Newsletter No.11
The
Queen's Golden |
Newsletter
Welcome Issue No. 11 of "The Separatist", Wokingham & West Berkshire Mental Health Association’s newsletter.
This article is written by our President Pam Jenkinson regarding the currnet campaign to save our crisis house form closure.
FIGHT FOR THE CRISIS HOUSE
This campaign is about power. It is not about electricity, but it IS about power. It all started on Valentine’s Day. Or you could say it started twenty years ago when we [a group of mental health service users and informal carers] decided to run our own separatist crisis house. Health and Social Services did not like this. They wouldn’t, would they! There followed twenty years of continual and systematic attempts to undermine us.
On 14th February 2007 I received a ‘phone call at home from Wokingham Borough Council [hereafter referred to as WBC] Property Department. They had some issues to discuss with us - namely higher than desirable but not dangerous levels of legionella found in our water system and problems with the supply of electricity at Station House.
They would meet us next day at noon. They came and dropped the bombshell that our electricity supply was to be discontinued imminently, that getting us our own supply would cost £10,000 - £14,000, and that before contemplating any expenditure they wanted a full buildings survey to establish whether Station House should be condemned.
The two officials concerned were a property officer and the Head of Community Care Development. At this stage I believed their concerns to be genuine so for the sake of convenience I handed them the keys to access the building on the following Wednesday when the Drop-In would not be open and I would not normally be at Station House.
In the end I decided to be present at the inspection and stayed all day at Station House but they did not turn up. I contacted the property officer’s line manager who confirmed that since he was on leave the inspection had been temporarily cancelled and who also usefully confirmed that the legionella had been dealt with immediately and so ceased to be a problem.
I did not smell at rat until the Buildings Inspectors actually arrived on Thursday 1st March. They had already done some inspecting and it was quite obvious that they had been instructed to find as much wrong with the building as possible. Since the building is sound they concentrated on spurious fire safety issues - even though fire safety precautions at Station House are also sound. Our new three year lease was only signed in August 2006 and Station House passed all tests - buildings, fire safety, wiring, electrical appliances, and all health and safety tests. The spurious buildings inspectors told me that they could not recommend the building for continued use, not even for Drop-In use, and would make their report to social services next day, Friday 2nd March. Having spent a lifetime doing charitable work in dozens of old buildings I realised that it was ridiculous to suggest that Station House was unfit even for daytime use.. So recognising it all as a put-up job I contacted our MP, John Redwood.
On Friday 2nd March property services rang my home in my absence - leaving the message that they would meet with us next Tuesday 6th March. That was our Twenty Year Anniversary of working in Wokingham so we had to reschedule the meeting. It proved difficult getting in touch and the property officer was reluctant to discuss anything before the meeting but I insisted that he did so - so that I could put my colleagues in the picture. Despite the short notice I rallied as many committee members as possible for the meeting on 8th March. Bless those spurious Buildings Inspectors for giving the game away! I knew now that this was the latest in a long series of attempts by social services to undermine our association and our crisis house. They have tried everything else and failed. This electricity problem was an opportunity for them to seize the building.
On Thursday 8th March the three arrived late - a property officer, a funding officer and a housing officer. They said that since the brewery that owned the adjoining pub were disconnecting our electricity supply on Monday 19th March, they were no longer supporting the building. They handed us two letters - one assuring us that we would receive the forthcoming year’s funding and one requesting the relinquishing of the lease and the building handed back vacant possession on Friday 16th March since our electricity supply was to be terminated imminently. The Housing Officer agreed to rehouse the one guest present at the meeting but appeared to have forgotten the existence of our other guest. When quizzed as to who made the decision they replied that it was a group of officers of the Council - not elected Councillors.
When they had gone we swung into action. We contacted bosses at the company who own the adjoining pub whose electricity supply we share. These bosses established that it was WBC Property Department who had instructed them to cut off our electricity, that they were not told that vulnerable mentally ill people occupied the building and that they would not dream of disconnecting while it remained occupied - though they would, of course, like resolution of the matter eventually.
So we embarked on a massive media campaign - appearing on Thames Valley Television News at 6pm on Tuesday 13th March. Chris Peacock from the television company described the crisis house as ‘immaculate’. No doubt he sees many facilities that are anything but! We also gave several radio interviews and featured in the ‘Wokingham Times’ on Wednesday 14th March. This article was very fair and balanced - though it focussed on the electricity issue rather than on the real power issue at the bottom of this. We are keeping up the campaign in the local press.
