From rainbows to Banksy – have lockdowns created a new appreciation for the value of the arts?

Posted on January 25, 2021 by heathercameron25

Cultural and creative sectors are among the worst affected by the coronavirus pandemic. Recent analysis suggests that jobs at risk in the sector range from 0.8 to 5.5% of employment across OECD regions. In the UK, the arts, entertainment and recreation sector saw the second largest economic decline of all sectors of the economy during the pandemic.

While the negative impact of crises is justifiably focused on, there are often positive opportunities to arise from such shocks such as widespread collaboration and innovative behaviours to find solutions. Indeed, the current pandemic is no different. Amidst the myriad of reports of the dire economic impact emerges a much more colourful picture of a resurgence in arts and creativity across not only the country but the world.

Rising creativity

From the abundance of rainbows displayed in windows across the UK to singers and musicians entertaining their neighbours from their balconies in Italy and elsewhere, the global pandemic has led to many turning to the arts and creative activities in a bid to help each other’s wellbeing and to thank those on the frontline for their heroic efforts to protect us all.

Many young people found new ways to express themselves through creativity during lockdown, whether drawing or making things, creating music or videos to share on social media. Examples of what young people in England have been creating are presented in Arts Council England’s project The Way I See It .

All sorts of artists from across the globe have been sharing their coronavirus-inspired artwork via social media.

The infamous street artist Banksy has also been joining in, creating a variety of new work from rats encouraging people to wear face masks on the London Underground to a piece paying tribute to NHS workers in Southampton General Hospital.

And the industry itself has had to get creative finding new ways to reach people. Many cultural and creative organisations have moved to delivering digital content to keep audiences engaged, which has opened the door for many future innovations. Organisations and individuals have also been doing a variety of work to reach those most in need such as projects creating new programmes or adapting existing work to reach people who are shielding or vulnerable in their homes, overwhelmingly addressing loneliness and isolation. One participant described their experience:

“I found the process of drawing and painting both cathartic and healing at the most difficult time of my life.”

Economic and social value

While there has generally been a need to make the case for the value of arts and creative activity, whether in education or business, perhaps the impact of lockdowns has afforded the opportunity for everyone to recognise their value both at times of crisis and as part of recovery.

The sector is already an economic driver and source of innovation. In 2019, the economic output of arts and culture was equivalent to 0.5% of the whole UK economy. And despite the immediate economic impact of the pandemic, there is hope that the sector will recover quickly, albeit with significant government support. Recent research from the Centre for Economic and Business Research (CEBR) predicts that the sector’s Gross Value Added (GVA) will return to its pre-lockdown level of £13.5bn by 2022 with the help of the Culture Recovery Fund, a full year earlier than was anticipated without government intervention. The research also shows the sector is set to be worth £15.2 billion to the economy by 2025.

As well as contributing to the economic recovery, the sector can also play a crucial role in the social recovery as indicated by the many examples highlighted above.

As non-educators, many home-schooling parents have moved towards cultural and creative enrichment for their children. It has been well-documented that arts and creative activities can help improve mental health and wellbeing and at a time when there are grave concerns about young people’s mental health, surely this can only be a good thing.

As previous pandemics and disasters have consistently shown, a major focus of recovery needs to be on mental health; something that the arts and creative industries can clearly help with.

Final thoughts

At time when we might all feel like social distancing from ourselves, the arts and creative activities can provide an escape for everyone. The value of arts and culture, both economically and socially, cannot be underestimated. Perhaps the most positive outcome of the current pandemic for these sectors, will be the newfound appreciation of them from all walks of life which will hopefully translate into decision-makers thinking twice before laying the brunt of budget cuts at their door.

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Guest post: Stories from lockdown – interviews show how poor housing quality made life even more tough

Posted on November 2, 2020 by jamescarson2014

Philip Brown, University of Huddersfield

Life during COVID-19 has not been a uniform experience. There have been distinct differences in how people have contended with lockdown, depending on whether they have access to safe, secure and decent accommodation.

New research from the University of Huddersfield has looked at how people were coping while living with poor housing conditions in the north of England during the first lockdown, between May and July 2020. We spoke to 50 households: 40 in the private rented sector and 10 owner-occupiers, as well as eight housing workers.

The findings are stark and unsettling. The study found that the state of homes were causing increasing distress and were costing more to run and maintain. People in rental properties, in particular, felt increasingly insecure in their tenancies.

Worsening conditions

The majority of the people we spoke to were living in privately rented accommodation. We found that for these households, existing poor housing conditions worsened during lockdown.

Many households expressed a suspicion that landlords were using lockdown as an excuse to indefinitely postpone or delay repair works (repairs were permitted at the time the study was conducted). Others reported that their landlords had refused to arrange repairs. People told us about leaking roofs and guttering, and about how water coming into their housing had caused internal damage, damp and mould.

Woman looking at mould in corner of room — **Damp and mould were recurring problems. Burdun Iliya/Shutterstock**

These households faced the choice of waiting and trying to cope, or using their own income and savings to fix their homes. As one resident told us:

In the end I had to pay for someone to come out and get rid of the mice myself because I can’t have mice running about the flipping house… when it was leaking on the roof I had to pay to have tiles put in.

