The Caulfield Park housing development in west London sits on a little bit of televisual history. The estate it replaced in South Acton was once the filming location for the fictional Nelson Mandela House, the high-rise home of the Trotter family in Only Fools and Horses.



These days, Del Boy and Rodney and their wideboy antics are, of course, long gone. For the current residents of the seven-storey blocks, the people now doing the misselling are their landlords.

The development is owned and run by the Catalyst Housing Association, which controls 21,000 homes across London. After it was completed with the aid of £19.5m of public money in 2011, Caulfield Park won the Best Regeneration prize at that year’s Affordable Home Ownership awards. Brochures promised a “desirable west London location” with access to green space, and “a fantastic variety of shopping experiences”.



Six years on, Darren and Emilia Atwood’s impeccably furnished, shared-ownership flat – they own a 55% stake, for which they paid £275,000 – would appear at first glance to prove that those superlatives were well earned.

But then I switch on my voice recorder, and out it all comes.

“One of the big issues over the years has been the lifts. They’re constantly breaking down,” says Emilia. “I got stuck in the lift when I was 40 weeks pregnant. The buzzer didn’t work, so we had to shout for help.”

“Another time, water kept appearing on the floor of the toilet,” says Darren. “I wasn’t sure where it was coming from. It must have been leaking for months and months.”

“Mice and rats,” offers their neighbour, Zakyira Mohammed. “In the evenings, you can hear them going through the ceilings and in the walls – just running around. We’ve complained to Catalyst several times about this, and got nothing. The flat upstairs, I know she’s caught 16 or 17 mice. I’ve caught two mice and one rat. The rat was very recent.”

“All Catalyst seem to do is log things,” says Darren. “They say, ‘It’s now been passed to the relevant department.’ But then you have to wait for weeks.”

When the allegations were put to Catalyst, their spokesperson said: “On behalf of Catalyst, I’d like to apologise to the residents of Caulfield Park for any discomfort or inconvenience that they have experienced. We have prepared and are implementing a comprehensive action plan to deal with the issues raised and are providing regular updates to our residents. We have promised to find long-term solutions and will be closely monitoring the situation.”

Rats at the Caulfield Park development in Acton, west London. Photograph: Darren Atwood

Darren contacted me after I had written a piece for the Guardian about Orchard Village, a new housing development on the outer edge of London, now mostly owned by Clarion Housing, the largest housing association in the UK. In its flats and houses – the occupation of which is split between tenants, shared-ownership households and people who own their properties – there are no end of problems, from stairs that have come away from walls, to damp and mould, and even an alleged profusion of toxic gas.

This was just one of many visits I have made to newly built housing developments across London, most of which have the same mixture of outward gleam and inward problems, and seem to say something very profound about modern Britain – where the supposedly life-changing promise of a new home too often turns out to be a nightmare.

In late 2015, I was on a reporting job in the Devonport area of Plymouth, which was once chock-full of neglected tenement blocks, but in recent times has been filling up with new housing developments finished in pastel shades. When she saw my notebook, one resident edged out of her front door and began telling me what had gone wrong with her new home, which she had secured under a shared-ownership scheme from a local housing association.

“My roof’s leaked twice,” she said. “There are windows we can’t open, in case they come in on us. I’ve had the lock on my door fall out into my hands … It’s been a never-ending list of problems. I’ve got a wall that’s two inches narrower at the bottom than it is at the top.”

Two years earlier, I reported from Poundbury, the faux-traditional, newly built Dorset village masterminded by the Prince of Wales, where again people said there was evidence of shoddy building and cut corners. “We tried to put up a coat hook and it pulled away all the plaster,” said one woman. “We’ve had problems with the plumbing. I don’t know anybody who hasn’t had an issue with maintenance. If I owned my flat, it would bother me, but I’m renting.”

When news broke last month of the £7m paid out in compensation to new homeowners by the construction giant Bovis, it seemed to point to a systemic problem. When I subsequently heard housing experts talking about a mounting shortage of skilled construction workers, the way the building trade is dominated by a handful of huge conglomerates, and concerns about the way construction standards are monitored, the impression of a hidden crisis was reinforced.

But four weeks spent at housing association developments across London has revealed something else again. Many housing associations have a reputation for customer care and community spirit, but in some cases those ideals seem to have been left far behind. Moreover, the capital’s overwhelming housing shortages seem to be making bad problems even worse.

‘You can hear the mice and rats in the walls. My neighbour upstairs has caught 16 or 17 of them’ … Zakyira Mohammed in Caulfield Park. Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian

The roots of housing associations lie in 19th-century philanthropy. From the 1980s onwards, these not-for-profit institutions began to acquire a new importance, especially after they began to take ownership of large swaths of council housing. Today, housing associations control around 60% of rented social housing in England. Many are also building homes under shared-ownership schemes, and for people who want to own their homes outright. In some cases, frantic home-building and six-figure executive salaries are the new normal – and, against a background of a government deregulation drive and cuts in subsidies, housing insiders worry about what that means for the relationship between these associations and their millions of residents.

