Facing Pride And Prejudice

Facing the repossession of our house, myself and the woman who lived there plus her ten-year old son initially sought to move to rent another house nearby, partially so that we did not have to have the chickens slaughtered and the boy could go to the same secondary school next year as he had intended to attend; the end of September being the deadline for applications to enter the competition for secondary schools. As I have noted before, in our town there are ten secondary schools, but five of them he could not apply for being either the wrong gender, the wrong religion or he had already been ruled out from attending on the grounds his teacher’s felt he would not pass the 11+ Examination. However, we soon found that because we had defaulted on paying our mortgage, we now have a black mark on our credit rating for the next six years, by which time I will be 50, so barring us from renting a house or in fact any other property, via a letting agency. We must now only rent property from a private landlord/lady who does not do a credit check.

With a seven-year waiting list for social housing in our town even for a woman with a primary school aged child, the options seemed to be living on the street or going to live with our families. Of our relatives only my parents and the woman’s sister live in this country. If my parents or her sister had managed to emigrate to Australia as they planned, then I would now be living in a tent illegally camped on common land and the woman and boy, I have no idea where. It is incredible how quickly in the UK you can go from having a house and a job, to having nothing and either being homeless or begging people for a bed. Hence the title of this posting. I have mentioned before how people now see the period of the British welfare state, of approximately 1948-82 as being anomalous. The ‘norm’ is what we are experiencing now. If you have work you may still need to ask for charity, just look at the number of people in employment getting food parcels from the Trussell Trust and other such charities. If you lose your job, depending on where you live, you may become homeless or be put up in a bed and breakfast room. There are apparently some council houses and flats left but personally I only know one couple who have managed to get one and they did that over a decade ago now.

Thus, people end up living with their families. The number of middle-aged people who, like me, with no other option, have gone to live with their parents once more is so much that it was warranted a feature in ‘The Guardian’. I have gone from being a renter and then an owner of a three-bedroomed house to living in a square room which is only 10cm longer along any wall than I am tall. Since the start of June alone, I have applied for 39 posts and have attended 13 interviews. I was offered a job which I accepted 8 weeks ago. Unfortunately I picked on someone to write a reference who went on holiday for 5 weeks so delaying the start date of my job which is still ten days away. I have been told that the work for me is piling up, but because of the precision required around references I am not able to start the job and begin reducing it. Apparently two of the three referees I had to provide have not been able to give the exact dates on which I started and left my employment, in one case going back to 2005; there is an issue about whether I started one job on the 1st or the 10th of a particular month. Due to this need for precision I am in this weird limbo of ‘having a job’ but not actually being employed. I guess people on zero-hour contract, i.e. with no assigned hours each week but required to be constantly available on call, can understand that previously anomalous, but now entirely acceptable position. I am still signing on unemployed while I wait for this situation to be resolved.

So I am living with my parents. Naturally I feel as if the last 26 years have been an utter failure. I am in fact worse off than when I left home to go to university at the age of 18. It is as if nothing that happened in the meantime ever amounted to anything. Mentally this is hard to deal with, but I am repeatedly told that I should not mention feeling down or confused, or any of the natural emotions losing your house and job throw up. The other thing I have stepped into a play of manners. The woman from my house is suffering it even more. When you are unemployed let alone when you are homeless, people feel that they are obliged to tell you how to live your life. Clearly everything you have ever decided to do, every decision or effort you made was wrong, it has been proven to be the case. This means that any opinion you hold is wrong and must not be expressed as it is illegitimate. Family members keep telling us how wrong we are. Any suggestions about improving our situations are dismissed as wrong or delusional and yet we are told that we are feckless, lazy, not applying ourselves. We are illegitimate and even if we accept that, it does not stop us being told many times per day that we are ‘wrong’. The criticism does not just stretch to work or economic issues but to everything. The woman from my house was questioned at length because she happened to kiss her former boyfriend when she met him, something her sister happened to witness. She was harangued when she mentioned in passing that she would like to buy a DVD of a particular series in the future. There is a sense that we should not even discuss or think about these things, these are not for the likes of us. 

As you see in dramatisations of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens novels the family members seem to take delight in correcting us.  On one hand they feel a very heavy duty to correct us but also appear to get a pleasure or at least some contentment from doing it.  It is as if, because we failed to remain in work and keep our house, we must be doing things wrong right through our lives down to where we sit in the house, where we put glasses, how we communicate with other people and even how happy we are.  I am constantly being told off for looking 'too sad' as if given that after months of bullying and the collapse of the life I had I must be able to put all that behind me immediately and march boldly forwards without any feelings if something reminds me of better times, typically something I did with the woman and boy from my house.  Seeing 'Dr. Who' listed in the newspaper was painful as it was a programme that I would watch and discuss with the 10-year old and now I will never do that again.  It is not a bereavement or even a divorce but it feels incredibly close to those things and yet I have to keep on apologising for those feelings as they are 'inappropriate' in my current setting.

