Awaab Ishak was only two years old when he died. An inquest has found his death was caused by respiratory problems due to prolonged exposure to mould in the social home where he lived with his family. This tragedy has also raised urgent questions about racism in housing.

In 2007 when I was a teenager, the council house I lived in with my family began to grow mould in a room occupied by two children – my youngest siblings. The small patches of damp black stains encroached on the side of the room like a morbid painting. The council did not come to survey or remedy the mould.

In that time, my mother and sister were also mugged outside the property. Thankfully, we were finally offered new accommodation and the building was demolished shortly after. Stories like mine are not unique, certainly not for social housing tenants.

According to a 2018 survey, 12% of social housing tenants in England and Wales were affected by mould and damp. That might not sound like a lot, but when you consider that there are 4.4 million social homes, it adds up. Government stats also show that mould and damp are most likely to impact Bangladeshi, Black and mixed Black tenants.

In 2020, according to the English Housing Survey, 3.5 million homes did not meet the Decent Homes Standard and serious damp problems were affecting almost a third of these. Many of them also faced delays in remedying the issues. And for one family, that proved fatal. In 2020, two-year-old Awaab Ishak died, with the coroner saying it was a result of overexposure to mould. Awaab’s family have said they tried every possible communication with Rochdale Boroughwide Housing (RBH), but to no avail.

Blamed for mould

In the damning inquest, it also emerged that Awaab’s family, who moved to the UK from Sudan in 2015, were blamed for the mould due to their “lifestyle” choices, which the housing association presumed included “ritual bathing”. Awaab’s father, Faisal Abdullah, told the Manchester Evening News he had “no doubt” that racism and prejudice influenced this response as the family had never used buckets to bathe. They also felt this was due to their lack of English-speaking skills and knowledge of the system.

After the inquest, RBH said: “We did make assumptions about lifestyle and we accept that we got that wrong. We will be implementing further training across the whole organisation. We abhor racism in any shape or form and we know that we have a responsibility to all our communities.”

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Awaab’s family is far from the only one experiencing problems with mould. One of them is teaching assistant Suleiman Osman, 46, from Camden. The dad-of-three was living in a council flat which, after Grenfell, had its cladding removed in 2017. Rooms in the home then became so mouldy it was deemed uninhabitable. This was on the eighth floor and after countless complaints from the family, Camden Council relocated them to the second floor in the same building. Mr Osman says this flat also has some mould causing continuing concern.

He says: “My kids have gotten sick because of the damp. They’re always sneezing and coughing; one of them sneezed blood and one had a chest infection. My GP has said the mould is causing respiratory problems. I’ve raised this issue with the council, with three local councillors and our MP.”

Mr Osman was eventually able to get a surveyor to look at the issues in June, but has since had no response. It is causing him to lose hope, but he knows he has to keep fighting for his family. “It makes me wonder where the humanity of housing bodies is – how can they sleep at night?”

A Camden Council spokesperson says: “We want all our tenants to live in warm, safe and well-maintained homes. We are taking direct action on this commitment through our specially set up damp and mould team, who will be visiting this property to remove the mould in the bathroom, upgrade the extractor fan and bring the home back up to the standard that we expect for all our tenants.”

Camden says the mould in Mr Osman’s current flat is caused by a broken extractor fan and is confined to the shower. The bathroom is being replaced. It says the mould in his previous flat was caused by a leak, and it worked quickly to move the family to a suitable different home in the building.

“My kids have gotten sick because of the damp. They’re always sneezing and coughing; one of them sneezed blood and one had a chest infection”

Government figures on race, ethnicity and damp conditions show that disproportionate numbers of people from specific ethnic minority groups live in damp housing in England, compared with their white British counterparts. Mixed white and Black Caribbean (13%), Bangladeshi (10%), Black African (9%) and Pakistani (8%) households were all much more likely to have damp problems than white British households (3%). The data is not broken down by tenure.

Christian Weaver, Awaab’s family’s lawyer, has seen cases where people feel powerless against the system. He says: “The devastating thing was the Abdullah family could see the mould was affecting their child and ruining his health, but they were just powerless – there was absolutely nothing more they could have done.

“The coroner made clear that there was no evidence of tenant lifestyle that might contribute to mould. And the inquest revealed an NHS health visitor visited Awaab’s home. That individual wrote to RBH expressing her concern at the state of the property. But importantly, she stressed the fact that there was a young child living there. This was in July and Awaab died in December. Nothing was done in between.”

It is easy to wonder whether these problems are a race issue or a class one – and while the two are compounded, it is hard to separate race from it. This is something that housing activist Kwajo Tweneboa can attest to.

