Colchester tenants living in 'health risk' council homes

Residents say they are living in mouldy homes and having to wait years for problems to be fixed after it was revealed one in eight properties fail to meet "decent" standards.

This means 12 per cent of all 80,038 occupied council or private homes in Colchester have been deemed not fit for purpose. 

Six per cent, meanwhile, have been classed as being category one hazards in the Government's English Housing Survey, meaning the tenant may require medical attention at some point as a resulting in living in the homes.

It also suggests they could be in a state of disrepair.

George Thomas says black mould and asbestos in his home are so bad his five-year-old son, who suffers from asthma, has been hospitalised multiple times.

His door intercom also does not work meaning he cannot control who is let in.

George says it also took him four years of fighting to get a drain which caused flooding in his kitchen and unpleasant smells fixed, and his family also went “whole days without heating”.

He added: “You only have to look at the quality of the buildings in Greenstead alone to see that the one in eight figure is possibly worse.

"When I was at hospital with my son, we were not the only children with discharge paperwork saying it is likely due to mould in the accommodation.

“Nursing staff told us before they left that a massive increase in children coming in with contact with respiratory illness due to mould.

“This needs to sink into the skulls of people working at Colchester Borough Homes."

Another resident, Emily Johnson, meanwhile, said it took the council five and a half years to get a working intercom and five years for her boiler and plumbing to be fixed.

She added: ”I'm surprised the numbers are so low."

The Housing Health and Safety Rating System used to grade the properties considers 29 categories of separately rated hazards, with hazards scoring 1,000 or more being considered category one hazards.

Mould - George Thomas' mould in his council house home (Image: Submitted)

Local authorities have a duty to act when category one homes are identified - which bosses at Colchester Council have said they have done/

They say from 2022 to 2023 the private sector housing team (PSE) carried out nearly 600 housing inspections, visits, and assessments of homes in the private and social rented sector.

Housing - Another issue in Colchester is that the waiting time for people in temporary accommodation to live in social housing now stands at 42-days (Image: Newsquest)

The PSE also directly improved 364 dwellings and removed more than 300 serious housing hazards both in the private and social rented sector.

A spokesman for Colchester council said: “As of the end of February 2024, we are pleased to report that 98.4 per cent of our social housing stock meets the Decent Homes Standard.

“This equates to just 95 properties currently falling below this standard, which are either programmed to have improvement work complete or where residents have declined the improvement works.”