In early 2021, the ITV reporter Daniel Hewitt visited a block of flats in Croydon, tipped off that the Covid lockdown was being used by some landlords as an excuse not to do repairs. What he found made him and his cameraman physically ill. You might remember the footage – it was broadcast and went viral. Ceilings and walls utterly covered with furry black mould. Dirty water pouring into buckets and on to electrical sockets. The squelch of the sodden carpet. Most shocking of all, though, were the emails Hewitt and his team started to receive after his story aired. Croydon wasn’t an exception. It was just the beginning.
Over three years later, The Trapped is an eight-part series that reveals – in horrifying detail – exactly what they found next. For those who want visual evidence, there’s an accompanying website with photos, but it’s hardly needed. The descriptions are so vivid and harrowing you don’t need much imagination to picture the reality for the people who have been “left to rot like the walls around them” in properties not fit for animals, let alone human habitation.
This isn’t a scandal about private landlords. The homes (if you can call them that) are let out by councils or housing associations. The tenants are mostly working people who pay rent, but their multiple, desperate requests for repairs go unanswered by the large organisations – in part funded by taxpayers – tasked with providing accommodation.
Interviewee after interviewee talks of how their homes are making them and their children sick: asthma, skin conditions, not to mention anxiety and depression. They talk of the powerlessness, the despair, the shame. “I don’t even feel like I’m human,” one admits. Episode two features a woman with terminal cancer, living our her final days in a flat so riddled with mould and damp she can’t breathe. She has been complaining for months: within days of ITV getting involved, she is rehomed somewhere that is actually liveable. This isn’t a story about housing, Hewitt tells us. “It’s a story about power.”
[See also: Forty years ago, Band Aid brought mad excitement to my generation]
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