No place like home…
Today is #WorldHomelessDay and I want to draw attention to the unacceptable housing situations that many of the families we see are struggling with. A third of the parents we’ve supported at Little Village are homeless or at risk of homelessness. ‘Homelessness’ is often associated with living on the streets. The homelessness that children experience is usually much less visible than this stereotype — but no less distressing.
The children we see are not living on the streets, but they are a long way from having a safe roof over their heads. These are the kids who are in ‘temporary accommodation’ — a phrase that covers a wide range of accommodation, from B&Bs, to hostels, bedsits, council houses and private rented flats. The kids we see are living hand-to-mouth, with no certainty about when they might be moved, or to where. They are cooped up in single rooms with their families; coping in damp, dirty flats; struggling to acccess basic amenities such as cookers, spaces to play, laundry facilities and wifi.
What we’re seeing reflects the bigger picture. The number of homeless children in the capital has risen by a shocking 49 per cent in the last five years. One in twelve children are homeless in some boroughs. There are over 120,000 children living in temporary accommodation across England, according to the Office of the Children’s Commissioner.
One of those children is Leyton, and his mum Jade, who we met last week:
“The council has temporarily put us in a privately rented flat in a block which wasn’t built as housing, it’s like an office block, we’ve got a bedroom, kitchen and bathroom, but no living room… We’ve been told by professionals that it’s no place for a baby to live, let alone one who’s prone to infections and breathing problems.”
Because, technically, the family are now housed, they’re not seen as a priority and the council won’t move them to a more suitable flat.
It’s not just office blocks, often on industrial estates far from town centres with few amenities, that are being deemed acceptable homes for young families. Government figures show that more children than ever are living in B&Bs, and a third of them end up staying in these ‘homes’ for far longer than the legal limit of 6 weeks. And last month there was a lot of media coverage of the families who have been housed in shipping containers.
It is hardly surprising that accommodation like this has a direct impact on children’s development. Like many of the parents we meet in temporary accommodation, Jade mentions rats and says she doesn’t like to put the baby on the floor. That makes learning to crawl and roll difficult. School age children suffer too, from a lack of personal space, nowhere to do homework or to play. It’s almost impossible to cook from scratch when kitchens are far from rooms. We know of one major hostel that has no laundry facilities. The basic jobs bound up with raising a young family are made almost impossible for these parents.
So what is going on? Just last year, the government introduced what they called ‘the most ambitious reform to homelessness legislation in decades’ in the form of the Homelessness Reduction Act. The intention of this law was to require local councils to provide shelter for people experiencing homelessness, with the goal of halving rough sleeping by 2022.
But because councils are struggling financially, they are forced to minimise as far as they can the people they define as ‘homeless’. So the unintended consequence of this Act has been to create two new categories of extremely vulnerable families.
First, those ‘at risk of homelessness’. This might include the so-called sofa surfers — the family sleeping on a friend’s dining room floor, or a mum and baby sharing a sofa at a neighbour’s house. We meet many mums fleeing domestic violence who are living in these kinds of situations. People defined as ‘at risk of homelessness’ are only offered advice (which, according to a recent report, is often a list of letting agencies and a suggestion that benefits go further if they leave London); councils are not required to provide them with shelter.
Second, those who are deemed to have made themselves ‘intentionally homeless’. Anyone who turns down accommodation that is offered to them is at risk of being labelled as this. Last week we met a mum who was in floods of tears, even though she’d just been offered a flat after a year of moving around four different temporary residences. The problem was that the flat was two floors up, when she has two small kids, another on the way, and a disability that makes carrying things different. The flat was over an hour away from her children’s school, and far from shops and other amenities. This is no kind of choice; she knew that if she turned it down she’d be at risk of the council labelling her ‘intentionally homeless’ and therefore no longer required to find her shelter.
This mum is not an isolated case. We often meet parents who are moved to temporary accommodation at the other end of the city from their children’s schools, meaning they can’t afford the bus fare home again after dropping them off. They spend their days walking the streets until school pick up time, sometimes with pre-school children in tow. The lack of certainty about how long they’ll be housed there means it is a risky business to move schools — they could be there for four weeks or four years.
It would be too easy to point the finger at councils. But that’s not the answer. With local authority budgets slashed thanks to austerity, they have an almost impossible task to house people in a city where social housing is at an all-time low, where Housing Benefit has been frozen since 2016, and where private rented accommodation is unregulatd and barely affordable, even to those in work. A recent study by the Bureau for Investigative Journalism found that that out of 4400+ 2-bed homes advertised for rent in London, just seven were affordable (see what the situation is like in your own area here). Seven!!
And the shift over to Universal Credit has made a bad situation even worse. Government figures show that the average rent owed by Universal Credit claimants in social housing is £681 — higher than equivalent figures under the old system of social security. Tenants receiving Universal Credit are twice as likely to be declared homeless or get evicted than claimants under the old system.
So what do we do? First, we need to make some more noise about the issues, and not only on days like today’s #WorldHomelessDay. Children’s lives are being blighted by cramped, dirty, damp houses that no one could possibly call home. This, in my view, is nothing less than a national emergency. The effects of these experiences will stretch long into these children’s futures — no good for them, and no good for wider society either. Inequalities like these hurt us all in the end.
Second, I’m no housing policy expert, but I really can’t see how anything is going to get better without addressing the dysfunctional property market, dominated by hundreds of small-scale private landlords who hold all the power, and dwindling social housing stock. This is especially true in London. If you want to read more from people who know this stuff inside out, check out Resolution Foundation work in this area, and this report from Shelter.
Third, for this reason and so many others, Universal Credit needs a drastic overhaul. It beggars belief that a system supposedly designed to lift people out of poverty is in fact dragging them deeper into crisis. In particular, the five week wait people have between qualifying for the support, and receiving any cash, needs to stop. If you’re in any doubt about that, check out the hashtag #FiveWeeksTooLong.
The homelessness we see at Little Village is, ironically, hidden behind front doors across the capital. Children are trapped in temporary accommodation that is not fit for purpose, often on leafy streets where other houses are sold for £1m or more. These kids may have a roof over their head, but these are in no way places to call home. It makes me feel angry and ashamed. Our children deserve so much better.