Since I lost my last job, I have increasingly felt as if I have become a species apart from other people. They can go into shops, they can think about a new car or a holiday even. I am not even allowed to discuss buying a DVD. Advertising now seems like something in an alien language. There is no point watching any of it, because even if there is something I can afford, if I bought it, it would be ‘wrong’. It is as if I have slipped through a membrane and whilst I slide through consumer society, I cannot touch or interact with it. Given my age, it is apparent that I will never likely touch it again. No house means no way to fund my care when I am elderly. For the first time I have begun to understand the rioters of last summer. You feel no qualms about damaging things from this other world that you are barred from. To think otherwise is equivalent to those who ran the Apollo space missions suddenly feeling guilty about damaging the Moon by landing men on it. It is that removed from my life now. This is why politicians fumble around for some explanation of what went on and simply blame whatever they want to criticise. If you can alienate a 44-year old, well-educated man from society, how are you going to hold on for those who had a lot less going for them and would envy the kind of life I have led up until now.

My father has not policed who I might kiss, but he has opinions on everything and seeks to put his nose into every corner. I was trying to speed up the references I was waiting for. My approach to writing an email to one of the referees actually worked out better than I had anticipated. However, it was not the way my father would have written it so I had to stand there why he shouted at me how much of an idiot I was and how naïve and foolish I was to think that was the right way to do things. My way succeeded, but because I am now categorised as being ‘wrong’ it still needed me to be abused. Talking to the Job Centre, he stands nearby tsking and criticising every response I give. I am caught between answering the demanding questions in a way that I think my father will approve of. I can never be ‘right’ even when my decisions are shown to be correct.

The fact that we are receiving charity means that every aspect of our behaviour can be policed. We have to be seen to be deserving of help. This is achieved by looking for jobs, not just any jobs, but the ones which our family feel we must get. If we do not get them, or in my case, not start them soon enough, then it is our fault. It is not because unemployment is too high or I am too old or too qualified or all the other excuses companies give me for not employing me. Whatever stops me and even more the woman from my house, in getting back into work is purely and simply our fault and we need to be lectured at length about it. We are incredibly grateful for the help we received knowing we would be on the streets otherwise, but the price demanded is impossible to pay, it is a thirst for indignation directed at us that can never be sated. It is not helped by the myths that these people believe in which I have highlighted before, the most common, ‘how come you cannot get council housing, all these immigrants turn up in Britain and get given a three-bedroomed house for nothing’. This is not true but they would rather believe the ‘Daily Mail’ than the actual responses you have got from councils and benefit bodies.

Another aspect is the house rules. I have mentioned before, the challenge of being a lodger. You will always fail unless you can precisely read the mind of the homeowner. The rules are immense, down to where you can put a glass, the amount of food you can eat, when even down to what demeanour you must have and what you can talk about in the house. Any violation leads to another round of haranguing, because if you have put a cup out of place then it shows once more how useless, feckless, lazy you are and you must be alerted to and lectured about that. It is exhausting but clearly satisfies some need in the charity-givers psyche. This has shown me why, as Francis Beckett highlighted in ‘Clem Attlee’ (1994), Attlee disliked charity and insisted that the state should dispassionately give assistance to those in need. The direct giving of charity, unmoderated by organisations, is acidic to the souls of both the giver and the receiver. Of course, this is something that Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and those other writers who so effectively wrote about our times feature in their novels. The mid-20th century anomaly is over and I suppose as I find myself facing ‘Hard Times’ I guess tolerate a lack of ‘Sense and Sensibility’ and simply cope with the ‘Pride and Prejudice’ and pray that I can get a job and rent somewhere to be away from here.

