And then he said the thing that I have repeated since to about nine people in that industry.
He said, “I’ve had three years of people being kind for a fortnight. Then it’s somebody else’s turn to be kind about something and we’re still on the steps.”
That is the actual problem and he described it better in one sentence than any policy document I have read.
So I did not argue with him and I did not persuade him. I did the only thing I have ever known how to do, which is paperwork.
I put Ozzie’s existing prescription in front of the panel I sit on, anonymised, as an example of a seating outcome, which is a thing that panel exists to look at.
I wrote to the housing association myself, not as a friend, but as a company that supplies that trust, asking one question in writing: what the clinical basis was for a refusal on a property housing a person with a complete spinal injury.
That letter got answered in nine days. Three years of appeals got answered in nine days because it came on a letterhead.
I am not proud of that. I have thought about it a great deal. It is the single most useful thing I did and it is also an indictment of everything.
PART 5 — THE RAMP
The ramp went in in the February.
Ozzie was reassessed in the January and has been in a properly configured chair since the spring. He has some shoulder damage that is not going away and he had three years of preventable loading that nobody will ever be accountable for.
Rye had his hip done in the April.
That was the hard one, because twelve weeks is twelve weeks and a ramp does not put a man’s son to bed.
What covered it in the end was not me. It was the care package being reassessed properly for the first time since 2022, which happened because the housing letter opened a file, and the reassessment produced eleven more hours a week.
I paid for four weeks of additional cover on top of that, privately, and I told Rye exactly what it cost and I told him I was not going to pretend it was a favour to me.
