Before catastrophe hit Grenfell Tower, it had been planned to publish this feature last weekend. Then, in the immediate aftermath, it was clear that this would be the wrong thing to do, to talk about related but not-identical issues of public housing. It would have been at once too close to the news about Grenfell and not close enough. Now, although the horror is still raw and much about it is still unknown, it has also become clear that Grenfell exposes in the harshest possible way questions of the current state of social housing, about the accessibility, affordability and quality of homes, and their impact on people’s lives. As is reported today, research by Shelter shows that a million households are at risk of homelessness unless a freeze on housing benefit is lifted.

Absurdly, local authorities are now having to pay high rents to house people in homes the councils once owned

These questions, which are the subject of the new documentary Dispossession: The Great Housing Swindle, were already urgent. The election, with its upending of Conservative complacencies and old assumptions, increases the chances that the issues will be addressed with at least some of the radicalism they require. Given the newfound power of the youth vote, the group worst affected by the housing crisis, a large electoral prize awaits the party who can get this subject right. Dispossession offers few solutions, but it adds to the buildup of anger on the subject, without which nothing will change.

The documentary describes the long-term effects of Margaret Thatcher’s right-to-buy policy – “probably the most popular ever introduced by a Conservative government”, according to a rare rightwing voice in the film, Thatcher’s former adviser Christopher Monckton. It was wonderful for many who benefited from it – even if some found that property ownership was not the promised land they had expected – but destructive of local authorities’ ability to respond to housing need. Its selling off of publicly owned housing has contributed to the ever more immense bill for housing benefit, and created the absurd and wasteful situation whereby local authorities have to pay high rents to house people in homes the councils once owned, but have now been bought by private landlords.

The film’s favourite subject is the effect of estates renewal, an idea that sounds good but can turn out atrociously in practice. The theory is that run-down council estates, some of them poorly designed and built in the first place, can be rebuilt with more and better homes financed by the high land values that come with buoyant property markets. The reality is that residents often become exiled and dispossessed, public assets are given up, the total number of genuinely affordable units shrivels and the developers involved make handsome profits.

The best-aired examples, revisited in the film, are the Heygate and Aylesbury estates in the London borough of Southwark; the latter a gift to journalists since Tony Blair went there on the morning of his election victory in 1997 to declare that “there will be no forgotten people in the Britain I want to build”. Both are, or were, large estates built in the 60s and 70s with industrialised building methods. The Heygate has gone, to be replaced mostly with market housing. The Aylesbury is heading towards a similar fate, although fierce opposition is doing its best to stop it.

Both were branded as failures, as crime-ridden hellholes, a claim challenged both by police statistics and by many who lived there. The same cannot be said of Central Hill and Cressingham Gardens, humanly scaled, peaceful and leafy estates created by the London borough of Lambeth’s enlightened architects’ department five decades ago. Yet these too are due to be erased, no matter what their residents think, thanks to the council’s desperate need to build more homes in any way whatsoever and the limited options given to it by central government.

In Dispossession the victims of these processes speak, such as a couple who have lived in Cressingham Gardens all their married lives and built up an irreplaceable and invaluable network of friends. From the Aylesbury there is a woman who bought into the dream of owning her council flat, only to find that it is to be compulsorily purchased at a sum that won’t pay for a replacement. For now she is the last remaining resident in her vast block, like a lone survivor in a post-apocalyptic movie, and she depends on a security guard to let her in.

The film also visits St Ann’s estate in Nottingham (which when Googled starts offering “crime” and “worst places to live in Nottingham” under related searches), in order to dispel myths that council tenants are feckless scroungers and criminals. It challenges the concept of a “sink estate”, often wielded as a convenient prelude to clearance. In Glasgow it tells how the “heart has been ripped out” of the Gorbals and how rats and bedbugs are infesting the overcrowded area of Govanhill.

The recurring theme is, to quote some of the voices in the film, of “conscious social cleansing”, of “people being swept aside with complete disregard”, of “community bonds being broken”. “It’s almost as if they see you as just a thing or a number,” says one resident. These effects are enhanced by the repulsive Housing and Planning Act of 2016, which obliges local authorities to sell homes in “high-value” areas to pay for a short-term boost to home-ownership. Dispossession also assaults the benefit cap, which tries to rectify the damage done to housing costs by right-to-buy, by taking it out on people little able to afford the consequences.

