The family of a vulnerable man who killed himself after the UK’s largest social housing landlord, Clarion, failed to address neighbour noise have accused it of “gross failings” and said his death has left them heartbroken.
The sister and brother-in-law of Mark Pearce, 56, who took his life after his noise complaints were dismissed as “whining” by the £1bn-a-year housing firm, accused Clarion of treating him as “a number … just someone who the rent was being paid for”.
Speaking to the Guardian, they called on Michael Gove, the secretary of state for levelling up, housing and communities, to make changes requiring all social landlords to set up teams to work with vulnerable tenants.
They warned that unless housing staff were “trained in how to deal with people’s vulnerabilities and understand what they’re going through, more people will end their lives”.
They accused Clarion of being an “absolute nightmare” to deal with, revealing that it had continued to demand rent four months after Pearce’s death.
Pearce, who had worked as a hairdresser and a chef, lived with anxiety and depression. His mental health was stable until late 2020 when a family moved in above his ground-floor flat in a converted Victorian terrace in north London. There was banging and loud music at all hours.
In the period to September 2021, when he killed himself, Pearce raised more than 22 complaints with the landlord about disruption that ruined his sleep, forced him to sleep on a blowup mattress in the kitchen and severely affected his mental health.
In January he had made two suicide attempts. He and his GP told Clarion that he had tried to take his own life because of the effect of the noise. The doctor wrote to Clarion urging it to prioritise the noise issue but the landlord failed to insulate the ceiling or move Pearce.
It emerged in the postmortem investigations that Clarion could not find this important letter. The family said this was a gross failing and incompetence.
The noise was not considered antisocial behaviour. The problem appeared to be a lack of floor insulation.
On Thursday, the housing ombudsman, Richard Blakeway, found Clarion responsible for “severe maladministration”. Clarion, which rents homes to 125,000 households, apologised to the family.
Pearce’s sister, Sam Simons, said she had trusted Clarion to deal with the problem.
“There’s this big thing about these housing associations being capable of working with people with mental health issues, so you just assume they know exactly what they’re doing,” she said. “Obviously, they didn’t. I believe he was treated differently because he had mental health issues.”
The regulations require landlords to show understanding of tenants’ different needs, including “tenants with additional support needs”. Proposed consumer standards, which are not yet agreed, would set stronger requirements, including holding more robust information about residents’ needs.
Pearce was one of six siblings who grew up in Wadhurst, East Sussex. “He was very stable for years,” Simons said. “He used to go to the gym, go cycling, his pet cats were his princesses and he had lots of friends.”
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That stability ended with the noise from the family above. “I know kids are noisy but the light fittings were shaking in the ceiling and you could hear conversations just sat in his front room,” said Mike Simons, Pearce’s brother-in-law. “It was a classic Victorian terrace house just turned into flats to make as much money as possible.”
Sam recalled how, in January 2021, a month after he first complained to Clarion, her brother posted on Facebook saying: “I can’t cope any longer.” He had tried to kill himself.
“It was then that we realised how much it was impacting his life … He had withdrawn and stopped going out,” she said. “He was saying he was being passed on to different departments all the time. He felt he wasn’t being listened to.”
The landlord made him feel worse by sending automatically generated letters, which failed to address the problem. At one point, Clarion closed his case, and Pearce told his family: “I’m back to square one.”
A spokesperson for Clarion Housing Group said: “We are so sorry for what [the family] endured and they should absolutely not have been receiving letters asking for rent after our resident passed away.”
They said Pearce lived in general needs accommodation and “there is a lack of specialist mental health provision available in civil society”.
“We are not experts in this field,” they said. “Mistakes were unquestionably made, but we were in frequent contact with the resident, provided support and did take steps to try to address the noise issue.”
It said that since 2021 it has paid for residents to access a mental health support service and “much has changed in how we manage complex cases”.