The 24-year-old from London travels around the country to report on and advocate for people living in poor conditions. The problems he sees are predominantly affecting people of colour. “I’ve spoken to thousands of people,” he says. “I have a very good indication from the last 18 months of the type of tenants that make up social housing. It’s mostly ethnic minorities living in these conditions. That’s not to say white people don’t live in social housing and have issues, they absolutely do. But the majority of people I’ve spoken to are from Black and ethnic minority backgrounds, many of them from places like Africa, Syria, Afghanistan, parts of Asia.”

Mr Tweneboa has noticed that these inhabitants are judged on their ability to speak English, their lifestyle choices and “culture”, just as Awaab’s family were. He adds: “Ritual bathing is something that I’ve heard about before from housing providers, but it’s racist because it targets those from foreign countries and it’s an excuse to blame tenants. There’s no such thing as ritual bathing. If people are bathing with buckets of water, it’s probably because the shower doesn’t work, which is something I’ve experienced myself in social housing. RBH has apologised for making assumptions about lifestyles. But it’s not assumptions, it is outright racism and discrimination.”

Mr Tweneboa asks why Awaab’s family weren’t prioritised, especially considering there was a small child in the home. “This is no doubt because of their background, race and where they’re from. They were failed on multiple levels and I see it time and time again. What’s worse is these families have to carry on paying rent during this disrepair.”

Racial inequalities

Housing racism is an intricate web that affects many of Britain’s ethnic minorities. Recent research by Heriot-Watt University found that Black and minority ethnic households were around three times likelier to become statutorily homeless than the white population.

Even when doing the same jobs, the race pay gap ensures minorities earn less. And once they occupy unsafe and indecent homes, they have little power to change their conditions. The tenant and resident organisation, Social Housing Action Campaign says there is a power imbalance.

“There is a lack of access to justice for tenants and residents with problem landlords,” explains secretary Suzanne Muna. “Instead of enabling redress, the control systems create barriers at every stage that are designed to wear down even the most determined complainant. If people are already disadvantaged because, for example, English is not their first language or they’ve had less access to higher levels of formal education, they are double or triple disadvantaged. These factors are more prevalent among Black, Asian and minority ethnic communities.

“People from Black, Asian and minority ethnic communities are more prevalent in the worst accommodation. The same is also true for single female parents and people with disabilities. There is discrimination in wider society and it is imported into the housing systems. But this isn’t just about race, this is fundamentally a class issue in which there is intersectionality in the form of racism and other types of discrimination.”

So what needs to change? Ms Muna says: “We need a movement to create tenant and resident power because ‘voice’ in the form of online surveys or hand-selected people in landlord-controlled tenant forums is not enough. We need to remodel public housing so that it is truly in public hands, managed through democratic tenant and resident structures, if we are to eliminate all forms of discrimination. There should also be rent controls in the private sector.”

“This isn’t just about race, this is fundamentally a class issue in which there is intersectionality in the form of racism and other types of discrimination”

Awaab’s case has also instigated a movement and invigorated campaigns such as Birmingham Fair Housing, which has carved out a manifesto for “everyone in the city to have an affordable, safe and secure home and for this to be a human right”. The group was shocked when, in the wake of Awaab’s death, Birmingham City Council said it would be producing a toolkit to prevent mould.

A Birmingham Fair Housing spokesperson says: “We believe this amounts to gaslighting their tenants. All the families we have spoken to have tried to treat and get rid of the mould themselves, but it just keeps coming back. We also keep hearing from tenants that eventually when the council does send contractors round to sort out the mould, they more than often just wash it down and paint over it, but eventually it just comes back. People have told us that their families have asthma, eczema and other respiratory illnesses which they believe have been caused by or worsened by them living in mouldy and damp conditions.”

They also believe racism is a factor in how these communities are treated. “Racism is systemic in our housing system and social housing providers are failing communities of colour when they fail to acknowledge and tackle institutionalised racism in their housing systems.”

Birmingham Council did not return Inside Housing’s request for comment before time of press.

As Inside Housing was going to press, an independent review of social housing was published. Ian McDermott, chief executive of Peabody, and Charlie Norman, chief executive of Mosscare St Vincent’s, wrote for Inside Housing in response: “This is a moment to lean into some of the uncomfortable truths” that the report raised “about the role that race and racism, structural inequalities and stigma play in how we respond to our tenants’ needs”.

There is now a petition calling on housing secretary Michael Gove to pass Awaab’s Law to ensure people are not exposed to uninhabitable conditions for too long. Had something like this been in place already, it might have saved the little boy’s life. And without provisions such as this, the country will suffer – not least Black, Asian and other minorities.