Margaret Thatcher hands property deeds to the King family – one of the first households in Britain to buy their council home in 1979. Photograph: Keystone/Getty Images

It makes no pretence at balance, although there would be a little more if some of its adversaries had responded to requests for comment. The Conservative side of the argument is represented only by the cartoon figure of Monckton, full name 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, now best known as a particularly preposterous denier of climate change. Dispossession doesn’t show more successful examples of estate renewal, or other recent attempts to address housing need. The relentless dinging of the Heygate and Aylesbury stories is justified (I’ve done it myself), but the film would have more credibility if it had found newer, fresher examples.

The ending of actively harmful policies, such as the Tories’ current remixes of their 80s right-to-buy hit, is essential

Oddly, it shows clips of the brutalist Barbican in London, where flats sell for seven-figure sums, as if it were an example of a typical council estate. Strikingly, it also shows archive footage of raw new tower blocks of 50 years ago, their new tenants moving in – material used by a previous generation of furious documentary-makers to attack the inhumanities of council housing. Now it is used to represent the power of the state to effect benign change.

Which brings us to the big question: what, actually, is anyone going to do about it? No honest portrayal of the current situation can ignore the fact that the last time government was a major builder of homes it didn’t get it all right. But, as it is now blindingly obvious that the market is not going to provide by itself, active building and planning by the public sector looks inevitable. There are ways to achieve new and affordable homes – by densifying suburbs, encouraging garden cities and, indeed, by renewing council estates – but none of them are easy. The invisible hand is not going to build them.

The ending of actively harmful policies, such as the Tories’ current remixes of their 80s right-to-buy hit, is essential. Clear statements of what is desirable, both in rates of house price inflation and quantities of social housing, would help. A proclamation that, just as everyone should have access to decent healthcare, so they should to decent housing, would be a good start. Rowan Moore

David Harewood: ‘The market is clearly out of control’

Actor who grew up in social housing on the edge of Birmingham

In light of the awful events at Grenfell Tower, this is a difficult subject to write about. But the tragedy has put one of the most pressing issues we face today right at the heart of the national debate… and believe me, we must talk about it. What’s been happening in Britain over the past 20 years is nothing short of a disgrace, as families and communities that have lived together for years have been ripped apart and slowly erased from the landscape to be replaced by shiny new buildings made of metal and glass, monuments to the rich and exclusive.

Developers and councils have replicated this “remove and replace” policy all over the country in a deliberate attempt to clear away the “undesirables” and make money from building on the high-value land that was their home. Slowly the life blood has been drained out of social housing, as repairs are underfunded and community concerns are shut down, altering the social make-up of our cities and communities for ever.

My aunt used to live in a small two-bed council flat in Dudley House in Paddington and when to everyone’s surprise I was accepted on to the National Youth Theatre’s summer course, I left Birmingham and went to stay with her and her son. I didn’t know London that well but it was a great location, very central, only a short walk to Regent’s Park where we performed As You Like It. We were cheek by jowl in Dudley House but everybody was very pleasant. The lift often smelled of piss but it worked; there was free parking for a few cars and generally the area was close-knit – kids played outside and everyone went about their business.

Today the same area is known as Paddington Basin and is vastly different. The canals are free of old car parts, there are hundreds of luxury apartments and plush new offices looking down on grassy walkways. Dudley House is still there, much to the chagrin of developers and council, as a few inhabitants of the neglected old building simply refuse to move. The lifts no longer work and won’t be repaired, the electricity is often cut, the exterior lights don’t work and many of the old flats are boarded up with metal shutters.

What kind of society are we building here? How can we expect social cohesion when we’re allowing the systematic social cleansing of our communities? I haven’t spent much time in the UK over the past five years but back here this summer I’ve been staggered by the number of “luxury” new builds across central London, while at the same time noticing the number of homeless increase. Who is living in these luxury places? How can they afford them? The market is clearly out of control and can’t be trusted to look after the less fortunate among us. If we’re not careful, pretty soon a lot more buildings will be burning down as I fear the people have had enough.

Tony Walsh: ‘I was very lucky to live. Social housing saved my life’

Poet, writer and performer who grew up in social housing in Manchester

I was born in 1965 in the downstairs front bedroom of my nan’s rented terrace house in Denton, Manchester. We soon moved to a damp, rented terrace house – my mum cried when she saw it. This was classic 60s slum stuff, the whole northern thing. I got rheumatic fever when I was three, which is related to tonsillitis not clearing up properly. I was so ill – I took penicillin from three years old to 14 – we were rehoused in a council house as a matter of urgency. I was very lucky to live. Social housing saved my life.

