It was six in the morning and Gary had just cycled home from shelf stacking at the supermarket. He was soon screaming and striking the walls of his decrepit mobile home. It was a normal morning in our farmyard where half-a-dozen of us lived in caravans and above sheds. Living in a “tin hut” while working as a rural campaigner opened my eyes to a largely unnoticed facet of the countryside. Look carefully as you drive or stroll around and you will count scores of caravans, mobile homes and huts with curtains. Most of these are lived in, no matter how dilapidated they are. Their occupants work in low paid rural jobs or, if retired, cruise between cafés and pubs during the day for warmth and company. Do these rural residents pay council tax or vote? Sometimes. Do they have access to electricity, running water or sewerage? Sometimes, sometimes not. Do they get the heath care they need? Sometimes, often not.
Newspapers and politicians headline the problems of the urban homeless, but they largely ignore the rural housing crisis that has led so many people living in shacks across rural England. More people could soon be squashed into rural hovels following a decision last month in the House of Lords. A strawberry farm near Leominster had built a caravan village for its 3,500 summer workers to ensure they had reasonable living conditions. The farm failed to secure retrospective planning permission, and failed in the Lords to prevent demolition of the homestead while the case is considered the by the European Court of Human Rights. We need migrant labour to supply our food and to sustain the rural economy, so where now are the itinerant workers to live? They will have to cram into temporary lets, tin huts and the nooks and crannies of the rural landscape that tourists and politicians are blind too.
This is the hidden side of the affordable rural housing crisis. The shameful way we treat our migrant workers is gradually gaining media attention, but usually only when workers die in tragic accidents. The story the press is missing is that rural Britain is becoming a modern-day version of 1930s California, portrayed with passion in Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath.
The government’s Housing Corporation recently pledged to build 10,500 affordable rural houses over the next three years. It is a welcome step but well short of the 11,000 a year called for by the Affordable Rural Housing Commission. None of these will be available for seasonal workers. Neither will the new houses address the problems of the people that have already found a home unnoticed in the nooks and crannies of the rural landscape — officialdom does not know that they are there.
Gary was recently moved to a city centre hostel in an attempt to “help him”. Terrified of the unfamiliar urban environment, he was back in his caravan within week. That means he is no longer counted among the homeless of Britain and he can continue banging the walls of his decrepit home almost unnoticed. He won’t complain about his living conditions but we should not be surprised if, in the near future, our migrant workers rebel. As Steinbeck said, there is a “little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.”Andy Boddington
Published in the Clun Chronicle, April 2008