After my trip to Caulfield Park, I spent an evening at Artizan Court in Wood Green, a development controlled by the giant Sanctuary Group, where a broken main gate and front door were recently left unrepaired for around two months, leaving a shared-ownership block open to intruders. Residents speak of leaks that have ruined bathrooms, loose floor tiles and broken doorhandles. Not long after that, I visited One Housing Group’s giant Suttons Wharf development in Mile End: another gleaming modern estate where residents have been through four years of hot water and heating outages, and infestation by moths and mice. Here people complain of unresponsive customer service and inexplicable service charges.

I ended up at Carillon Court, near Aldgate East tube station. Around a decade ago, it was commissioned by Notting Hill Housing, the association that began in 1964 with a portfolio of four houses, and now controls nearly 32,000 homes across London. “A small budget should never mean that you have impoverished ideas,” said the development’s creative director, Ilse Crawford. “Pokey rooms can feel institutional, so I opted for dark colours to make the spaces feel warm and definite, as opposed to an apology.”



If this vision ever amounted to much, precious little of it seems to linger on. In the company of a shared-ownership resident called Elena Shutova, I pace along waterlogged walkways smattered with moss and peer over at a roof covered in puddles. She describes the basic problem – “Drainage does not exist, so water has nowhere to go, and just seeps through the building ” – and takes me to meet Farhana Ahmed, who lives in a top-floor flat with her husband and five children.

Every room in her home has issues with damp and mould: in her lounge, there is a huge section of wall covered in telltale green smudges. When I contact Notting Hill Housing, they tell me Farhana is a tenant of the Spitalfields Housing Association, who in turn point me back to Notting Hill. No one seems to know where the buck stops, and as the emails fly back and forth, I keep rereading my transcript of our conversation. She says her kids have hayfever-like symptoms and coughs, which she traces to the damp and mould. “Nothing has been done,” she says. “I don’t think they can stop it.”

Housing industry insiders speak of rising concerns about building standards, and equally big worries about what is happening to many housing associations. There are still plenty that hold fast to their traditional ideals, but too many now behave like property developers – not least because huge cuts in government help and a Conservative policy of insisting rents are cut by 1% year until 2020 have led to a new emphasis on bringing in money via commercial ventures, and on building as many new homes as quickly as possible.

Steve Hilditch is a former policy head of Shelter, and a one-time housing adviser to the last Labour government. Between 2002 and 2008, he was on the board of Notting Hill Housing. “When I was there,” he said, “the board spent its entire time talking about the financing of big projects, buying land, getting the finance for huge schemes – and the amount of time it spent on the nuts and bolts of what the association did with its existing homes was very limited.”

‘I’ve missed hospital appointments because the buzzer’s broken. There are a lot of problems. We’re trying to get out of here’ … Chris Babet in Caulfield Park. Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian

The biggest villains in the story, perhaps, are the Conservative ministers in the coalition government who hacked away at parts of the last Labour’s government legacy. The cuts they introduced were mostly too obscure to snag the media’s attention, but had real consequences for housing. In 2010, Eric Pickles announced the abolition of the Audit Commission, which had overseen housing associations since 2001, and had triggered a positive change in the way they worked (“Their inspection system led to a pretty rapid improvement in how they managed homes,” says Hilditch). In 2012, the government then got rid of a body called the Tenants Services Authority, which had closely regulated how housing associations provided social homes. “Now,” Hilditch told me, “one of the big weaknesses of housing associations is their lack of accountability. They publish very little. They’re not subject to freedom of information requests. And I think it’s very easy for that kind of system to become complacent.”

Back at Caulfield Park, I speak to a social-housing tenant called Chris Babet. He has multiple sclerosis and uses a wheelchair. He has lived with his family in his fifth-floor flat since 2011, and has experienced no end of problems, including two simultaneously broken lifts that once left him housebound for 10 days, problems with intermittent hot water, and mice.

“I’ve actually missed hospital appointments because the buzzer on the front door of the block’s not working,” he tells me. “The ambulance comes, and the buzzer doesn’t work, and they go. One time, when the lifts went down, I missed a doctor’s appointment. There are a lot of problems. We’re trying to get out of here.”

Understandably, he is less interested in awards, creative directors and a fantastic variety of shopping experiences than somewhere decent and dependable to live. And towards the end of our conversation, he says something very telling. After five years at the sharp end, he thinks it’s time he was on his way, so he and his wife are trying to get a council flat.