Problems with my housing association are wrecking my mental health

[Dave2019]

Several months ago, I posted the topic 'Housing association has partially withdrawn our Internet access',

https://www.consumeractiongroup.co.uk/topic/454673-housing-association-taking-away-internet-access-due-to-kiosk-mode/page/4/#comment-5181916

 

and was given some great advice. Caggers stayed with me as I battled with my HA, trying out this advice, but the HA finally wore me down, so the topic thread just ended.

 

People here were so supportive, however, that I have decided to use this site to talk about a much more grave problem I have been having with this HA - one, in fact, that has for some time been causing me to have serious thoughts of ending my life.

 

My main reason for starting this topic was an email I recently got from them, and I wanted to ask if people here think the HA was telling the truth in this email, but in order to get to this, I have to give you all the full story. It's so long and convoluted that it would take up several screens, so I'll have to severely precis it. If anyone needs to ask any supplementary questions, however, I promise I will answer them fully.

 

Briefly, several years ago, I twice tried to sue the HA for negligence because of problems I was experiencing with neighbours in the multi-occupied housing scheme where I live.

 

Both claims were struck out on legal grounds, as it appears a HA cannot be sued for negligence; however, everything I had written in those claims was true, and any judge would have seen the HA had behaved very badly towards me. Nevertheless, the HA has always said that these claims were 'totally without merit', suggesting the HA had done nothing wrong, when it knew this was not the case.

 

I kept on complaining about the way I was being treated, and at the same time, the neighbours who had been causing me problems (two women, plus a few of their friends) began to make some disgusting allegations about me.

 

For example, one of the women, my downstairs neighbour, claimed I was deliberately making her life a misery with noise nuisance, while the other (close friend of the first) claimed she carried a rape alarm with her everywhere she went, just because of me. As someone who has always valued his reputation, this destroyed me.

 

Then in 2016, the HA applied for an injunction against me under the 2014 Antisocial Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act; as someone who has never in his life behaved in an antisocial manner towards anyone, this upset me more than I can say. 

 

The application included witness statements by those two women, stating how much they were being harassed by me, even though I had not spoken to either of them in two years, and had done everything to avoid them.

 

There was also a witness statement from a housing officer claiming my letters of complaint to them were causing them a lot of work, and even suggesting that a complaint I had made to the Housing Ombudsman constituted antisocial behaviour.

 

I was determined to defend the case, but two women who were to appear as my own witnesses began to experience intimidation from the two women I have already mentioned, plus their friends, and my barrister told me life would be very difficult for them if they testified for me; they both suffered from depression and had partners who were very ill, so I could not let them testify.

 

So instead, I agreed to sign an Undertaking which said I would not try to contact either of these women (even though I hadn't gone near them in two years) and would limit my correspondence with the HA to one letter per month.

 

Now here's the important thing: I am totally certain that the HA only made this application to limit my ability to complain to it.

 

One women had claimed I was causing noise nuisance, but my next door neighbours had told them I was so quiet they never even knew when I was in the flat, and the other woman claimed she carried a rape alarm because of me, but when the HA contacted my previous social landlord (I learned this after making a Subject Access Request) they had been told that in the five years I had been with them, I had been 'an exemplary tenant'.

 

Plus, one of the housing officers heavily involved in this injunction application had told be he knew I was 'a very civil man'. What had happened was that the HA knew these women had an axe to grind, and had used them to get the only thing the HA really wanted: a limit to my ability to complain to it. In the two years the injunction was in force, neither woman complained about my behaviour, even though it had not changed.

 

I am in no doubt about what was going on here: the HA wanted to stop me writing to it, and it knew my complaints did not constitute antisocial behaviour, so it 'piggybacked' its attempt to limit my ability to complain on a bogus claim of antisocial behaviour towards other tenants.

 

Anyway, I kept to the terms of the Undertaking, but in August 2018, just as it was about to end, the HA renewed the application. This time, the only thing it asked for was a limit to my contact with them, claiming that my complaints were antisocial behaviour (which was ridiculous).

 

I was determined to defend the case, but a barrister I had approached under the Direct Access Scheme persuaded me to opt for mediation instead. I hated the idea, but he said (and these were his exact words), "If this goes to Court, even if you win, this will severely affect your chances of being taken on by another landlord. They'll say 'This one's been dropped on the floor, so we won't bother'".

 

When I agreed to mediation, I made it very clear that the chief thing I wanted from it was the chance to clear my name, by showing once and for all that I was a man who had never, and would never, behave in the way those two women had claimed.