Our findings showed that people were not reporting or following up concerns or making complaints, due to a fear of possible revenge evictions or rent increases which they could not afford. Many respondents told us that they were putting paying for housing costs ahead of food and other outgoings.

Making ends meet

We heard accounts of the challenges of living in cold and damp conditions. This was a recurring factor in the lives of those people on low incomes, as well as for people for whom the pandemic had added a new layer of uncertainty.

A lack of control over rising energy costs in the home was an ongoing source of anxiety. A single parent said:

I don’t put my heating on as much as I should do. I make sure my daughter walks around in slippers, dressing gowns. You come into the home, you take your coat off and you put a dressing gown on, so you walk round in a housecoat, basically.

Often, these accounts did not come from people who had existing experience of the welfare system, but from people who were still working full-time in professional occupations.

Elderly woman wrapped in blanket adjusting thermostat — **Energy costs cause anxiety. Paul Vasarhelyi/Shutterstock**

Spending weeks at a time in poor-quality accommodation had a crushing impact. One woman reported:

I’ve got really bad damp in my house…it’s always bothered me, but it’s bothered me more and more and more because I work from home, and I’m working in the kitchen, and I’m looking at it every day directly and seeing it there. It’s just getting worse. The landlord keeps saying, “There’s nothing I can do”.

Existing problems

The report makes it clear that the issues households were facing did not begin during lockdown. Rather, households were put into lockdown within homes that were already low quality. The stories within the report are not isolated cases – around 1 million homes across the north fail to meet basic decency standards.

Research has shown that those most at risk of experiencing the worst impacts of the pandemic are those people who are already vulnerable: those receiving benefits, living with long-term health conditions, in precarious employment or living in insecure housing or with poor housing conditions. These issues are particularly acute in the north of England.

Immediate action is needed to ensure people retain as much income as possible, their outgoings are minimised and their housing is secure. The housing crisis in the UK is not just about a lack of new homes, but also about the quality of existing homes that many of us will continue to live in for decades.

Philip Brown, Professor of Housing and Communities, University of Huddersfield

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Domestic violence during quarantine: the hidden crime of lockdown

Posted on September 28, 2020 by Rebecca Jackson

Photo by Käännöstoimisto Transly on Unsplash

Domestic violence is often described as a “hidden epidemic” within the UK. Even before Coronavirus forced the country into lockdown, support services faced funding and resourcing challenges, and many people fleeing domestic abuse already faced barriers to accessing support, but as social distancing has become the dominant policy response to suppress Covid-19, it is clear there have been unintended consequences for domestic abuse victims which have exacerbated the challenges in providing and accessing support.

An increase in reporting of domestic violence

Figures show that calls to domestic abuse services have increased significantly worldwide during the Coronavirus pandemic. Calls and online enquiries to the UK’s National Domestic Abuse line increased by 25% after the UK entered lockdown in March 2020. More than 40,000 calls and contacts were made to the National Domestic Abuse Helpline during the first three months of lockdown; in June, calls and contacts were nearly 80% higher than usual, according to the charity Refuge, who runs the service.

An investigation by the BBC’s Panorama found that three-quarters of victims told them that lockdown had made it harder for them to escape their abusers and in many cases had intensified the abuse they received and research by a team at LSE showed that while the overall level of domestic abuse crimes (not calls) have remained stable when compared with the long-term trend, calls to the Metropolitan Police between March and July which related to reports of domestic abuse increased by 11% compared with the same period in 2019.

This same research from LSE also noted some changes in the characteristics of the cases being reported, with calls more likely to be made by “third parties”, such as neighbours, and that while abuse by ex-partners fell by 9.4%, abuse by current partners and family members increased significantly – by 8.5% and 16.4% respectively.

In early May, the government announced a £76m package to support the “most vulnerable in our society”, including victims of domestic violence and modern slavery, rough sleepers and vulnerable children. However, with many charities which support victims of domestic abuse struggling with the financial fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic and facing a significant rise in demand for their services, concerns are being raised that the availability of specialist support could be reduced, meaning people exposed to domestic abuse may not be able to access the help they need.

Local level support for vulnerable people fleeing violence

Lockdown offered an opportunity for local authorities to think about the support offered to vulnerable people, including those who were homeless due to fleeing violence.

In Greater Manchester GMCA formed partnerships early on to secure accommodation for women fleeing violence to ensure they would have a safe space. The accommodation was intended for women who are homeless or facing homelessness, including rough sleeping or in shared supported accommodation where the service was unable to meet public health guidelines regarding Covid-19. This included women experiencing domestic abuse, trauma, or contact with the justice system as well as other multiple disadvantages. The service delivery model was designed to be a Trauma Responsive Service Model in order to create a safe and secure environment for each resident and to avoid further traumatisation. The process marked a departure from how cases of female homelessness due to domestic abuse would typically have been handled pre lockdown.