My dad and my sister still live in social housing. When my mum died, and we gave up the family [council] home that was our home for 30 years, my dad moved into sheltered housing. You do then think: “Have we got no stake in that now? Do we simply hand the keys in?” But then you think: “Well, yes.” When I think about the circumstances we were in, that my mum and dad were in their 20s with their child at death’s door, that’s what social housing is for, you know.

In the early 90s I was working as an inner-city housing officer for Manchester city council in the most deprived ward in the country at the time, Manchester Central. It was in the days before the legislation Labour introduced around neighbour nuisance and tenancy enforcement, and it was hugely challenging. Low powers and appalling late-80s, early-90s unfettered poverty and crime.

Cressingham Gardens, Lambeth: built in the 60s by the London borough of Lambeth’s enlightened architects’ department, this ‘humanly scaled, peaceful and leafy’ estate is due to be erased to provide higher-density housing. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

When Labour got in in 1997 the funding regime and the legislation we were working with – as well as the whole benefits regime – changed and things felt much more optimistic. We began investing in the estates properly, tackling inbuilt problems. I worked in various positions related to social housing for 18 years and I am proud of much of the work we did – it was important. It was a safety net for those who needed one; the housing was dignified, safe and clean. Blair gets castigated for some of his policies, but there was a lot of work to be proud of, that needs to be remembered.

What happened in Grenfell Tower should never have happened. I managed a number of tower blocks, and there were rigorous inspection regimes. There need to be benchmarks by which a civilised society measures itself: basic housing, sanitation, healthcare and an effective social security safety net, because when it’s not there, we all pay the cost. Whether it’s in homelessness around us or in general social decay – it turns up in ill health, in crime, in poor educational attainment, in poverty stats, in civil unrest.

Now, again, there’s a very visible rough-sleeping problem in Manchester which we had pretty much cracked in the early 2000s. We’ve got Andy Burnham now as the new metro mayor here, and to his credit he’s donated a percentage of his salary to a homelessness fund, but the issues are systemic and need to be tackled as such. Dispossession is an important and timely film – it raises serious questions.

• Click here to listen to Tony Walsh read his poem Nowhere, about issues raised in this piece. More on Tony Walsh: longfella.co.uk, facebook.com

Lynsey Hanley: ‘Knowing you have to move, but not when, gets to you’

Author of Estates: An Intimate History and Respectable: Crossing the Class Divide

Ten years ago I wrote a book, Estates: An Intimate History, in which I explored the history and reputation of council estates, and tried to measure my own experience of growing up on a peripheral 60s estate at the height of the right-to-buy era against that reputation. It had always been clear from talking to my extended family – four generations of which lived within 200 yards of each other – that to move into a council home had once been regarded as a step up and out of the clutches of private landlords and barely habitable housing. By the time I was growing up, in the 1980s and 1990s, to live on an estate – to require a public resource – was regarded by government and in the wider culture as shameful.

Paul Sng’s Dispossession illustrates what happens when housing, a universal necessity and therefore human right, becomes infected by the poison of class inequality. My grandparents moved into their brand-new house on the edge of Birmingham in 1969, when my mum was 17. A year later my great-grandmother and disabled great-aunt, isolated and struggling in the Rhondda Valley, moved into a ground-floor flat around the corner.

Their new homes – warm, spacious, modern – were palaces to them, and they remained grateful for the rest of their lives. I grew up knowing that, though at the same time I nurtured a spoilt-brat conviction that I needed to be elsewhere. “There’s nothing wrong with living on a council estate,” we’d be told at school, but no one who taught us actually lived where we did.

An enormous estate, of 2,704 homes, the Aylesbury in Camberwell was branded a crime-ridden hellhole, a claim challenged both by police statistics and by many who live there. Despite fierce opposition from residents, it’s also in the process of being demolished for regeneration. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

The interviewees in Dispossession speak tenderly and proudly about their homes, and with contained anger about the fact that the lives they have made are treated as insignificant and easy to disregard simply because of where they live. Demolition is treated as a regrettable but nonetheless entirely reasonable reaction to past mistakes.

Having moved off the estate where I grew up, I went to live on another estate, this time an inner-city ex-council block in east London, for nine years. After four years there we were told our own block might be demolished and “regenerated” – that is, many more flats squeezed into a smaller space so that social housing might “pay for itself”. The uncertainty of knowing that you will have to move, but not knowing when, gets to you.

