Ealing woman forced into hotel as social home deemed unsafe

Amanda Wallis was moved out of her flat after firefighters deemed it unsafe to live in and turned off the electrics.

Wallis, who is wheelchair-bound and suffers multiple chronic illnesses and disabilities, was assured that the fuse box had been checked before she moved to the Mount Park Road flat last August.

Wallis, 35, criticized the lack of support she has received from both her housing association and the council.

She said: “Ealing Council do not listen. They just fob people off and they are not helpful at all. It is completely wrong, it's their system.

“They just don’t care.”

Wallis first noticed an intermittent issue with the fuse box when she moved into the property last year, but it was just over a week ago she became very worried.

She said: “Last weekend there was a lot of buzzing coming from it. Then on Wednesday I smelt burning and it started sparking on and off.”

After hours pleading with the council for somewhere to stay on Wednesday, she was relocated to a B&B before being moved to a Premier Inn the following day, while an engineer fixed the problem, the cause of which was found to be a loose screw.

Wallis pays around £430 per month for the property, which she rents through A2dominion, the housing association responsible for over 38,000 homes across the capital.

Wallis decided to rent the property following a virtual viewing, which did not show the flat to be inaccessible, but she cannot access her bathroom without assistance and the front room now doubles as her bedroom.

Living on her own and with no family nearby, she is forced to rely on friends to assist her to even enter or exit her property.

She was also provided with a certificate assuring her that the fuse box had been checked before she moved in.

According to the electrician doing the repair, however, the last check-in fact occurred on February 1 2019.

The fuse box that caused Wallis the issues

She says in the event of a fire she would not be able to escape because of steps outside the home.

Wallis has described her experience as “incredibly stressful”, and took to Twitter to vent her frustrations at A2dominion.

She says the group then asked her to remove the posts.

She said: “They phoned me on Wednesday saying I need to take the tweets down saying that it would basically ruin their name.”

Wallis, who is one of the 2.2 million clinically extremely vulnerable people asked to shield from last June, reflected on her situation.

She said: “It’s been very difficult.

“I have lost my independence. I would get out by myself but now I am relying on my friends.”

A2dominion said they had contacted Wallis several times during the week to discuss her situation, and said that although they had tried to make adaptations to her home, they couldn’t make the communal areas accessible.

They added that they had carried out repairs to allow her to move back and successfully applied to have her medical banding changed to put her higher in the priority list, but say there are no available properties in the area as of yet.

Director of Residential Services Steve Michaux said: “We know this is a difficult situation.

‘’We will continue to work closely with the council to find Ms Wallis a new home as quickly as possible, but there is a severe shortage of accessible properties in Ealing.”

A spokesperson for Ealing Council said that Wallis had recently presented to them as being homeless, but that they were not responsible for tenants of housing associations.

He said: “As Ms Wallis is currently an A2dominion tenant and is not at risk of eviction, we do not have a legal duty to provide her with housing at this time.”