The Cauldron: The Rookery

The recent rains have been relentless, made all the worse when coupled with a rare wind direction. When I think of the south-westerly wind, the sou’wester, I image a giant spindly figure with tree-trunk legs and long fingers leaning over the roofs of Gibraltar and peeling back tiles to let the horizontal rain in. He cackles mercilessly when performing this act. We all marvel at the videos and reels shared via smartphones showing cascades of water running down Castle Steps but what of the poor souls who live in the upper town slums and the Queen’s Hostel?

Someone asked me recently ‘where does the upper town begin?’ and I said from Cornwall’s Parade up, but what we collectively refer to as the ‘upper town’ seems to encompass any old buildings that are falling to bits. A lot of these slum streets are just off Main Street. Henry Pinna, the Action for Housing figurehead and long-suffering peaceful protestor, recently took me on a journey one Sunday morning [FULL DISCLOSURE: Both I and my husband John are volunteers at Action for Housing]. It was to the patios and alleyways of Carreras Passage off Engineer Lane where Henry grew up. The good news is that there is promising high-quality refurbishment work going on in some of the blocks but the bad news is that the majority of the buildings are riddled with damp, the wooden stairs are rickety and perilous, and there’s cabling flailing around across the corridors and roof terraces (those roof terraces that are accessible as most of them are impossible to reach due to collapsed staircases).

Jonathan Scott has been producing special GBC Viewpoint reports since 2017 which focus on the slum situation in Gibraltar. His last episode took viewers to a property in Turnbull’s Lane where an elderly woman was housebound due to access. A sad old lady who, much like the building around her, has been left to rot. It’s dangerous for people to visit her as each step taken on the wooden stairs could result in a serious accident. Some of the façades in this picturesque lane have nothing behind them, they are held up between existing buildings much like a Hollywood film set. Beautiful examples of Gibraltar architecture lay neglected and the poor inhabitants are forgotten about. Is it a coincidence that most, if not all, of them are of Moroccan heritage? We as a society should be repulsed by this. How is it that one sector of Gibraltar gets treated, let’s face it, badly? If I say the word racism out loud or on social media I suddenly get gunned down, but what is it then?

The current housing list is full of people who are forced to live in hideous conditions while they wait for that precious allocation. Elderly and disabled people, young families, asthmatic children, citizens suffering from mental health problems and debilitating medical issues. Each having to deal with damp, water ingress, overcrowding, some with no washing facilities and sharing a communal toilet. Why is this still going on when our leaders boast about Gibraltar being high on the list of wealthy nations? The Gibraltar Housing Waiting List is reaching the 1000 mark, and many have been sitting at the top of Medical A+ and Social A+ for years. They don’t get allocated a home, yet we know that places are allocated, we know that people die and properties are vacated, so why are the severe cases not prioritised?

The Principal Auditor highlighted several cases where the Chief Minister intervened and directly allocated homes to certain people who were not even on the housing list. The Chief Minister or indeed the Housing Minister should not be allowed to directly allocate homes to people. There should be a fair process in place where the Housing Allocation Committee have a set criterion and allocate homes from the list in an unbiased manner without any intervention from the politicians. Handing out a home in Gibraltar is the equivalent to a diamond-studded lifetime gift because the open market is prohibitively expensive. It cannot be left to political individuals to play God.

As a community we should be up in arms about this but as with everything in Gibraltar it all boils down to those handful of people in power. The GSLP/Liberal Government have been in office for over 14 years and have not built one single government rental home. Nothing. During the 2023 election campaign the latest Housing Minister boasted about solving the housing problem and promised to build more rental stock. It’s 2026 so where is it?

This segues nicely to the ‘Rooke facility’, a modular building first announced by the Government six years ago and intended to be an elderly care facility. (I’m renaming it The Rookery before some bright spark calls it Mid-something or Harbour-something). The brand-new modern tower was granted a certificate of fitness in August 2025, but it stands there empty in the centre of Gibraltar, like a huge middle finger to all the desperate people having to manoeuvre buckets under leaking roofs caused by the never-ending rainfall. There are around 170 modern residential units purpose-built for the elderly. The equation to me seems simple:

Many elderly individuals on the waiting list living in slums + New Government-led residential block purpose-built for the elderly = Problem Solved

Rooke Holdings Limited has invited expressions of interest from individuals or organisations to occupy, operate and manage the elderly care nursing home at the site. Why go to all that trouble? There’s no need for a third party to run what is basically a block of studio flats. A private ‘middleman’ should not profit from what is a government project to house old people. Just hand The Rookery over to the Gibraltar Housing Department now and they can allocate the flats to the eligible people on the waiting list.