No Go Britain: no suitable home means no job

Following our report on the problems faced by disabled people in finding appropriate accommodation. Several of you tweeted us with your experiences.

Mark Cooper (@markc1984 on Twitter) is an unusual victim of the financial crisis. In August 2008 he was offered a job in the city. He was thrilled. But things didn’t quite work out. The job was with a company called Lehman Brothers, the bank that proved not too big to fail.

There are hundreds of thousands whose employment hopes have been dashed by the financial turmoil of the past five years. But his second disappointment had nothing to do with credit default swaps and the like.

Instead he fell victim to the almost impossible task many disabled people face in finding a place to live.

Mark has cerebral palsy and lives in Edinburgh. His last job was as a parliamentary officer for Capability Scotland. But in April last year he successfully applied for a job with ITV in London as a disability equality trainee.

Key factor

The success was quickly followed by failure to find a place he could stay. What private accommodation there is for disabled people is extremely expensive. As a social tenant in Edinburgh, Mark looked into house swap schemes with social housing projects in London, with no success.

To even get on a London waiting list, he thinks he would have to give up his social housing in Edinburgh and move to London.

“Housing will be a key factor for me when I try to find work so I can see the same situation happening as happened with the ITV job,” he says.

“So I feel like I am stuck. I would like to work in campaigns for a charity or in the media and the majority of those jobs are not in Edinburgh.”

“Getting a job in London after what happened to me with Lehman’s felt like unfinished business. But if I do get a job there I will face the same problem every time.”

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