A 22-year-old student – Kwajo Tweneboa, has become an unlikely champion for social housing tenants, shaming Clarion, Europe’s biggest housing association, into action.
“I can’t let people live in squalor,” he says with sure determination, as he details some of the appalling living conditions he has uncovered in the past four months.
“Houses are being overrun by mice, cockroaches, rats in some cases.
“Lights streaming with water, asbestos ceilings completely broken or covered in black mould.”
About Clarion he says: “I don’t know what they are waiting for. Is it for someone to die in one of these properties?”
What was Kwajo’s campaign?
In May, Kwajo and his two sisters were living on the Eastfields Estate in south London, in a flat which at the time had no ceiling in the main room, mouldy walls, an infestation of vermin, water streaming through light fittings, and asbestos.
For 18 months, Kwajo had repeatedly asked Clarion for repairs – but his calls went unanswered.
Frustrated, he posted a thread of pictures of the squalid flat on Twitter.
“I was horrified, embarrassed and disgraced. I felt backed into a corner,” he remembers.
As well as struggling to make his housing association listen, Kwajo, a business studies student at De Montfort University in Leicester, was trying to process the death of his father.
He had died in January 2020, following a cancer diagnosis, and had spent his last few days being cared for by nurses in the flat, “feeding him through a tube through his stomach in a place that was infested with cockroaches, mice, rats, asbestos everywhere…
“It made a bad experience much worse.”
Clarion Housing Group is Europe’s largest housing association, responsible for housing more than 350,000 people.
It has grown by acquiring council houses from local authorities across England, as well as building new homes, often by regenerating ageing estates.
Stung into action by Kwajo’s public shaming, Clarion has now repaired the flat and have apologised claiming “we took our eye off the ball”.
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This piece was first reported and seen by the BBC.