 

I told the barrister I desperately wanted my good name back, and this is why I was prepared to choose mediation. On the day of the mediation, in the presence of two the the HA's housing officers, their solicitor, my barrister, and the mediator, I made an impassioned speech about how I would never behave the way I was portrayed, and that all I wanted from the mediation was to get my good name back. It did no good:

 

when it was the housing officers' turn to speak, they rigidly stuck to their claim that I had behaved antisocially: one even said to me, in everyone's presence, that 'it had  taken housing officers lot of work to undo the harm I had done to those two women'. My barrister stayed silent: he did nothing to challenge them. I felt helpless and wretched, but I was given no further chance to speak, and it was clear my barrister was not going to help me.

 

When the draft of the settlement agreement came, one clause stated that I agreed that everything between me and the HA had been resolved and that neither of us would ever refer to any of it again. A total lie.

 

Another clause required me to withdraw a complaint I had made to the Housing Ombudsman about a housing officer who had lied to the police about me, even though I could fully substantiate this allegation. Signing it was the last thing I wanted to do, but I knew that if mediation failed, the HA would continue with the court case (it had already set an exact date, the next month),

 

I had already paid £2,000 for the mediation, my barrister told me that the court case could easily cost me a further £10,000, and he strongly hinted that because the HA was a public body, even if I won the case, I would not get any of my costs back. He even mentioned that their were instances where someone had won a case yet still had to pay his costs and the other side's costs.

 

Also, my barrister was right behind everything the agreement document wanted me to do (for instance, referring to my complaint to the Ombudsman, he said, "We're dealing with this matter by burying it"). So, dejected, beaten, miserable, I signed the document. This resulted in something called a Consent Order being made, and this has effectively tied my hands ever since. 

 

I should say here, just for the sake of clarity, that I am 100% certain that my barrister was really working for the HA, though probably without its knowledge, because he knew all the money he makes is from representing landlords like the HA, so he wanted to curry favour with them. I can't prove this, but there's a lot of very convincing evidence which I won't go into, as this topic is already too long.

 

Anyway, this brings me to my main reason for starting this topic. I was already suffering from severe clinical depression, and signing that agreement against my will plunged me into a really deep depressive state, worse than anything I'd every experienced before (and I've suffered from depression for decades).

 

The fact that I was regarded as a man of very poor character but could not by law even protest against this allegation, because of that Consent Order, was the main reason for this. I finally emailed the CEO to tell her how bad things were, and that I was finding that my suicidal thoughts appeared to be turning into definite plans.

 

I also told her in great detail just way I was feeling this way (these emails actually breached the Consent Order - that is how damaging that document was to me). She and another officer finally agreed to meet me, but as it was the height of Covid, it had to be in the outdoor area of a cafe, with lots of other people talking on nearby tables, which made it a very bad venue for what I had to say).

 

The meeting achieved nothing, and I could see they were not prepared to be honest: for instance, the other officer told me she would look into my case again, but when I handed her a thick wallet file and told her it contained lots of evidence to support my claim that I had never behaved antisocially, she refused to take it.

 

I knew the 'investigation' would be a whitewash, and it was: the resulting report was just a re-hash of all the poorly supported allegations against me. This plunged me into despair.

 

So, fast forward to October 2022. My GP wrote to the HA to say that my not being able to recover my good name was causing me severe mental problems. He stated that the treatment I was being given would not work unless the cause of my depression was addressed, and so for this reason, he wanted the HA to agree to meet me to argue my case and try to get my good name back. The HA replied to him, flatly refusing to meet with me.

 

In December 2022, after I had seen my GP again, he again write to the HA. This time he stated that 'if the HA refused to meet me, he was worried that as a result there was a likelihood of what he termed 'completed suicide', by which I think he meant that I would attempt suicide and succeed in that attempt. 

 

The HA's reply was the same; a flat refusal to meet with me. Their was also a whopping great lie: the letter said that 'every alternative to resolving this matter had been tried and exhausted'. Nothing had been tried. The letter also implied that the Consent Order prevented the HA from meeting with me to discuss this matter, but that was rubbish, because it did not prevent the HA from making that thoroughly bogus report.

 

Then, in June of last year, with my mental state worse than ever, I again asked my GP to request a meeting with the HA. He agreed, but I heard nothing for months. Then in November, I asked my GP if he had contacted the HA and he said he had emailed them, in June, but had not had a reply.

 

He gave me a copy of his email, which once more stressed how serious my mental state was. I then emailed the CEO, using her own email address, asking her why the HA had not got back to my GP.  I asked her to reply to my email personally. But in spite of this, the reply came from 'Customer Feedback'. It said:

 

"I acknowledge receipt of your email sent to *****, Chief Executive on 6 January 2023.

I would like to inform you that Mr ***** is no longer with the organisation therefore he didn’t respond to your doctor’s email.

Please advise what issues relating to Platform  remain outstanding, once I receive your response I will be able to advise the most appropriate place to direct your enquiry.

Kind regards"

 

So, I'd really appreciate people's thoughts on this.

 

One thing I'd particularly like to hear people's thoughts on. I strongly suspect that this email was a lie, and that the HA had read my doctor's email but had just not bothered to reply.