The electricity issue at Station House has a long history. The building was bought by Berkshire County Council in 1976 on a compulsory purchase order because it was on the route of a proposed inner distributor road. When I started working at Station House in March 1987 it was occupied by the mental health team who moved to Wokingham Hospital in March 1991. Our charity then took occupancy with a grant to cover some bills but not others. We have always paid for cleaning, cleaning materials, repairs, telephone, gas, television licence, public liability insurance, refuse collection, fire checks and equipment. The Council have always paid house insurance, business rates, electrical wiring checks, building checks, water checks, electrical appliance testing, and, so we were reassured, ELECTRICITY, from a central fund that paid for supply to all Council buildings. Furthermore, I believe that at the time that was indeed the case. Over the years the pub has changed hands several times and the Council owning Station House has also changed. The likelihood is that a proper arrangement was set up and at some stage broke down. No business would pay someone else’s bill for years without querying it. The only other possibility is that in the circumstances we are like one extra light bulb in a floodlit arena.
Certainly the concern of both the company and the pub seems to be to prevent overload rather than worrying about payment of what to them are negligible costs.
D DAY, Friday 16th March, arrived. We were intrigued by the term ‘end of business’ as the time to relinquish the lease and the building. In a crisis house business does not end. It goes on 24 hours per day, 365 days per year. We had taken legal advice. The company that owns the pub have been very kind to us and so has Clifton Ingram, Solicitors - giving free advice to a charity. We were assured by them that WBC were acting illegally in giving us eight days notice to quit and were obliged to give the six months agreed in the lease. So we organised a sit-in to protect our position and went ahead with this as a symbol of solidarity - even though WBC indicated a stay of execution. This did not arrive in time to change our plans.
At 4pm on Friday 16th March, the closing time for our Drop-In we sat in. Well-wishers and supporters joined us. Great hilarity was caused by the Fitzpatrick version of Alberto Korda's iconic image of Che Guevara solemnly pinned to my coat. He was a communist, they laughed. No matter.
He was a freedom fighter. Anyway politics are one thing and art is quite another. I challenge anyone to produce a more splendid IMAGE of struggle than this arresting symbol. I shall get Che Guevara laminated and he will accompany me throughout the campaign.
We all agreed that if you have to sit in you would rather sit in our lovely lounge than in a crumby social services facility with broken old chairs, tatty old curtains, chipped cups, a calendar that is four years out of date and not a flower or an animal to be seen. At the sit-in we started collecting signatures in support of the campaign to save the crisis house. Our Chairman, is conducting all the correspondence with WBC. Our position is that we have a three year lease and that the six month break clause should only be invoked if there is a good reason. Now that we are assured of an electricity supply, we are organising independent health and safety inspections and are confident that the building will be found fit for purpose. It has stood solidly since the mid nineteenth century. It was found fit for purpose in 2006. Nothing has changed since then. After three years we would expect to renew the lease unless there was good reason not to. If the station area is actually being redeveloped by then, we will invoke the Council’s stated ‘duty’ to relocate us. Their officer said that they have this duty and that Station House is not ideal. We don’t believe in the ideal so we are not wasting time and energy pursuing it. Our stance is to conserve what we have and make the best of it until we get a concrete [not a theoretical] offer of something better. With legal assurance that we can continue occupation according to the lease for both drop-in and residence we are not concurring with WBC’s request to stop accepting new guests once the current guests are resettled.
They wished to undertake a further health and safety check to ‘help’ but we regarded this over-intrusiveness as harassment and got the solicitor to write a warning letter - getting them to back off.
The effect of all this on the mental health of our users has been devastating and their apparent distress has strengthened our zeal to fight for their rights and to protect the service that they value so greatly. What we must do now is get back to normal stability - delivering our services without disruption. We must be more spick and span than ever both in ourselves and in the premises. We must keep up our standards and carry on as normal. We plan to have an Open Day in April and to liaise further with elected Councillors and with the community. We have stated baldly to the media that public buildings in Wokingham belong to the community, not to the Council. They are maintained with taxpayers’ money, not the Council’s money, and it is the community, not officers of the Council who will decide upon their use.
We have been appalled at the officers’ failure to grasp the mental health implications of their actions. Vulnerable mentally ill people need careful preparation for stressful life events - of which moving and loss are two recognised examples. There is a lamentable failure on their part to understand what the crisis house actually does. Our population is not static and cannot just be moved to alternative premises like the residents of a hostel. We call into question the credibility of posts such as ‘corporate head of community care’ and ‘head of community care development’ and ‘head of mental health team’. I have expressed this lack of confidence to the media.
These are the reasons why the crisis house should stay at Station House:
LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION
Vulnerable people without transport can get to us easily by public transport.
We are located away from residential areas where we may be perceived as a nuisance to neighbours.
