Hundreds of homeless young people, including dozens who are pregnant or have children, are being illegally turned away by councils when they ask for help, the Guardian has learned.
As government figures showed the number of households with children living in temporary accommodation in England rose 15% in the last year to nearly 75,000, it emerged that a young pregnant woman who was sleeping rough was refused support because she “wasn’t 20 weeks” into her pregnancy. Others were rejected because they were wrongly judged to have no local connection or to have made themselves homeless – in one case despite a person having fled domestic abuse.
