PENSIONERS FROM HELL

A growing number of pensioners are being evicted from sheltered housing for antisocial behaviour usually blamed on teenagers, violence, swearing and playing loud music. Seven residents were expelled from four London care homes in one month for repeated bad behaviour. A sheltered housing report claims that wardens are finding it impossible to control some occupants.

Offences include blaring music late at night, violent attacks and verbal abuse on neighbours and staff and wandering naked around communal areas. One eviction was that of Mary Urry, 81, from a block of pensioners’ flats in the Isle of Wight. Her reign of intimidation included attacking other residents with walking sticks and playing Chas ’n’ Dave songs at top volume. The antisocial incidents were revealed in an investigation by a charity called the Emerging Role of Sheltered Housing. Its results were presented to the National Sheltered Housing Conference.

Meic Phillips, chairman of the charity’s good practice group, said, “Reactions from those attending suggest that this antisocial behaviour is much more common than previously thought. The problem may be that people are entering sheltered accommodation later in life. They are therefore more likely to be mentally and physically frail and may be bringing with them a complex mesh of mental health issues, particularly dementia.”

The charity recommmends further study of antisocial behaviour among England and Wales’s 800,000 sheltered housing residents. Tony Colley, 63, was evicted from his sheltered bungalow in Maltby, South Yorkshire, after an Anti-Social Behaviour Order was served on him this year. Neighbours complained that he swore, entertained a string of girlfriends, brandished his walking stick and set his house on fire four times while drunk.

Barbara Simpson, 64, was removed from her housing association flat last year because she refused to stop feeding birds in her garden. Neighbours complained that the birds’ droppings were a health hazard. Anchor Housing Association took out a court injunction and covered her windows with mesh to stop her feeding the birds, but she was filmed pushing bread through the mesh and was evicted.

Gwen Hassall, chairwoman of the National Wardens’ Association, said the findings of the Emerging Role of Sheltered Housing were consistent with the experiences of wardens, who are confronted by increasing bad behaviour. “What I find both saddening and surprising is that these situations have reached the stage of eviction. This is an issue that needs to be dealt with, particularly by social services,” she said. (Source: Times Online)