Our block is still standing, a whole decade after the housing association paid us to leave. Three years after we left, I bumped into a neighbour, who had held out for more compensation (we took ours in 2007 and moved up north) and was one of the few residents left on the estate. “It’s a shithole now,” she said. “The rubbish chutes never get unblocked.”

The residents of Grenfell Tower had warned for years that power surges following the rewiring of their properties posed a serious fire risk. People’s lack of power, having to put up with whatever is imposed from above, being ignored until it’s too late: the story of class and housing in a nutshell.

Andrew Adonis: ‘The big problem was councils not replacing the homes they sold’

Former Labour minister, now a lord, who grew up in council housing

It is one of the most important issues facing the country: how do we at least double the rate of housebuilding, while also making homes accessible to people who can’t afford to rent, let alone buy? There is a real danger of social cleansing happening. I say this with feeling: I was brought up in a council flat in the London borough of Camden and it was a real mixed community. It would be a tragedy if places like that became no-go areas for the next generation of low-income people.

The regeneration of council estates can play a valuable role. Some of them are not pleasant living environments and it is right to seek to improve their quality. Often they are low-density, so you can build more homes and make them better places at the same time. But the aim should always be to increase not decrease the numbers of social housing and to create genuinely mixed neighbourhoods. Some have succeeded in doing it – the borough of Hackney, for example. People should also have the right to come back to their homes. And it is essential that councils work with local communities: there is a critical need for intensive consultation.

The big problem with right-to-buy was not allowing councils to replace the homes that were sold. That depletion of stock without providing for new housing. It was unforgiveable. Now they definitely need to build more. I strongly support the right of local authorities to borrow to build viable schemes – it happens in other countries but not here.

After the war, local authorities made the mistake of not building mixed communities, but they did a great job of providing a very large number of social homes for people who had been living in slums. It was a Tory government that started the move toward mass housing, in 1951, when the housing minister Harold Macmillan promised to build 300,000 homes a year. He was so successful it helped him become prime minister. In the future, I hope another housing minister will become PM because they’ve been so successful.

John Bird: ‘I’d nationalise all surplus government land for social housing’

Lord John Bird is an anti-poverty campaigner and founder of the Big Issue

I was born in London in 1946 and lived in the slums of Notting Hill. It had the highest infant mortality rate – a terrible place to live and grow up. Eventually we were moved to council housing, a flat on Kings Road, between Fulham and Chelsea. We had our own toilet, which was brilliant – up until then we’d been sharing with eight families.

I thought Dispossession offered one side of an argument that didn’t develop. It could have dealt more with the major reasons we’re in this housing crisis – the appalling postwar housing record, where in the space of a few years a million houses were built, and by the mid-60s a lot of those were in really poor condition. They were badly put together and badly funded. And I didn’t recognise the portrait of life on a council estate as talked about by some in the film, where everyone’s knocking on each other’s doors and it’s all harmony.

I watched the Grenfell Tower tragedy unfold. I was there in 1969 when they cleared the ground to make way for that terrible estate. What the council did was take a deprived and seedy area that had supplied sub-standard housing for generations of people. They turned it into a real pig’s ear. You can see from the list of people who were living there that the council has put all the same people together there, almost creating ghettoes.

The film shows a world divided into victims and rescuers. Most of the people in the film who spoke about the problems of housing were speaking as “rescuers”: they don’t live in the property, but they appoint themselves as knights in shining armour. I want to help the poor get away from this self-indulgent lot, always going on about rescuing them. That’s why I’m in the House of Lords, to dismantle poverty – and to get to the roots of poverty you have to get the poor confronting it themselves.

What I liked about Thatcher’s right-to-buy policy was that she realised what the middle classes were getting away with. They were getting all these perks: their children were going off to university because they were property owners, they had low borrowing rates, they could go on holidays. She thought: “Wouldn’t it be brilliant if the poorest in the land could own their own property so maybe their kids could get a bit of social mobility?” What was spiteful and ideological was how they didn’t use the money to build more social housing. That was the fly in the ointment.

The film Dispossession visits St Ann’s in Nottingham, a so-called ‘sink estate’ in the deprived inner city. Photograph: Mark Richardson/Alamy Stock Photo

We are in a state of emergency. We need to understand that the housing crisis is a state of emergency. I’d nationalise all government-owned surplus land; I wouldn’t allow the NHS, councils or the army to sell its surplus property – I would say it has to go to social housing; I would also appoint a dedicated secretary of state for housing, not someone who has 10 other portfolios, so that social housing is not left to the vagaries of local authorities. There’s a lot of interesting stuff done in Finland where you can put a house together for £30,000 – a kind of much improved prefab. You can’t leave it to developers, because they only want profits.