 

So I have to ask this question: if the officer my GP had sent this email to really had left the organisation, would this mean the email would not have been read? This officer had a really fancy title - something like 'Regional Estates and Neighbourhoods Manager' - so the HA would have known that quite a few of the emails sent to him would have been about important matters, and could be part of an ongoing correspondence.

 

So if he left, wouldn't the management of his email account be changed in such a way that the new person occupying his position would get to see any emails sent to the previous occupant of that position?

 

The HA knows that it looks very bad for it to receive three messages from a tenant's GP, all stating that the tenant was suicidally depressed because of a problem he was having with the HA, so it would be useful for it to claim it just never got to see the third one, even if it did. They're dishonest enough to do that - there's no doubt about that at all. 

 

I'll leave it there. Sorry it's been such a long post, but believe me, it would take a post several times longer to tell everything. If you've read this to the end, you have my heartfelt thanks.

 

 

[stu007]

Hi

 

Please be patient as I am sure others will be along to give there wisdom.

 

Your post is very lengthy and in-depth so please give us time to digest your post on how to best approach this one as it is a difficult one.

 

Just quickly that email response for the GP not getting a reply due to that individual leaving there post and that being the reason for no reply, what a load of bull as all those Housing Association Email Addresses in this day and age will be monitored.

 

From that response as they are aware they did not respond to the GP due to that individual leaving and now knowing about it, have they actually responded to the GP? (that response does not state whether they have)

 

Give me a wee bit of time to fully digest your lengthy post

[Dave2019]

Hi stu007

 

Thanks for being so supportive.

 

My feelings about their reply were exactly the same as yours: I'm almost certain they're lying when they claim they didn't reply to the GP's email because 'the person concerned is no longer in the organisation. This housing officer had a very important title: Regional estates and Neighbourhoods Manager. Surely then, when he left, his email account would have been taken over by someone else? There were bound to be issues that were 'ongoing' and that this man's successor would have had to have access to any emails concerning such issues.

 

You ask if they have responded to the GP, and I'm almost certain the answer is 'no'. To ensure you have an accurate picture of the situation, I'll quote my email to the HA, and their reply. I'll redact all names.

 

My email, sent on January 6th:

 

 

 

"Dear [name of CEO]

 

In June of last year I visited my GP, Dr *****, and told him I was continuing to feel deeply depressed, and to have suicidal thoughts, because of issues relating to [name of HA]. I asked him to appeal to [name of HA] to meet with its staff to try to resolve things, because I believed this was the only possible way my mental health could be improved.

 

I reminded him that he had twice made such an appeal to [name of HA] but that its staff had refused to meet with me; I then told him that in spite of this, I needed to ask him to make one further request for a meeting, because I could think of no other way to address the serious depression I continued to experience. Dr ***** readily agreed to my request.

 

When I had heard nothing from Dr ***** by November, I wrote to him to ask if he had contacted [name of HA], and he responded by sending me a copy of an email he sent to [name of housing officer]; however, to my dismay, in a covering letter he said that although he had sent it to him in June, he had received no reply.

 

This letter clearly stated that my mental health was in an extremely poor state; it said: "Invariably, he remains very preoccupied about this whole situation and it continues to affect his mental state which continues to show some depressive features. He is also still troubled by distressing and intrusive thoughts around suicide." In view of the important nature of Dr *****'s email, I need to know why your staff did not reply to it.

 

I would be grateful if you would reply to this message personally.

 

Yours sincerely"

 

 

 

Even though I expressly asked the CEO to reply personally, my reply came from a person in 'Customer Feedback'. It read:

 

 

 

"Dear Mr *****

 

I acknowledge receipt of your email sent to to [name of CEO] on 6 January 2023.

 

I would like to inform you that [name of housing officer] is no longer with the organisation and therefore he didn't respond to your doctor's email.

 

Please advise what issues relating to [name of HA] remain outstanding, once I receive your response I will be able to advise the most appropriate place to direct your enquiry.

 

Kind regards

 

[Name]"

 

I hope this helps to put you in the picture.

 

 

 

[unclebulgaria67]

When people leave companies, the general practice is just to close the email account. I believe under Data Protection Act, as the person receiving the email would no longer be covered by Data Protection Act as they had left the employers, the company has to delete the email account in their name.

 

For this reason, your email, if sent to an individual persons email account, rather than to a companies email account, may have been deleted.

 

My reading of your post to this thread, is that you cannot continue living in a property that is so detrimental to your health and wellbeing. Therefore my advice is that with the help of your GP and local Council Authorities Housing department,  is that the Council start looking into suitable  alternative Housing options in your area. Your ongoing battle where you are living does not appear to be one that can be resolved and will just continue to cause you distress. Therefore moving to another suitable property may remove you from the situation and allow you a more peaceful living environment.