Anna Oakes-Monger, 24, from Lancaster, lost her jobs when the government ordered the closure of bars, clubs and restaurants. She and her housemates were able to arrange with their landlord to defer their rent, but they fear emerging from the crisis with huge arrears.
On the night that Boris Johnson announced he was ordering all bars and restaurants to close, we were all at home watching. We sort of knew there was going to be this big announcement, so we all just sat down in the living room to watch the press conference.
We felt the financial impact pretty immediately. In our household, three out of four of us work in hospitality, so we have all lost work. Some of our jobs are paying furlough, others have just laid people off.
We decided to ask our letting agents to defer the rent. We knew that we were not going to be able to pay, whether they said yes or not, so we decided that we would just ask and see what they said. Because we are members of Acorn, maybe we felt more equipped to do that than other people might. Being part of a tenants union makes a big difference.
We all sat round and talked about how to phrase it in a way that was most likely to get a good response – or at least how to phrase it in a way that was not too antagonistic, because in anything you say to a landlord you are at risk of antagonising them. A few days later they emailed back saying they won’t chase rent payments and we would arrange at a later date how they would be paid.
I don’t know when they are expecting us to pay, but if there’s three of us not paying our rent for several months it’s going to be a pretty massive debt.
I’m on a waiting list for universal credit now, with about a million other people. The process of applying was pretty grim. I’ve never done it before and I was sat in an online queue for about four or five hours, then it didn’t work when I got to the end of the queue and I had to do it again the next day. Someone called me and I had an appointment over the phone, and I’ve not heard anything since then.
As for the future, I feel quite a lot of uncertainty and dread. I’m really worried about vulnerable people. There are lots of people who are not being looked after by the government, so I’m at home but I’m running an aid group, trying to make sure that people have got food and medicine. But I’m quite worried about the kind of world that we are going to emerge into.
My best hope is that this is going to be a realisation that the system that we have been running up to now is not sustainable, and we need better protections for people in general.