Halls of residence at the University of Cambridge were also offered to homeless women and their children after students vacated them early due to the pandemic. St Catherine’s College formed a partnership with Cambridge Women’s Aid to provide over 1000 nights of secure supported accommodation during the lockdown period.

In both instances the partnerships allowed for practical and quick solutions to provide support to vulnerable women, filling the support gap some traditional routes like refuge shelters were unable to fill because Covid 19- restrictions on the mixing of households meant that homeless and refuge centres were operating with a limited capacity.

Final thoughts

People fleeing domestic violence already faced significant barriers to finding the safety offered by refuge services, even before the lockdown imposed by the Coronavirus pandemic. But we know now that the pandemic has made it harder for survivors to leave an abuser or to seek help, that their experiences of abuse were made worse by the conditions imposed by lockdown and that the circumstances gave abusers more control than ever. When the pandemic is over the majority of local services expect to see a spike in people looking to access their life-saving support, but at the same time the pandemic has threatened the sustainability of the network of services which makes up this support, many of whom were already experiencing a funding struggle.

The work being done to help support vulnerable people fleeing abuse and people facing barriers to accessing refuge is more important now than it has ever been, and continuing support from government and effective partnership working will be vital to ensuring these services continue in the future.

If you need help or support in the UK, call the national domestic abuse helpline on 0808 2000 247, or visit Women’s Aid online.

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Digital Housing Week: How coronavirus is affecting housing

Posted on June 26, 2020 by jamescarson2014

Throughout this week, Inside Housing magazine has been providing a series of webinars offering debate, learning and innovative thinking on how housing providers are responding to present-day challenges and preparing for future demands.

One of the webinars focused on the ways in which Covid-19 has accelerated the move to agile working for housing associations (HAs) and council staff, and how housing providers can tackle the mental health and wellbeing issues experienced by staff and residents.

Responding to the new normal

Anita Khan, from Settle Housing Association in Hertfordshire explained how her HA responded to lockdown by mobilising its continuity plan. Settle’s first responsibility is to engage with and support its customers, and once the plan was enacted, agile behaviour took root.

Anita described how automated contacts with HA customers enabled it to identify which people were in isolation or shielding. At the same time, methods of enforcement had to change, as the UK government banned evictions. Anita explained that once the HA stopped sending messages warning customers of enforcement of the rules on rent payments, the residents started to engage more positively with it.

Working practices at Settle also changed substantially, with a move away from a face-to-face culture towards remote working. Anita described the process of change HA staff experienced, from relief at not having to make long commutes, followed by fatigue from too many video conferences, and more recently recalibrating to a situation that works.

Agile working in the age of coronavirus

Tony Morrison, an agile working consultant, described the measures taken by Newham Council to modernise the way the local authority worked. He explained that in 2019, Newham got a new leadership team, and deployed a plan to make the first investment in IT for eight years. The aim was to make sure everyone was mobile by default, and to pivot a local authority with 14.5 million pieces of paper towards a paperless organisation. The plan was already under way when the lockdown was imposed.

Immediately, the council had to adapt to the new situation. Around three thousand members of staff didn’t have effective ways of working from home, and so the council identified who most needed assistance, and delivered laptops and mobile devices to these 500 individuals.

At same time, the council deployed Office 365 and migrated Skype for Business, and enabled staff to communicate with customers using Zoom.

Newham has now rolled out a further 2000 devices to staff, and it’s clear that the lockdown experience has demonstrated the possibilities of remote working.

The council is already looking to the post-pandemic period when it might not require so much expensive office space. Tony explained that now would not be the right time to consider disposal of offices because so many other organisations are in the same position. Instead, Newham is looking at alternative uses for its property estate, including cohabiting with other organisations, pop-up spaces and conversion to affordable housing.

Housing on the frontline of a mental health crisis

There’s now little doubt that the coronavirus pandemic is having a significant effect on mental health. With the loss of lives and livelihoods, and the growing demands for support from already overburdened health services, the fallout from the pandemic is likely to be on an unprecedented scale.

During the Inside Housing webinar, consultant psychiatrist Raj Persaud talked about the unique role housing can play in tackling mental health issues among staff and residents.

He noted that housing staff may be among the first to identify signs of mental illness among residents, because fewer people have been attending GP surgeries during the pandemic.

He suggested that housing staff in this position should raise such issues with community mental health teams. He also highlighted the importance of contacting NHS services by letter. Because letters are legal documents, health professionals are more likely to pay attention to issues raised in this way.

Raj highlighted a key issue housing staff can focus on when dealing with people who have mental health problems:

“Too often, the aim has been to concentrate on the causes of mental illness, but that misses out on the coping skills people have used in the past. The right skills can make a person super resilient, and so it’s always useful to engage in conversation about coping skills people have used for previous life events.”

All of the speakers in the webinar stressed the importance of the human factor in tackling the challenges raised by the coronavirus pandemic. Raj Persaud noted that, in the absence of the water cooler, the pub or the staff room, physical locations have to be recreated virtually. Doing this may feel clunky at first, but even if things don’t feel right, housing staff and others should persist until they find a method that suits them, and enables people to feel they are less isolated.