Neighbours face rat and mouse hell in their homes
CAUSING ‘TERROR’ – WITH FAMILY FORKING OUT FOR HOTELS
BEVERLEY Wood and her two teenagers have spent the last week in a caravan.
But it’s no holiday – just a temporary escape from the ‘absolute terror’ they experience at their rodent-infested home in Oldham.
The mum-of-two says she has spent more than £1,400 – almost all of her monthly income – on moving from one AirBnB to the next this month.
Her two kids, who are diagnosed with autism and find changes in their environment challenging, are at their limit dealing with all the change, she says. But Beverley feels she has no choice. In almost two years of reporting her housing issues, the 45-year-old claims her housing association, Onward Homes, has done ‘nothing’ to sort out what she suspects is a writhing rodent nest beneath the housing estate.
With money running out, Beverley – who works as a part-time teaching assistant – says the family will soon have to move back into their rat and mouse-infested home.
“We still don’t have a home,” she said. “I feel like I’m getting to the point where I’m running out of options. No-one will help us.”
The trouble in her house, where she’s lived for five years, started over a year ago when a smell started developing under the floorboards that was
‘so bad’ it made her eldest
‘vomit.’ They believe it was a dead rat.
Onward Homes refused to deal with the problem, according to Beverley, who once again paid out of pocket to move into a hotel.
She said: “I was told on that occasion that the smell would go when the flesh had rotted off the bones of whatever died,” she said.
“Then we started hearing scratching behind the walls, which is terrifying for children who’ve got additional needs. Scratching behind the mantlepiece. Scratching in the bedrooms.”
Beverley started finding mice and rats, dead or alive, all around the house.
Beverley has a connective tissue disorder and fibromyalgia, which causes her pain all around her body and means she cannot work full-time.
Despite the physical challenge, she has spent hours – and over £300 – trying to plug all the holes in her home with filler and glue guns to stop the mice and rats entering.
Repeated reports to Onward Homes, shown to the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS), have only resulted in a small number of traps being laid out in Beverley’s kitchen. But she has received no offers of compensation and been denied temporary accommodation except for one two-day stay
in a hotel last year, during which time she said ‘nothing happened – no one went to inspect the house.’ Beverley showed the LDRS letters from social services and her 15-yearold daughter’s school pleading with the housing association to take action or relocate the family.
“This family are now at crisis point and I am worried about what might happen,” the pastoral manager at the school wrote. Beverley also described how the moves and dirty environment are causing emotional harm to her children, causing meltdowns, bedwetting and even occasions of self-harm.
Her neighbour Shauna Greenhalgh is also struggling with mice and rats.
“I’ve had mice run across my feet,” said Shauna. “I’ve had it where I’ve been cleaning up the girls’ room and they’ve jumped out of clothes boxes or toy boxes. I found a dead one in one of my girls’ beds. You can hear them in the walls. Downstairs in the living room you can literally feel
the floors vibrating with things underneath your feet.”
Her three children – five-year-old Sophia, four-year-old Millie-Rae and baby Emmie-Rose – are too ‘petrified’ to sleep in their beds and they often end up bundled up in one room together. She described how Sophie will get so upset she starts hyperventilating. “She’s five and she’s having panic attacks,” Shauna said.
“And I don’t sleep. I get paranoid that something’s crawling all over me. And I worry about the girls, so I’ll be up and down constantly making sure there’s no mice on the beds.”
Shauna, a single mum, has to clean constantly to keep the droppings away from her 22-month-old, and is constantly having to replace furniture and clothes ruined by gnawing.
The two neighbours believe there is a mouse or rat nest located under Shauna’s home and garden.
At the end of last year, Onward Homes were called out to fix a sinkhole in Shauna’s garden - within a month it had returned.
I feel like I’m getting to the point where I’m running out of options. No-one will help us. Beverley Wood from Oldham