Hundreds of council residents ‘suffering’ as heating failures plague Hoxton estates

Cranston Estate. Image: Google

Hundreds of Hoxton residents have been left without hot water for days on end over the winter – as heating issues continue to blight three estates.

Over 450 households across Cranston Estate, Cropley and Thaxted Courts in Hoxton may have been affected for months by Shoreditch Heat Network (SHN) outages.

The estates have long been beset by similar issues.

Resident Michelle Drummond, who has lived on the Cranston estate for 21 years, complained to Hackney Council earlier this month that every tenant had “limited to no heating and hot water throughout the very cold winter months”.

She lamented the Town Hall’s “upsetting” silence on the issue.

On 11 January, Ms Drummond said the matter was “beyond a joke”.

“Loads and loads of people are suffering, and it seems as though Hackney just doesn’t give a damn,” she wrote.

“My belief is that we are stuck in this problem due to poor planning and poor management.

“A meeting with [cabinet member for housing services] Cllr [Clayeon] McKenzie has been requested several times and [he] has failed to respond.”

Cllr McKenzie replied to Ms Drummond the next day, saying he was “very disappointed to hear” about his department’s response to recent outages in recent weeks and “fully understand[s] the residents’ frustrations and the impact these disruptions are having on their daily lives”.

The Citizen understands that one vulnerable resident was this week given a heater by the council after having to “fight for it”, though more have since been handed out across households.

The Town Hall says all heating-related issues on the estates have been “responded to and repaired on the same day”, but Ms Drummond says some residents are not feeling the impact of this.

She said she had resorted to boiling saucepans of water in order to have a hot bath.

“The water from my bathroom tap is lukewarm and then just cools down again.”

She added that some residents are still getting either “tepid” or no heating or hot water, including one elderly individual, despite others being notified by the council that the system had been restored.

Problems with utilities and poor communication were brought to the Town Hall in June last year, but the heating has experienced four outages since October.

Estate-wide network failures date back to 2019, when one of the block’s boiler houses broke down.

One leaseholder told the Citizen that the latest spate of outages prompted them to make a formal complaint in October, but they did not receive a response for over two months.

They have now asked to escalate the matter to a Stage 2 complaint.

The Town Hall stressed that it was “working hard” to find a long-term replacement and minimise “any disruption” to households’ heat and hot water.

Housing service director Steve Waddington last week said the council was “fully aware” of the ongoing situation and “apologise[s] for any inconvenience this has caused those connected to it”.

He explained that six main heat exchangers had been ordered as a “preventative measure”, and these would be installed “as soon as they are delivered”.

Two more boilers were currently being put in, he added, and should be up and running either by the end of this month or early February at the latest. A feasibility study into long-term options for the network was also underway, he said.

Yet Ms Drummond said she and other residents feel let down by a lack of engagement and clarity over these developments.

“They haven’t said specifically when they’re going to do the [study]. They haven’t said when they’re going to be able to approve the finances, apart from the date of the end of January.

“None of us have been kept updated about that.

“Some people are on a tech service that sends text messages, but it’s not the whole of the SHN. Cropley Court [residents] have had to request to go on [this service] because their boiler house is the one that flooded.”

After phoning the council for updates and advice, she said she was advised by one staff member to open her oven door for a couple of hours in order to heat her home.

The council said it “does not recognise” this claim.

Despite the heating failures, Ms Drummond added that she was still being charged in full for utilities by provider Sycous.

“I’m now constantly going into my emergency credit. That’s never happened before,” she said.

She was later told by the council that she could file an insurance claim for those bills, as the energy company would not issue a refund.

A council spokesperson said: “If anyone believes they are or has any concerns about their heat meter charges, they should contact us at heatmeters@hackney.gov.uk so we can investigate.”

Residents used an Freedom of Information (FoI) request to find out the number of times the boiler houses connected to each building had failed since installation, but the Town Hall said due to the 2020 cyber attack, the majority of this information “would now be unavailable”.

The Citizen asked the council how much it had spent addressing heating issues for the three estates, but was told: “Due to the way this information was recorded, we don’t hold any further information.”