Thanks to reporter Ross Marshall for his article on Saturday about our concerns at Fullerton Place, Portswood over a massive rat invasion. He has hopefully helped to highlight our ongoing struggle to be heard and understood by Abri Housing Association and to bring us some urgent relief and action. 

For so long Abri has ignored or trivialised all of residents’ reports and complaints about the problems which have led to the current situation. For years now, and in their statement they admit they were aware but not for how long!  Aware is just not good enough without acknowledgement and action. 

Although we have now been promised a thorough eradication of the rodents, it should never have reached this magnitude and there will also be, sooner or later, a repetition, particularly in an area which a major pest controller says is rampant with rats. 

This infestation is far from a few rogue rats but an epidemic of plague proportions which needs the most urgent and stringent of actions. It’s so serious that it’s almost as infamous as Hamelin in Browning’s famous Pied Piper poem. 

The town officials paid heavily on that occasion for their inaction.  Ok, that’s a legend, but we are real people in real homes who are suffering unnecessarily though the inertia of so many.  And we are coming to the end of our collective tether - We need help on many fronts.  

We urgently need stronger doors to prevent the drug dealers, vagrants, fences of stolen goods and dumpster divers, all using our rubbish stores at nights as a convenient free trading/sleeping place. 

Our reports to Anri of this happening have been all but disbelieved, coupled with complete indifference and no joined up thinking or even attempt to improve things.  Where are the police, the social workers and the general RULES to prevent such use. 

Not just for us but to prevent this awful situation being tolerated in several Southampton locations of a rat epidemic that’s just shoved under the nearest carpet rather than being addressed. 

Our problem now, yours later?  There is a huge ‘buck’ circulating around the problem, constantly being passed.

This is 2025 but it’s easy to imagine that our buildings are slums from 1825.  At one time our public health record was exemplary and of a standard that the world wanted to emulate.  Now we are shameful as a country and definitely as a city, in that respect.

Kind regards,

Susan Ambrose