Church and State blog: Email to the Minister for Housing and Planning

Friday, November 24, 2006

Email to the Minister for Housing and Planning

Again last night, it was very hot inside my sleeping bag. My bad throat is getting better, though, thanks to the non-prescription medication Declan has me taking. We again brought cardboard all the way from the Whitechapel Road to our patch - a walk of 40 minutes. We found this cardboard at the back of the new London Muslim Centre, a huge building that can hold 10,000 people. It appears the Blair government is throwing a lot of money the Muslim way these days.

Muslim leaders are calling for 150 private Muslim schools to be state-funded. No doubt, next they will be sitting in the House of Lords as unelected religious leaders (with full voting rights), just as 26 unelected Church of England bishops currently do. Perhaps that would suit the Christian hierarchy just fine, given the fact that Islam also prohibits euthanasia, abortion and gay marriage. (I don't think they have a clear position on embryonic stem cell research just yet.) It's not looking good for human rights in general, if you ask me.

Would it be preferable if schools, hospitals and other institutions of state were secular? Terry Sanderson, vice-president of the National Secular Society, thinks so. "We must secularise all the institutions of state," he told The Times last month. "It may take generations, but we must make it difficult for any religion to take any kind of power. Religion is never satisfied until it is in charge."

This afternoon Declan emailed Minister for Housing and Planning Yvette Cooper about St Mungo's. We don't really expect a reply, but no one will be able to say we didn't email her.

Dear Minister,

Further to my telephone conversation yesterday afternoon with your Assistant Private Secretary, Ms Christine Adeyoola, I wish to complain that whilst my wife and I have been sleeping rough in Tower Hamlets (for the past three weeks), we have been waiting for St Mungo's, London's largest homelessness organisation, to provide us with a referral to a night shelter.

In the early hours of last Saturday morning (at 4.05am), my wife was assaulted where we bed down at night. A full account of this assault is contained in her blog here.

Please would you advise if the matter of a dereliction of duty of care on the part of St Mungo's falls within the remit of your office.

I can confirm that last Monday I spoke to the PA to St Mungo's CEO Charles Fraser, but to no avail. Yesterday I spoke with the Private Secretary to Tower Hamlets Council Leader Cllr Denise Jones, who informed me that my complaint was outside the remit of the Council.

On 11 December I am before Mr Justice Walker in the High Court of Justice Administrative Court in London for an oral hearing for permission to apply for Judicial Review against the Department for Work and Pensions. This follows the decision by Birmingham Erdington Jobcentre Plus to terminate my joint claim for Jobseekers Allowance (from 19 September) because I did not sign my declaration that I was available for work on 27 September. I was not scheduled to sign on until two days later.

My wife and I signed on every second Friday, not every second Wednesday. Nonetheless, all my subsequent letters of complaint were ignored, including three letters to Secretary of State for Work and Pensions John Hutton MP.

Yours sincerely,
Declan Heavey

Rough sleepers like us could be in trouble this weekend. It's reported in this morning's Metro newspaper that Britain "will be battered by potentially dangerous gales and gusts of up to 120kph (75mph) this weekend". Great!

Church and State

MAYOR OF LONDON RSI PROPERTY
DAY 406 IN A WEEKLY PERIODIC TENANCY
SUBJECT TO A SECTION 21 NOTICE

(SEE PARA. 3 BELOW)

1. Our 308 Honorary Associates include 20 Nobel Prize laureates. Declan and I are engaged in a project that deals with the publication of issues significant to social policy in a number of key areas, e.g., climate change, population, futurism, atheism, and free speech. Established as Network for Church Monitoring, a non-profit company limited by guarantee, our main publication, found at the website, Church and State, calls attention to subjects, not the least which have been critical of the interaction between religious and secular institutions. We have been the target of numerous threats and actions, e.g., the former resulting in threats to Declan's life, and the latter, which have led to vandalism. The various incidents are on record with the police and other official agencies.

