A place to call home

|PIC1|There are officially 250,000 people living in Newham, but look more closely at some of the people coming in and out of the basements, garden sheds or garages in the area and you may just be looking at some of the additional 70,000 people believed to be living there illegally.

They are Newham’s “hidden population”, says Peter Watherstone, trustee of the new church housing charity Just Homes. They include the jobless, those on very low wages or without access to benefits, failed asylum seekers and single mothers.

Whatever the reason for their poverty, they often face cramped and unsafe living conditions at the hands of landlords content to rip them off, ignore housing and occupation rules, and disregard planning and building regulations.

“There is a load of people who will never be able to afford their own homes because their incomes won’t enable them to do that, who aren’t even on the radar, who are living in maybe concrete boxes down the bottom of people’s gardens or in basements,” says Peter.

It’s not that there isn’t any social housing in Newham; it’s just that there isn’t enough of it. One third of households in the East London borough earn less than £15,000 a year, while the Local Authority is struggling to meet the needs of the 29,000 people on the waiting list for social housing.

It’s little wonder then that some landlords are seizing the opportunity to line their own pockets at the expense of the helpless. Just Homes trustee and Baptist minister, Bruce Stokes, heard of one landlord who divided a single room with two screens in order to fit in three couples and another who charged a tenant £100 a week for a windowless basement.

Even within his own congregation at Woodgrange Baptist Church, he knew of people squashed into a three-bedroom house with 15 other people. “Landlords are renting out smallish properties and just cramming people in. People are making a killing out of this,” he says.

Peter and Bruce have teamed up with fellow Christians, church minister Simon Clinton, property specialist Toheeb Dosunmu, and ex-offenders worker Bankole Akinlade, to launch Just Homes. For them, the housing issue is one that the church must address.

“I often ask myself if the church left the community would the community miss our actions?” says Toheeb, CEO of LPS Estates. “I believe that if Jesus were here today He would be picking people off the street and providing accommodation for them. If indeed we are the salt and light, we need to get involved with every situation and every problem in our society and housing is one of the main issues around at the moment.”

Just Homes takes over the social housing arm of First Fruit, another charity founded by Peter in 1997 to provide accommodation and work for homeless, unemployed and marginalised people of all faiths and none in Newham. It already houses over 40 people in six different properties, including families, refugees and ex-offenders. One place in Forest Gate houses single, unemployed mothers who volunteer in a coffee bar set up to fund the house through its profits.

“Sadly, when it comes to housing the marginalised, those struggling to get by, it’s always someone else’s problem, they’re always being passed on. We know we can’t fix things for everyone we encounter in difficulty but we want to be able to do what we can,” says Simon.

Aware of the need to expand, the trustees are urgently seeking investors and potential landlords to help reach their goal of overseeing 100 more properties and securing £1 million of investment within the next 10 years.

For those unable to invest, there is the chance to be a real friend to those who often don’t have any friends, perhaps by helping them with the shopping, moving in, or just lending a sympathetic ear.

People planning some time away could consider entrusting their house to tenants until their return, while those with underutilised spare bedrooms or sofa-beds could invite someone in to share their home and save them from a night on the park bench.

Peter and his wife Hannah have hosted many people in need of a home over the last few years. The experience has not always been easy – neither for host nor guest – but it has ultimately proved to be a blessing and a real way of demonstrating Christian hospitality.

“The gift of hospitality is one of the gifts that Christ wants us to exercise in the church because there are many strangers in our land,” says Hannah.

That’s why Just Homes is above all else, a Kingdom project, says Bruce.

“Jesus subverts the way that society operates and the belief that there are some people who are more important than others.

"Actually it is those people at the bottom that Jesus paid particular attention to in order to make the point that everybody matters.

"What drives us to do this isn’t a love for housing. What really drives us is the concern that God treats everybody as equally important and therefore has particular concern for those who are excluded.”