"5th March 2003
Housing Benefit Agency
Vale of the White Horse
Abingdon
Oxon
Dear All,
Thank you so much for everything you have done for us. If it hadn’t been for the diligent way in which you did not pay my husband’s housing benefit, we would not last night have been the proud recipients of an eviction order. And in the same week as he’s started a new job, too! It just goes to show how much help the Labour government is prepared to give people in order to keep them on benefits.
Special thanks go to our landlord, who, despite having been informed that the overdue payments were about to be made, still went to all the effort of applying to the Courts for an eviction order. Thanks also for sparing us the trouble of giving us any warning. It would only have made us worry unnecessarily, after all.
The full effect, of course, could never be achieved without the excellent Mr Blunkett’s Home Office, so credit is due to them. Thanks to them holding both our passports since December of last year, we don’t have to worry about small things like getting a new place to live, since no one will let us a property without photo id anyway.
Thank you for helping make me, a lowly foreigner, a homeless person in your great country. Finally I understand why asylum seekers are knocking down the door trying to get in and exploit the benefits system. Thank you all, thank you again and again.
Yours,
Marina Strinkovsky"