CAN a tap that’s left turned on all the time be good for the environment? In a roundabout way it could, says Green Futures (Jan/Feb), referring to the artist Mark McGowan’s attempt to waste 15 million litres of water by leaving a tap on in a London art gallery. The idea was to “hold up a lens to everyday lives and magnify their unsustainable perversities” — or, in English, to make people realise how wasteful they are. Trust the Government to try to pinch a piece of the pie, continues the article: “When you hear the Government colonising the arts as an official panacea for society’s ills, you can’t help but hear alarm bells, too.” Since the war in Iraq, however, young artists have an anarchic, political edge that might not sit too well with ministers’ plans to sculpt society into an arts-loving utopia.
An ideal world is far from what many young women forced into marriage experience, according to Young People Now (Jan 11). The issue only tends to be discussed when an “honour killing” hits the headlines, the magazine points out, but valuable work is being done with young women fleeing arranged marriages. The Y Stop refuge in London helps women under 25 to rebuild their lives. “We help them realise that they are not at fault and that they do have choices, ” says Sandra Jones, a support worker at the refuge.
Also lacking choices are so-called short-life tenants evicted from their homes after, in some cases, over a decade in the same property. Inside Housing (Jan 13) explains that short-life housing is where social landlords rent out empty properties awaiting refurbishment, demolition or sale, to housing co-operatives, who in turn rent them to tenants usually on low incomes but who don’t qualify for social housing. The landlord can ask for the property back at any time. The difficulty arises when short-life housing turns into a long-term arrangement and tenants are evicted after years in the same house. “When you’re talking 15, 17 years and it’s short-life, it’s a bit of a misnomer, really,” says Paul Jones, the co-ordinator of Alamo Housing Co-operative. Landlords, however, believe the onus is on co-operatives to make tenants understand that it is not a form of secure occupation.
In North London, meanwhile, a dating agency is trying to bring romance to people’s lives, says Community Care (Jan 12). The overall winner at the CC Awards is Stars in the Sky, a “dating and friendship service” for people with learning disabilities. The project, run partly by people with learning disabilities, makes matches, runs social events and sets up discreetly supervised one-to-one meetings. So far only one relationship has blossomed, but many have made friends.
From endearingly sincere to horribly cynical — The MJ (Jan 12) lays into the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) for being rubbish at administering the council tax benefit system. The article says that the DWP’s feeble attempts to sort out the “labyrinthine” housing and council tax benefit system will result in inconsistencies in benefits paid: “Local authorities have been making the best of an awful benefits system dumped on them and operated by remote control from the DWP for years. It is (we who) should be teaching the Penisions Service how to administer a vast and complex system, not the other way round.”