In August 2024, the community union ACORN approached Medact, a health justice charity run by doctors and other health professionals, to join its campaign seeking justice for people evacuated from the Barton House tower block the previous November.
Six months on, on 27 February, Medact members delivered a hard-hitting message to a panel of floundering council officials – along with residents and press – in St Annes Board Mill Social Club, just up the road from Barton House.
A report presented that day by Medact, working with families from the tower, concluded the chaotic evacuation and its aftermath – where residents were housed in woefully inadequate hotel accommodation – had taken a “profound and lasting” toll on people’s physical and mental wellbeing.
It found some traumatised households in Barton House – who are disproportionately from ethnic minority communities – will never feel safe again, no matter how many repairs are carried out to the block, which was evacuated on the basis that it could collapse if a fire broke out.
“Adults and children are triggered by the smallest reminder of the fragility of the building – cracks in the walls, fire alarms malfunctioning, broken lifts,” Medact wrote. “Many households have spent years waiting for their turn to move through the council’s banding system… the result has been generations of people forced to live in a building that they feel is a constant threat to their lives.”
In this week’s episode of the Debrief, Priyanka Raval – who previewed Medact’s findings in her cover story from our autumn issue, focusing on residents’ fight for justice on the anniversary of the Barton House evacuation – speaks to the charity’s Amelia Cussans about their work.
Just how severe are the impacts of bad housing on people’s mental and physical health? Was the handling of the Barton House evacuation uniquely bad? What was missing from councillors’ and officers’ response to Medact’s report? And amid wider questions around structural racism relating to housing allocations in Bristol and elsewhere, what needs to happen next?
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