Home Care In Westminster, CO

Homes policy change follows a public consultation that overwhelmingly backed the move

THE city council is bringing in lifetime tenancies for all council tenants after its previous strategy of flexible, fixed-term, agreements resulted in limited success in freeing-up homes.

Westminster City Council said all new and existing tenants will be granted secure lifetime tenancies over the next year and urged housing providers to take a similar approach.

The policy change follows a public consultation in March that overwhelmingly backed the move.

The decision was approved by council leader Adam Hug (above) on May 29.

He said: “We’re giving our residents the long-term security they deserve.

“A safe, stable, home is the foundation for building a stronger community and this change ensures tenants can plan for their futures with peace of mind.

“There will be no changes to rent, tenancy rights, or the services residents receive and the council will work with tenants to ensure a smooth transition.”

Since 2013 tenants have been placed on a flexible, fixed-term, tenancy, reviewed every five years.

The council said this was meant to enable a more efficient use of social housing stock and address under-occupation, partly by ensuring those who no longer needed social housing were not living there for years after they should have moved elsewhere.

Leader of the Conservative opposition, Cllr Paul Swaddle, said: “This is not right. Council housing is needed to support the most in need, and should be prioritised.”

The city council said the shift will offer tenants greater stability by providing them with a long-term home that they can rely on.

It has also proposed maintaining existing rent levels, tenancy rights, and housing services.

A council spokesperson said the authority already has the powers it needs to take action and end tenancies if they deem someone no longer qualifies, and this will not be impacted by the introduction of lifetime tenancies.

There is nothing in law or its tenancy agreements covering income thresholds for existing secure tenants, flexible or otherwise.

It comes as The Renters’ Rights Bill proposes axing shorthold tenancies.

If enacted, this will prevent housing providers from offering flexible, fixed-term, tenancies.

The council said many providers have already ditched them.

Westminster city has approximately 28,000 social-rent homes, according to a council document.

More than half of these are owned by housing associations.

Demand for social housing is high with 5,200 households on the waiting list but only around 700 lettings available each year.

The majority of people on the list are homeless, and homelessness continues to rise across Westminster and the capital.

Family fun day organisers hope to put canal fees in the spotlight

A BOATERS’ “Big Bash” is being held this weekend with organisers hoping to shine a spotlight on new charges set to be introduced on the canal.

The National Bargee Travellers Association (NBTA) said there will be live music, children’s activities, stalls and speeches at the family fun day in the Paddington Arm of the Grand Union Canal in Westbourne Park from noon tomorrow, Saturday.

“There’s going to be music, stores, and all sorts of activities for people to enjoy rather than just marches or speeches,” said Jake Oscar Saville, of the NBTA.

He said the association members are concerned about surcharges being imposed on “itinerant” boaters – also known as “continuous cruisers” – living in boats who do not have a fixed mooring.

A “commission” has also been launched by the Canal & River Trust, the body responsible for maintaining the historic waterways.

Mr Saville said he believed itinerant boaters’ interests were not being represented to the commission, and added: “It’s a commission to look into the future of itinerant boaters but there’s nobody from our community that’s a part of it.”

The NBTA, launched in 2009, is a volunteer organisation providing support and advocacy for the various people living on boats across the United Kingdom. The NBTA believes the surcharge discriminates against them and is a direct threat to a traditional, low-impact, lifestyle.

They argue the fee risks pricing their communities off the water entirely.

Mr Saville said: “We’ll continue to organise as best we can to make sure that they are aware of what their legal rights are and that they’re not being discriminated against by enforcement that isn’t legally proper.”

The commission was launched in January and is chaired by lawyer Andrew Cowan, alongside Sir Chris Kelly and a CRT rep. The CRT said: “It has been 30 years since the British Waterways Act 1995 was passed and, in that time, there have been many changes to the canal network and how it is managed, the number of boats licensed on our waterways, and the way people are choosing to use their boats. We believe it’s a sensible time to take a fresh look at how we license boats on our waters and help us consider whether it would be sensible to consider possible changes that better reflect the use of the network, today and in the future.”

For more on the association and fun day go to: https://bargee-traveller.org.uk/

It turns out that seeing a band you saw in your 20s, when you are now in your 40s, can make you feel like the sands of time are running a tad low

The Boy Least Likely To at Bush Hall

IT is illegal to say anything slightly negative about the carefully constructed icon Beyoncé, but if you were on a late train any time last week you would have been surrounded by scores of middle-aged people in cowboy hats.