Station House in its location is no use to anyone else. Shut down as a crisis house it would be a boarded up eyesore and a blight on the landscape which is already threatened with losing its pleasant cricket club.
FLEXIBILITY, FLEXIBILITY, FLEXIBILITY
Our charity must have its own base. Pensioners, playgroups, widows groups - these can all meet at specified hours in hired premises. Mental health users cannot. Crisis occurs at any time of day or night and we have to be available.
NHS mental hospital beds are difficult to access and interpret admission criteria rigidly.
We do not. We cater for a broader range of users.
We are flexible about lengths of stay - allowing guests time to recover completely and so to return to work and to normal life.
CHOICE, CHOICE, CHOICE.
The crisis house gives users an alternative. For those precluded for financial reasons from private treatment, bog standard local statutory services are the only thing available apart from the crisis house.
For those whose own homes and families compound their problem, we offer an alternative.
For those who prefer self-help and adult responsibility to infantilising services we offer an alternative.
QUALITY, QUALITY, QUALITY
We offer a high quality environment.
At Station House high quality support is always available. People do not have to endure waiting lists and help given only by appointment.
Having the house with several rooms enables us to offer privacy for our advice/befriending services and quiet internet access in our library.
FAMILY, FAMILY, FAMILY.
We are a family and families operate in homes, not in institutions.
So many people who come to us for help have no family. They need us where we are.
Uprooting us unnecessarily would be a cruel threat to our family cohesion.
MONEY, MONEY, MONEY
Renting a suitable house - which is the only way we can replicate our services - is beyond our financial means. Such a house could cost as much as two thousand pounds per month in rent. Even if we had such money private landlords would not accept us because of NIMBYISM.
If the Council is short of money for welfare services, as all councils are, why throw away a perfectly good facility which delivers excellent services to the local community and costs the Council practically nothing since Station House is an old ‘white elephant’ building?
We have perfectly good crisis beds. The Council is throwing away a fortune in taxpayers’ money - paying to place vulnerable mentally ill people in costly and quite unsuitable bed-and-breakfast accommodation where no care and support are available. They are much better off with us..
IT WOULD BE LUDICROUS
Certain things disturbed us in our discussions [such as they were] with WBC.
There is a shortage of accommodation for charities to rent. It is therefore ludicrous to throw away a perfectly good property where we have been operating happily and successfully for twenty years. There is nothing wrong with Station House. It is just like its tenants - old!
It would be ludicrous to spend a lot of money on fire doors. These were very new when we took over the house and are still perfectly sound. Our fire safety record is immaculate.
It is ludicrous to be over protective. Over-protection is bad practice. Producing people too terrified to change a light bulb is nothing of which to boast. When our guests move out they move into the real world and need realistic preparation.
It would be ludicrous to close down the beds at Station House in the absence of anything better. Of course we want to safeguard the premises for our charitable work but we also wish to improve mental health more generally. Before we accept closure we would insist upon inspection of premises which the Council DO use for vulnerable people - the notoriously dirty B & B at Slough, for instance, and the doss houses off the Oxford Road in Reading. Local taxpayers are paying for people to stay in these. Our beds are free.
It would be ludicrous for the Council to spend a lot of money on Station House unless necessary, but we are willing to look at what actually needs to be done in consultation and co-operation with local councillors.
This affair could have destroyed us. We are a group of dedicated volunteers who resist, always have resisted and always will resist State control and interference in our affairs. We cannot accept decisions about us and our services made behind closed doors by people who unsympathetic to voluntary, separatist initiatives. We cannot have decisions thrust upon us and their implementation rushed through before we have a proper chance to think. Funding alone without a proper base from which to operate is not adequate and could be clawed back if we were unable to deliver our services properly. We must therefore stay at Station House.
Pam Jenkinson. 18th March 2007.
Footnote: We are now working with Wokingham Borough Council officials and councillors to hopefully find a resolution to the situation. We feel it will come down to finding sufficient money to contribute to the repairs needed at Station House so that they can be carried out and enable us to have our lease reinstated. We are now actively fundraising for this purpose. If you can help, details of how to make a donation can be found on our contact us page.
Please send your letters or emails supporting us in saving the crisis house to the address on our contact us page and/or the local press.
A
petition is available for signing at Station House -
alternatively you may print one here and send it in
to us.
Petition
Thank you for your support.
Dates for your diary
Tuesday 24th April 2007 – Open Day, Station House10.00am to 10.00pm.
Read Back issues of the Separatist
If you have any contributions of suggestions for a future issue of our newsletter, "The Separatist" you can e-mail them to mailbox@wokinghammentalhealth.org.uk or send them to our address which can be found on the Contact page.
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