadow Board, representing residents' views on the redevelopment, said: 'These are our homes that we're losing through no fault of our own. We've been in many a battle to get what we want and we've got everything we want.
'We're looking"
nlnews@archant.co.uk
21 February 2007
CAMPAIGNERS - (left to right) Kathy Donald, Cheryl Gillett, Bill Newman and Terry Lewis
CAMPAIGNERS - (left to right) Kathy Donald, Cheryl Gillett, Bill Newman and Terry Lewis
AN ASBESTOS-RIDDLED estate that could collapse if there was a gas explosion is finally facing demolition - if Islington Council approves the redevelopment plans.
It is almost four years since it was revealed the Packington Estate, off Essex Road, Islington, was at risk of collapse if there was a gas explosion.
But now residents say they are delighted with redevelopment plans submitted by housing association bosses at Hyde Housing - who will take over control of the estate from council chiefs in the spring.
The proposals will see the sprawling 539-flat estate replaced by a mixture of 840 houses and flats on a street-based scheme.
Cheryl Gillett, chairwoman of the Packington Square Shadow Board, representing residents' views on the redevelopment, said: 'These are our homes that we're losing through no fault of our own. We've been in many a battle to get what we want and we've got everything we want.
'We're looking"