No doubt they thought Bey loved them back for rocking her London gig merch but by any sober analysis these fans had actually become the worst hen party searching for the right platform for Brighton.

At the risk of prosecution, is there anything more predictable than Beyoncé having a country swing reinvention in the middle of her stellar soul career?

Amid the Stetsons, you’d have found Harrington also on my way back from a gig.

A little more low key, 200 people had been in the Bush Hall in Shepherd’s Bush for a band you’ve either never heard of or can’t remember, called The Boy Least Likely To. It’s the sort of cute venue that wherever you are standing you can see the faces of the performers, and you don’t have to queue for the loos.

That’s not to say all this is definitely better than the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, readers can make up their own minds about that.

Now, I would’ve thought I’d have felt old going to a Beyoncé show, such is the desperation you find in so many in their 40s and 50s, claiming, as they do, to love the superpowers of pop in a see-through bid to cling on to a lost level of cool. Saying you like Beyoncé at our age, or Taylor Swift or Stormzy or bubble tea, is like those who claim they really can’t miss The Super Bowl. You’ll stare and insist you’re enjoying it, but you don’t really understand what’s going on.

And yet, in the end, it was going to The Boy Least Likely To that made me feel old, and not just because their songs are often sad nostalgic spins about missed opportunities and what life could’ve been if we’d made a different choice at a different time.

The Boy Least Likely To on GMTV nearly 20 years ago

No, it turns out that seeing a band you saw in your 20s with other people who were also in their 20s, when you are now in your 40s and the people around you are too, suitably makes you feel like the sands of time are running a tad low.

The band was playing their 2005 album The Best Party Ever in full as an anniversary special, but last time I saw them it was a packed house at the Scala in King’s Cross and here it was just the happy survivors, still nodding away to their softly-sung, folksy indie tunes, complete with an occasional toot on the recorder.

Everybody was wearing slightly more expensive stripy jerseys and better looking sneakers than the last time we convened to hear these songs, but there were more bald heads, extra rings around the eyes and regular phone checks on the baby-sitters. It was like a scene that might have been in High Fidelity, something poetical about the realisation by a Hornby-type that songs only freeze time for so long and somehow they can make you feel happy and sad at the same time.

As if to illustrate the bittersweet nature of this gathering, band leader Jof Owen explained his tooth had popped out like an old man last week, while the new keyboardist turned out to be the daughter of the original keyboard player.

She was in the womb the first time around.

To think, I came to this place to feel jolly, not to question what I have actually done with the past 20 years.

Maybe The Boy Least Likely To felt the same way returning to their little masterpieces from the early 2000s.

They once had Rashida Jones – Anne Perkins in Parks and Recreation and much more – in their music video, and got to play out GMTV one morning with their song Be Gentle With Me.

Another of theirs featured in the Peter Rabbit movie soundtrack, but you wouldn’t really call them famous.

Maybe 20 years from now, when Beyoncé is still romping around in a shiny catsuit in her 60s and people of a similar age are wondering how she still has the energy for it, Sarah from Burgess Hill will dig out the fading cherry Stetston she wore to see her heroine sing the Cowboy Carter album in 2025.

Fair enough, I shouldn’t be a grinch – because that speck of a bright gold light they made out on the stage from the last row of the Spurs stadium last week and the giant screens on which they actually watched the concert will no doubt be burned into the brain forever.

Nothing makes your memory clearer than your favourite music played live, nothing is better at granting you a sorcerous quantum leap back to a certain moment, place, argument or kiss.

But, boy, a song most likely can make you feel old.

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It’s back to NW1, ‘where we belong’, in Eimear McBride’s fourth novel, writes Conrad Landin

Eimear McBride and her follow-up to The Lesser Bohemians [Bjo96_CC BY-SA 4.0]

THE “act of theatre”, Chris Kraus wrote in her 2002 experimental novel Aliens & Anorexia, “really happens in the tiny gaps between the actors and their roles”.

This “friction witnessed by the audience” is in full view in The City Changes Its Face. It’s less a novel about actors as a performance in itself, reaching for fulfilment amid the sheer inadequacies of the written and spoken word.

It’s Eimear McBride’s fourth novel, and it opens two years after her second, The Lesser Bohemians, finished up. The same star-crossed lovers of that book have sauntered from Kentish Town to Camden Town, now cohabiting in a rather conventional domesticity – but their troubling age-gap and inner darknesses loom larger than ever.