A lot of effort is put into getting people off the streets, with some success, but the real problem is getting people out of poverty and standing on their own two feet. We are a very dysfunctional society. We don’t put money into new businesses. We live in a low-wage economy. They’re opening libraries in Germany while we’re closing them. We have the worst of the US economy: low wage, low education, no dynamism.

The government must prioritise housing, it must treat the housing crisis as the nation’s biggest issue. Plans in the Queen’s speech to ban tenant fees and “promote fairness” in the market barely scratch the surface. We need to use the land we’ve got. We need to build. We need deeds, not words. Words don’t keep you warm, safe, secure. Homes do.

Sheila Scott: ‘Our guests dream of a shoddy council tenancy’

Chief executive, Shelter from the Storm

Guests often tell us “I’m not your usual sort of homeless person” and we always say, “I think you’ll find you are”. Homelessness can happen to any of us. When we started Shelter from the Storm it all seemed so easy, we’d provide a bed and dinner for the street homeless, the most basic and simple thing for most of us – and then we’d help them access the homes and services that were available.

Ten years later things have only got worse, the safety net of the welfare state has shrunk, social housing has dramatically decreased, access to affordable housing is more difficult and provision of mental health care is at breaking point. The sort of guests we help has changed too, up to a third of the 43 men and women staying with us at any time will be in work, often full time and for famous high-street names, but still unable to find a room they can afford to rent. The homes we do manage to access are mostly insecure tenancies in the private rented sector, often quite shoddy and usually hours away from their work and community. Our guests dream of getting the sort of council tenancies shown in the film, even though they are so poorly maintained. Sadly, we have to tell most of them that this will be almost impossible for them to achieve.

People are bemused and shocked that it is left to charities to respond to the national crisis of homelessness and we’re seeing this again so heartbreakingly with the Grenfell Tower tragedy – volunteers are desperate to help and they can’t believe that such a wealthy country doesn’t have systems in place to respond. But we see this all the time, we shelter people who’ve escaped torture, slavery, domestic violence and war and plenty who’ve just been evicted by their landlords, none of whom is deemed to be in priority need for accommodation. We get referrals from all the London councils, the prisons, the hospitals, the street outreach teams, the national homeless charities – there just isn’t enough housing available. Every day we have to turn people away.

We’re feeling the effects of social cleansing ourselves, our dark little corner of London’s King’s Cross has become a glamorous destination hub. Like the street workers, we’re not wanted there any more and like our guests, we’ve been given notice. But we will find a new Home for the Homeless, it’s the people not the place and we’re looking forward to another 10 years caring for the dispossessed of London: whoever they are, wherever they’ve come from, at Shelter from the Storm they’ll find a place of safety, a place of transformation, a place of hope.

Kerry Hudson: ‘I remember a sense of anger and casual violence’

Scottish writer whose debut novel drew on her childhood in council flats and B&Bs

Through the 80s and 90s my mum, my sister and I moved around a variety of social housing and cheap private flats in both Scotland and in England, always hoping the next place would offer better prospects.

I would like to be able to say that the social housing we stayed in, despite its hardships, offered a strong sense of community because I know that is true for many estates. But we were always interlopers and my mum, a single parent on benefits, was isolated and, I imagine, often frightened.

The Dispossession documentary skilfully outlines the importance of social housing and how it can foster an extraordinary strength of community. But to be really effective it must be properly invested in and treated with the same duty of care as any other integral part of society. Five of the seven estates we lived on felt as though the poor had been penned in and left to rot. Out of sight, out of mind. What I remember from those estates was a sense of anger seething, casual violence, men in ski masks at neighbour’s doors, feuds, used syringes discarded under our washing line and found by my baby sister, arson, the conspicuous, visible deprivation of our community.

In the shadow of Grenfell… A woman stands on the balcony of her home, close to Grenfell Tower, two days after the block was engulfed in flames. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

When I woke to the news of the Grenfell Tower fire I was horrified and heartbroken but not surprised. Twenty years ago, growing up in tower blocks in North Lanarkshire, it was obvious how high-rises, without due caution and attention, could be deathtraps. When we occupied a top-floor flat in a neglected tower we nailed a huge coil of nylon rope beside the window, thinking, in the event of fire, we’d climb down the rope and take our chances with the remaining fall.

