When Mark*, 32, first moved into supported accommodation in Birmingham, other tenants would steal his plates and cutlery from the kitchen, and people would knock on his door daily asking for drugs.
“There was no support. Someone would come in but they did nothing. They didn’t go into your cupboard and say ‘you’ve got nothing in here, we should help you’,” he said. “I was suicidal at that time, I had a lot going on in my life.”
Others had it worse, he said. People who were new to the city and had no support network, of which there were many, were often picked on.
“Everyone in those places struggled,” he said. “The woman in the room next door to me, she was shy, and the others would offer to buy her food from the shop then take her card and spend £100.
“People were selling drugs. One person could bring the whole house down.”
Mark was forced into the house share, a type of “exempt accommodation” for vulnerable people that is supposed to provide support for tenants, after he quit his job as a live-in carer during lockdown.
“I was working 90-hour weeks and it was having a major impact on my relationship and my ability to see my son,” he said.
His housing benefit did not cover the £500 a month he needed to pay rent, so he was referred into exempt accommodation, where providers can claim higher rates of housing benefit – one of the properties he was in was charging £1,000 a month.
“In my mind it is just a money grab. The people who are running these things are just grabbing money off the government because they’re charging ridiculous amounts of money – and for what? What are they actually doing?” he said.
The only support he received was from a local charity, Sifa Fireside, which provides support for homeless and rough sleepers in the city.
Its chief executive, Natalie Allen, said: “We’ve seen a significant shift recently. There’s a huge amount of people now coming through our doors, and actually not all of these people are rough sleepers. They’re actually people who are housed in this precarious and dangerous, really low-quality, exempt supported accommodation.
“They’re not receiving any support, and they’ve got complex needs, so they’re coming here as an escape, and to get support and access to services.”
Allen said the charity was having to deal with the repercussions of placing “risky mixes” in houses together.
“It’s about a group of complete strangers who are all vulnerable in completely different ways, being shoved together in a house,” she said.
“Sometimes it’s not just one house, it’s streets and streets within local communities. It’s just asking for problems.”
*Names have been changed for anonymity.