2. There are no less than 63 Nobel Prize laureates on the Church and State website from 20 Honorary Associates, eight articles, nine book excerpts and 33 petition signatories. (For example, one Nobel laureate signed our Nobel petition in support of human embryonic stem cell research and gave us permission to excerpt from one of his books.) Our list of associates also includes 18 US National Medal laureates, and six Turing Award laureates (the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in computer science). We have published one article and excerpted from the books of seven members of the British House of Lords. And there are 31 knighted professors on the site from 13 Honorary Associates, one book excerpt and 21 petition signatories. These figures are despite the never-ending assault on our email (this link reveals the targeting of our emails to, among others, a close colleague in Washington, DC as well as space advocates and Nobel laureates).

3. This is Day 406 for us living under the threat to life of a 'no fault' eviction by Peabody Trust.[1] We live in a Mayor of London's Rough Sleepers Initiative (RSI) property. Peabody's appalling new terms of tenancy have forced us into an unstable weekly periodic tenancy that poses a threat to Declan's life and inhibits our ability to exercise our rights. Declan accumulated quite a history with the Housing Ombudsman Service before he received the Ombudsman's decision not to investigate a referral from Lyn Brown MP on jurisdictional grounds. The Ombudsman was asked to consider whether or not our tenancy has been renewed like for like; and whether, if not, it should be in light of the landlord having accused us of not signing a like-for-like agreement. The Equality and Human Rights Commission will not accept a referral of discrimination from Ms Brown, the Commission's helpline (EASS) having grossly distorted the complaint against Peabody. We no longer have pro se access to the courts (see next paragraph).

4. This eviction matter came before District Judge Ruth Fine at the Central London County Court on 30 June 2020, when both counsel for St Mungo's (the charity in effective control of our tenancy) and Declan presented their positions. Declan lost the case and was ordered to pay £1,850 in costs. A publishing colleague in America cleared these costs within 24 hours of my blog post about this hearing for strike out on a related issue that was the essence of the claim, i.e., that St Mungo's would take a phone call to confirm that we are clients of the Mayor of London's RSI programme. Within a week of the hearing, St Mungo's had agreed to take this phone call for us both, the Court having ruled that they were not obliged to do so despite our circumstances. This time we escaped bankruptcy (counsel for St Mungo's asked for £3,407.50 in costs), but consider that to seek pro se access to justice in the courts has become far too dangerous for us. Declan currently has before the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman the decision of the Information Commissioner that allows St Mungo's to continue processing coercive support plans without our knowledge or consent and that also poses a threat to his life.

5. When it comes to traffic, we have had 10.7 million hits in the past three years on Facebook; however, I left the platform on 13 March 2021 for one year rather than risk being banned for life. It is indisputable that with any sort of level playing field Church and State would have far exceeded 2.5 million hits last year. In addition to a large variety of blocks without explanation, Facebook had so severely restricted our Page's distribution by October 2020 that it was almost as good as an unpublished page.[2] Currently, we are up to their 85th block since 1 December 2015, and as usual without an explanation. This block records as one half of their 3rd double block in the first five weeks of this year that lasted 60 days. Our traffic has also been curtailed by over 2.5K blocks on access to Church and State since 26 July 2016, including 29 full distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks since 17 May 2019 that have lasted for as long as 54 hours at a time.[3] About 70% of our hits are from Americans.

"This is precisely the hard hitting kind of response needed to clarify the unfair way Facebook is treating your highly reputable site." Don Collins, Founder, International Services Assistance Fund, Washington DC

Last updated: 26/06/21

_________________________

[1] Once a fixed term has elapsed, the landlord has the option to seek eviction even if the tenant has upheld their obligations in full (though of course the landlord must still apply for and obtain a county court order).

[2] 17/10/20: We have permission to publish this ISAF letter of 30 September to Facebook COO Sheryl Samberg. Facebook has so severely restricted our Page's distribution since 4 September that it's almost as good as an unpublished page

[3] Since October 2019, we have been defining a full DDoS attack as having such a high volume of up to 4-minute blocks on access to Church and State that we don't bother recording them all.

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Friday, November 24, 2006

Email to the Minister for Housing and Planning

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