The Steady Path to Repossession of Our House

Early on with me posting to this blog, way back in 2007, I wrote a lot about the agonies of being booted out of one house by a landlord and then buying another house quickly.  Now, almost three years on, I am in a position to see how much of a mistake that rapid house purchase was.  December 2007 was the worst time to move, with house prices and interest rates seeming to be going to rise inexorably, we felt lucky to get a fixed-rate mortgage at 6% and a 3-bedroomed house at less than £240,000 (€283,800; US$372,400).  Now, of course, with interest rates at almost zero for 18 months, such a high rate of mortgage seems insane, and the house, well, that is worth somewhere around £205-£210,000.  Saying that though, even with a £900 per month (€1,060; US$1,390) mortgage repayment, it was already below the rent for a house of the same size in my town and now, three years later, renting the same type of property locally would cost £1200 per month, so there were savings.  In addition, I was fortunate that after Newham Council had taken its £14,000 cut from the sale of my flat in their borough; HM Revenue and Customs £16,000 for capital gains tax as I had been unable to find work near my flat and so had been compelled to rent it out, and the estate agents sold the 2-bedroomed flat to a friend of theirs at a price you could have got a 1-bedroomed flat in the same area for, I had quite a bit of money to put into the house.  I reckon I will come away with around £30,000 of that, which means I have lost £20,000 (€23,600; US$31,000) in house purchasing since 2001 and am unlikely ever to be able to afford to buy any kind of house or flat again.

The main problem for me at the moment is selling the house before I run out of money to pay the mortgage repayments.  Having applied for 40 jobs in 16 weeks and attended 11 interviews without success, it looks like I am going to be unemployed for a pretty long time; structural unemployment, 1980s-style is back.  I have enough saved from my last redundancy package to pay two more months repayments.  Where money for deposit on a flat and rental payments will come from, I have no idea.  Knowing that I will soon default on the mortgage repayments I have contacted my lender twice in the past four months, first when I was made redundant and again now.  However, both times I have been told they can do nothing, I am not yet desperate enough.  I need to have only one month's repayment money left before they can even begin considering any options such as moving me to an interest-only payment scheme.  I have noticed that at the job centre (even though many of the staff at my local branch are in line for redundancy themselves come December), the building society and the estate agent's, people are still thinking that we are only experiencing frictional unemployment, i.e. people being out of work for three months or less as they move from position to position.  In fact, at a Back-To-Work session run by the job centre they said as much.  People need to wake up to the fact that certainly in public sector work and, I feel, more widely, we are now facing a pretty quick progression to mass, structural unemployment as seen in the 1980s.  The principles of the late 1990s and 2000s do not apply in such circumstances.

I applied for mortgage interest benefit.  I was advised by my job centre that, given that I have been unemployed for more than three months, I should apply for such help.  I did.  I was then told that because the woman in my house works more than 24 hours per week, I was not entitled to it.  To make matters worse I was also told that my jobseeker's allowance, which currently is paid to me on the basis of my contributions, will stop in December because the 'household income' must be too high because the woman in my house works more than 24 hours per week.  Given the current economic climate and the fact that she is self-employed she is working more than 40 hours per week to try to make more money.  She is angry that her business which usually turns a profit of £12,000 per year, i.e. little more than the £8,400 needed to pay just the mortgage (let alone utility bills and food costs) if she was paying it alone, impacts on what I can claim.  To make matters worse, she has been told that whilst she is a single parent, because I am part of the household, even though I have no income apart from my jobseeker's allowance (and even that will stop in less than three months). she is entitled to only £15 ( €17.70; US$23.27) per week in 'in-work' tax credits, i.e. payments for people working but on a low income who have children.  If I leave the house, this would apparently rise to £200 per week.  I have spoken before about the hazards of inadvertently becoming a family if you live with someone of the opposite sex: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2008/05/i-now-pronounce-you-inadvertent-husband.html  Despite that, it is clear that it is much better to be living alone or just with a child if you want to claim benefits.

My efforts then to reduce the steady drain of my savings and the inevitable default on the mortgage has only one possible redemption, one which the building society keeps on talking about, which is to beg from your family.  This assumes that your family is richer than you and willing to bail you out.  I am estranged from my brother who lives abroad and the bulk of the family of the woman who lives in my house live overseas, the rest are in the same situation as her.  I persuaded my parents to pay the mortgage three months from now so the house is not repossessed before it can be sold and they would get that money back immediately from the sale price of the house.  However, they cannot do this indefinitely, and six months seems the maximum.  I am very grateful that I have that, most people would not.  Given how slow the market is, however, it seems very possible that come next summer, especially with more people having to sell up the way we are, the house will remain unsold and the building society will take it over.

Whether I lose the house to repossession or manage to sell it first, the experiment of being a property owner will be at an end and I will be back at the mercies of the unregulated rental sector, which under the current government is likely to be freed even further of its restrictions.  Given how I was kicked out of two houses at the whim of the landlord and had one intimidating myself and the woman and child that lived there, with no notice paid to that behaviour by the police, I have a very bleak view of my future in terms of finding a place to live.  In many ways I have been lucky and I am sure we are all going to hear more stories of people pushed from pillar to post as unemployment rises to new records and landlords/ladies exploit those people who have no choice but to come to them.