Twenty-year-old Eily has retreated from drama school and barely leaves the house, and Stephen – two decades her senior – cannot get her to talk. A jar of piccalilli is thrown across the kitchen, and amid bloodstains and an unassailable stink of vinegar, picking up the pieces is a job for two.

Were this a plot-driven novel, it would hinge on the re-entry of Stephen’s daughter Grace – just a couple of years younger than Eily and the cause of considerable jealousy – who appears in London in regular narrative leaps into the recent past. Grace is very much a “she” alongside Stephen’s “you”, described only as the image of her father. When her loud rustling disturbs the protagonists’ awkward sex, it is a jolt for us too – we’ve forgotten she’s not Stephen’s to be turned off.

Yet its Eily’s narrative “we” that comes out on top, inviting us to step across time with her – once we’re over our inhibitions at experiencing generosity and derangement at once.

And McBride’s pages are turned not by plot, but instead by language and expression, through which she instils a suffocating claustrophobia into a novel of vast horizons. Eily, Stephen and Grace are constantly struggling for breath, amid a fog of cigarette smoke, a rainy Camden and the finite space of their circumstances. “The city, magnanimously, raised its weft and offered us room to turn,” McBride writes in a moment of optimism that likewise reminds us of human subjectivity.

We venture from the World’s End in Camden High Street to the Sir Richard Steele on Haverstock Hill, swerving Blustons, Owl Bookshop and the drug dealers by Camden Town tube. When the action shifts to Finsbury Park, Archway or Holloway, it’s within the confines of a stuffy cinema showing Stephen’s autobiographical film.

Presented as a screenplay far more lyrical than practical, this section is a heartbreaking portrait of addiction and wayward youth, brought to life in cold colour. As the narrative steps into role, with Stephen now its first focaliser, we see the shadow of McBride’s own theatrical training at Drama Centre London – popularly known, and not for nothing, as “Trauma Centre”.

Yet its Eily’s banal commentary on the background music, and her observation of Stephen and Grace’s body language, which rams it home.

It’s the gap between performance and performer that brings us closest to understanding what lies beneath.

Returning from a trip to St John’s Wood towards the novel’s end, Eily describes it as “lovely, but not our place”. It’s back to “Camden. Where we belong. Where what will be, still will, at least in a world of our own.”

That’s a certainty pre-shattered in the book’s very title, but a fleeting moment of recognition too. Much as we all might struggle to find the words, much as we are defined by time and place, our performances – if nothing else – remain our own.

• The City Changes Its Face. By Eimear McBride. Faber, £20

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Thought-provoking show about the war in Ukraine was developed from real, sometimes harrowing, witness accounts

Tom Godwin as The Man from Stoyanka and Marianne Oldham as the Journalist [Ikin Yum]

IT is a measure of Dash Arts’ integrity and ambition that the company has an artist wellbeing coach (Lou Platt), food consultant (Olia Hercules) and testimony advisers Nataliya Gumenyuk and Peter Pomerantsev on board for this thought-provoking show about the war in Ukraine.

Developed from real, sometimes harrowing, witness accounts The Reckoning, by Anastasiia Kosodii and Josephine Burton, is a vivid and powerful drama about conflict, survival and the importance of revisiting and retelling trauma for both reporters and survivors, however painful.

Two Ukrainian actors open proceedings: Sam (Simeon Kyslyi) and Olga (Olga Safronova) introduce themselves and the play.

A journalist (Marianne Oldham) meets a man from Stoyanka (Tom Godwin), a former security guard living with two dogs in a ruined village outside Kyiv.

He recalls the Russians arriving, his own ordeal and terror. Kyslyi and Safronova stand in for several survivors sharing their experiences of the invasion, torture, displacement and loss.

Throughout, vegetables are methodically chopped on stage as the man prepares a Ukrainian summer salad.

Burton’s nimble production is mainly verbatim theatre. The testimonies are drawn from real events and stories recorded by The Reckoning Project; an organisation that collects evidence, ensuring witness accounts are heard in the pursuit of justice for victims of war crimes.

It’s impeccably acted with minimal props – chairs become barricades, dog leads resemble nooses – in Zoë Hurwitz’s imaginative set design.

Some scenes are delivered in Ukrainian, adding a note of authenticity to this intense, poignant evening, softened only by the welcome helping of salad we are given at the end.

This gesture of domesticity reminds us of all that is lost – the ordinary lives upended by war.

Attending The Reckoning feels like an act of solidarity.

Recommended.

Until June 28 arcolatheatre.com