Even so, council housing was the best we could hope for. When we were expelled from that system, because we had left a flat in another town and were deemed “voluntarily homeless”, we depended on long-stay B&Bs. These B&Bs, filled with single men, also the lowest priority for social housing, came with a “top-up fee” in addition to our housing benefit, taken from our already meagre living allowance. In return, we’d get a single room for three of us, sometimes a sink and a microwave, a communal shower costing 20p a go, gas and electric meters that swallowed pound coins at a rate we couldn’t afford to keep up with.

Eventually we turned to private landlords. A real flat with a kitchen and private bathroom sounds like an upgrade but these flats also came with “top-up fees” for barely habitable homes. One minuscule flat in Great Yarmouth was so damp there were mushrooms growing from the bathroom carpet and we all slept in one tiny room listening to our gentle, solvent-addicted neighbour rant and scream to himself through the night.

Two decades later, I suspect our situation would be even worse. There are 1.4 million people on the council housing waiting list and a highly competitive rental market with a system of agency fees, deposits and credit referencing that can only continue to exclude the very poorest seeking affordable homes. Just last year Tories, many of whom are landlords themselves, voted against housing reforms to make rented homes “fit for human habitation”. The message this sends is clear, if you are poor you must take what you get, safe or not.

Marcus Barnes: ‘Being a mixed-race kid from a council estate – it shaped who I am’

Writer and artist

Thirty years ago my mother moved us out of the family home we shared with my grandmother and uncle to set up on her own in Brockley, south London. Being unemployed at the time, she opted for a council house. She settled on the first place she saw, a ground-floor two-bed flat with a garden on the Honor Oak Estate and we moved in around May 1988. Honor Oak has 27 blocks, some of which have been knocked down and replaced with more modern blocks since we left in 1998. The estate covers 30 acres, and is referred to as “Tenement Town”. Watching Dispossession took me back to the place where I spent my formative years: seemingly endless summers travelling from one corner of the estate to another, running around the adventure playground up by Nash Road, or down to garages at the back by the playing fields, hiding out in the bushes up on the hills which we’d ride down on our bikes. We knew so many people all across the estate.

Occasionally I’d be out later than I was allowed and somehow word would reach me, “Marcus, your mum’s calling you”. Other adults would look out for us. There were a few “characters”, alcoholics, people with mental health issues… One of the first people to ever have an electronic tag on his ankle lived on the Honor Oak Estate. I have never experienced such a tight-knit community since. We really did look out for one another; there was a very sociable, connected atmosphere throughout the estate – multicultural and generally quite safe. Flats in Honor Oak are now being rented for up to £1,500 a month.

Central Hill, Lambeth: Like Cressingham Gardens, Central Hill estate near Crystal Palace is a successful, popular, beautifully designed estate. Again, the council wants to knock it down for regeneration despite residents’ resistance. Photograph: SM Photography/Alamy Stock Photo

I also have vivid memories of the notorious North Peckham estate where my aunties lived – which has been regenerated to the tune of £290m, with 1,184 social homes being lost in the process. The North Peckham estate was a frightening place back then, the walkways where lights didn’t always work, smelly staircases, rubbish chutes that were repeatedly set on fire. Even as a child you could sense the neglect. It was the first place I ever got mugged, for a brand new mountain bike when I was 11. That incident had a profound effect on me, I became agoraphobic, only really leaving our flat in Brockley to go to school and back.

When I was old enough to be self-aware I felt the stigma that came from being a mixed-race kid from a single-parent family who had lived on a council estate. It shaped who I am – I refused to allow my situation to stop me from getting somewhere in life. The notion that those who live in social housing are sponging off the government, watching Jeremy Kyle all day, angers me so much. Being from a low-income background doesn’t mean you’re feckless or lazy. I’m proud of my roots and I always tell people where I grew up because it’s important to challenge stereotypes.

The Grenfell disaster is the epitome of what is happening in social housing now; wilful neglect, rich favoured over poor, money over humanity and local authorities shirking their responsibilities in the name of a quick buck. I felt as though these people, the survivors and those who died, were my people, the friends I had on Honor Oak estate, the people who are demonised time and again, the ones who have no voice, no influence and little hope for a way out. With government policies that are stripping out social housing from so many of the UK’s cities, I can imagine how hopeless and depressed people who are battling to survive in social housing must feel nowadays. Grenfell is a symbol of the imbalance that pervades the world. Let’s hope some positive change will arise from the ashes.

Dispossession: The Great Housing Swindle directed by Paul Sng is out now. See dispossessionfilm.com for screenings