Property in the UK 9: My First Steps to Losing My House

I suppose it was inevitable. I had expected house prices to begin falling this year, but I had not expected oil prices to rise. I had expected Iraq to stabilise and for more oil to be coming from there, I did not realise that Chinese consumption was going to step up so suddenly, forcing prices higher and higher and in turn both petrol and oil prices. Anyway, consequently with petrol having risen by 30p per litre in the past year and food costs for me by about 20% in the same period, I suddenly found this month that all my salary had been spent by the first week in May. Myself and the woman in the house sat down to see where we could all cut back. Her online business has collapsed as other people not only in the UK (she sells in Europe, USA and to expatriates in China) have stopped buying anything they see as frivolous. This means she will have to go out to work (something she loathes, she feels people despise her and patronise her when she is an employee which is why she always tries to be self-employed). She pointed out I was spending £32 (€40; US$62) per month on coffee at work. I have also stopped doing the lottery at £8 per month and cancelled both house contents and life insurance saving about another £80 (€100; US$156) per month. We also had a cleaner at £64 per month which we are laying off, so altogether we reckon we can save £183 per month which is enough to cover my petrol bill or about three-quarters of the monthly groceries. This means we do not have to sell the house we have been in for just under five months.

We have a fixed rate mortgage for five years, but got it when the interest rates were at their peak. House prices have slid constantly since then and we think we over-paid for this house anyway so if we sell we will have lost probably at least £20,000 (€25,200; US$39,200) on what we paid for it. Also British people dislike quirky decor in their houses so the Victorian style interiors that came with it (and of course we cannot afford to change now) will make it as hard for us to sell as it was for our predecessors here. Also the market is being flooded by people trying to dump houses that like us they can no longer afford to pay for. In addition, many people who bought buy-to-let properties are now dumping these even though they do not live in them. Repossessions by banks of houses on which people are no longer able to pay their mortgage have risen by 17% so far this year and the estimated figure is 45,000 in 2008 compared to 27,000 in 2007. We are not back to the level of the 1990s, the peak was over 80,000 reposessions in 1991, but there seems nothing to stop this climb. In addition, the mass year-on-year repossessions of the early 1990s put cheap property on to the market whereas since the early 2000s bank policies have changed and they keep repossessed property and set a high price and wait until the market rises back up to it so that they get more money back than auctioning off at a low price as they did in the 1990s.

For now, 'tightening our belts' should mean we do not get into danger over the mortgage. It does mean all luxuries have gone, no more meals out, no holidays (those we had, I realise now were foolish), no more DVDs or electrical goods. It is hard to explain to the 6-year old in our house why these things have stopp. My fear is that costs will rise further and that in the future having taken up all the slack in our finances there will be nothing left to economise on. We only need the car to go wrong or one of us to need dental treatment for it to soak up all the meagre savings we have left and us like an increasing number of house owners to begin the path to losing the house and all the money we put into it.

With hindsight we could have done things differently: bought a cheaper house, moved to a cheaper town (certainly one closer to where I work), continued renting, but of course our options were limited with two landlords in a row mistreating us, forcing us to move on as quickly as we could into what have turned out to be bad houses for us. My prediction is that by May 2009 I will have lost this house and with it all the money I saved and invested through the 2000s in that flat in London (where I was also shafted). In the UK of today you do not only have to be clever with money (which I am clearly not) but you have to be very, very lucky. I earn 50% per year more than the national average salary, so I am not losing my house just yet, but my contract expires in August 2009 and with people already being made redundant by my company it is clear I have no future there as they always simply do not renew the contracts of fixed-term staff like me. I have lived through the very nasty unemployment of the 1980s and the house fiasco of 1990-3 during which so many people suffered terribly and yet I managed to escape by being flexible and not investing in anything. As you get older though humans naturally crave stability, but in the UK though we are encouraged very hard to buy houses, doing that just makes you vulnerable to the economic turmoil that seems to buffet us so regularly and then the people who urged you to buy a house are totally unsympathetic when you are kicked out. The bulk of us are simply hard workers, not successful gamblers and yet we are forced by British society and its economy to constantly gamble with our future.

As I told the 6-year old, not getting some things he wants now may help his mother hang on to this house, but I think more likely is the outcome I threatened him with that in a few months he will no longer have a bedroom of his own, not have a garden and many of the electrical goods now in the house will have gone. That is his future and most likely the one of many hundreds of thousands of British families, just because greedy American bankers could not be content with the mortgage market they had.