Man Stuck In Flat For Weeks Due To Broken Lift

The 28-year-old is one of several disabled residents unable to leave their homes within the block on Wrotham Road in Camden.

Grimshaw, who has lived on the third floor for seven years, said being unable to leave his home was “really affecting my mental health”.

A spokesperson for Camden Council said the lift stopped working on 16 March after a roof leak caused damage to its control system, and apologised to residents. They said the authority hoped to be able to fix the lift “this week”.

Grimshaw said: “It’s been incredibly emotionally debilitating, because they keep telling me one thing and then they say another. It just never comes to a resolution.

“I haven’t really seen many people. I can’t do the things that I would normally do.”

He said some of the things he had missed out on included going to football matches with his father.

Grimshaw said the lift had broken down previously but not for this length of time, and criticised the way the repair had been managed.

“For it to have been out of action for so long is a disgrace,” he said. “I have had to cancel several hospital appointments during this time.

“It just feels like disabled people in general, when it comes to these sorts of situations, they are not really listened to. I just feel like the council don’t really care. It’s not good enough.”

Grimshaw said he was calling on Camden Council for compensation.

“The lift might get fixed in a few days, but the council need to realise the kind of emotional distress, challenges and difficulties this has caused,” he said.

“I think we deserve some sort of recompense for the time we have been stuck in our flats.”

Joshua Reeves, disability rights advocate, said he had issued a formal legal notice to Camden Council on Monday regarding the situation.

Reeves said the situation at Wrotham Road was “a critical failure of both safety and disability rights”, adding: “George is under house arrest without being under arrest. This is just so unfair.”

A spokesperson for Camden Council said that each time they had attempted to repair the lift, they had found “further damage”.

“We apologise to residents that due to the complexity of the repair, this has taken so long,” they said.

“Although we repaired the leak and got the replacement parts we needed, each time we’ve attempted the repair, we’ve found further damage within the lift shaft caused by the water and continued electrical issues,” a Camden spokesperson said.

There have been lift problems everywhere in London, not just here. Over in Hackney, East London, residents have said they are being held hostage because there have been dangerous lift failures in council blocks, and residents have hit out at Hackney Council over continuous lift failures on their housing estates.

People are stuck in broken-down lifts for 90 minutes before the fire brigade comes to release them. It’s a persistent problem, along with other problems. People make complaints, but it just doesn’t get them anywhere because councils are not taking accountability, but it is their duty of care to their tenants to make sure they are safe.

Councils are warned over and over again that the lifts are failing, and for increasingly longer and longer periods, and are in danger of failing completely, but each time they get told that an engineer has been out and either found it to be working, or it has been made safe when it clearly isn’t safe.

Despite gathering proof and uploading photos and videos, residents continue to receive the same response.

Hackney Council residents have reported being trapped in their lifts due to systematic failures, and an entrapment order has been raised with Apex lifts to address the problem, but still, Hackney Council have been warned repeatedly of the dangerous lift failures.

Now, social tenants are too afraid to speak up about the problems out of fear of losing their tenancy, but Hackney Council are now in complete breach of its contractual and legal obligations, and they need to find a permanent solution.

A lot of these flats have two lifts, so when one is not working, the other one is, hopefully. However, a lot of these flats only have one working lift, and when that goes out of service, the residents have to use the stairs, but for those that are disabled or elderly, that is not possible, and they are trapped in their flats, and more often than not, inside the lift until the Fire Brigade come to get them out. This also means that it puts a lot of strain on the second lift due to these circumstances.

Numerous disabled people in wheelchairs who live in flats are totally reliant on the lift to get out of the building, but more often than not, the lift is less than reliable, and many residents are being trapped in their flats, not days, but months, without being able to get out – this is called entrapment, and more alarming are the days when people do go out and return to discover an out of order lift. In these events, people who are disabled or elderly find themselves stuck outside in the cold.

It impacts every day of their lives because they have no idea if the lift will be working when they go out, or if it will still be working when they come back, so there is this constant anxiety that they might be trapped.

Lifts break down all the time, at any time of the day, and if someone is out when it breaks down the council are obliged to send an engineer out to repair it, typically in a 2 hour to 24 hour timeframe, but if a disabled person or elderly person is out at the time, how are they supposed to get back into their home? And even when the engineers do arrive, they might not have the right parts to repair the lift, which means that the person is not able to get back into the flat for weeks or months, and if they are in a wheelchair, what are they supposed to do, fly up the stairs on their magic carpet?

The average age of a lead tenant in the social housing sector is 53, which is 12 years older than the average privately renting tenant. Social housing also has the largest proportion of tenants with long-term illness or disability of any housing sector at 56 per cent, and more than half have mobility problems.

The problem is that, particularly in larger cities, there’s a lot of social housing in blocks of flats, and tenants may have been living there for an extremely long time, but as they have got older, their needs have changed, and living in a flat, especially high-rise flats, is completely inadequate for their requirements.

This indicates that, particularly in a single lift block where lift maintenance appears to have been neglected, a malfunctioning lift turns from a minor annoyance to a serious welfare concern.