Every morning Nicole Bent wakes up and wonders what to have for breakfast. And no, it’s not a toss-up between cereal or toast at home or a Pret porridge pot on the way to work.
For almost three months Bent’s home has been a room at a north London Travelodge hotel, shared with her three-year-old daughter. With no cooking facilities her options are stark.
“Sometimes in the morning I will spend £8.99 on breakfast … [at the Travelodge] … and take some of the food for later,” she says. “Sometimes we have crackers, or instant noodles for dinner, and sometimes we have takeaways, or go to the café at Morrisons where you get a free kid’s meal.”
Welcome to the sharpest end of London’s housing crisis, where spiralling rents plus the cost-of-living crisis mean record numbers of people are now stuck in hotels and B&Bs.
According to the Department of Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, in the last quarter of 2022 more than 13,000 households approached councils in the capital for help with housing.
Meanwhile London Councils, which represents the boroughs, reports a 180 per cent increase in people staying at hotels and B&Bs for six weeks or more from 2021 to 2022.
And there are now more than 75,000 homeless children in London — enough to fill the Royal Albert Hall more than 14 times over.
Experts say that these children can look forward to a future of low educational attainment and health problems.
‘We have moved seven or eight times since March’
At the start of the year Bent, 28, was living in a rented flat in Epsom, Surrey. But when her tenancy was about to end her landlord announced he was selling up.
The news was a blow as Bent had moved to Epsom from Enfield for a fresh start following a previous spell in temporary accommodation triggered by the end of another private tenancy. She then moved in with her grandmother in Enfield. When her grandmother moved to Leicester, Bent found herself suddenly homeless.
Life at the Travelodge is far from ideal. There is no storage, so she has only a bare minimum of possessions with her. The hotel has a policy of asking guests to move rooms every 28 days. “We have moved seven or eight times since March,” says Bent.
Not only does she not have anywhere to cook, but Bent’s room doesn’t even have a fridge. “There is nowhere to store fillings so even making a sandwich is impossible,” she said. “I lack the ability to do even the most basic things.”
There is nowhere to store fillings so even making a sandwich is impossible
The cost of buying takeaways and hotel breakfasts is another issue. Bent had to take an advance on her Universal Credit payments — along with child benefits, her main source of income — to make ends meet but it will need to be repaid.
For weeks now she has been trying to contact Enfield council, with the support of her MP Kate Osamor, to see if some meals could be added to her booking but says she has met a brick wall of unanswered calls and ignored messages.
Enfield, for its part, claims the opposite, that its officers have made “considerable efforts” to contact Bent and other Travelodge residents, with a view to finding them more suitable housing.
Catering aside, a Travelodge is clearly not an ideal environment for a three-year-old. “There are a lot of children that have got a lot of energy to burn off, and a lot of people who are frustrated about being there,” said Bent.
Her only realistic exit strategy is to find a place to rent. But her benefits are capped to £1,400pcm, which doesn’t go far in a city that has a massive shortage of rental homes and where many landlords would prefer to rent to young professionals than single mums on benefits.
In the midst of all this Bent, who used to work in finance, is trying to find ways of earning money, although her lack of a permanent address means she can’t apply for vouchers for free childcare. She does manicures, takes art commissions and has started a business making positive affirmation dolls (see her work on Instagram @kiyadolls).
But freelance work is erratic, particularly since Bent had to take down her website because she couldn’t afford the £200 in annual fees and relies on word of mouth.
Surge in newly homeless after eviction ban lifted
Analysis of the Department of Levelling Up, Housing and Communities data shows that this is not only an Enfield problem.
Eight boroughs added 500 or more homeless households to their housing waiting lists from October to December last year, a mixture of leafy suburbs such as Barnet, Ealing and Haringey, and the central London neighbourhoods of Islington, Lambeth, Lewisham, Southwark and Tower Hamlets.
And over the past year, 15 boroughs have seen a substantial annual increase in the levels of homelessness including Richmond upon Thames (up 87 per cent) and Bromley (up 79 per cent).
A spokeswoman for Enfield council said it currently has 3,100 households in temporary accommodation, including 4,370 children.
This situation exemplifies the deteriorating state of housing in London and the collapse of the private rental sector
More than 260 households are living in B&Bs or hotels, up 839 per cent in a year. It is a precarious way of life — about 30 families at a Travelodge close to Bent were told to vacate their rooms recently because they had been booked by music fans in London to see Beyoncé perform in Tottenham.
This kind of accommodation is also an expensive option, currently costing Enfield almost £1 million a month: £840,000 on hotels and £127,000 on bed and breakfasts. Last year, before the cost of living crisis really started to bite, the council was spending just over £50,000pcm.
“This situation exemplifies the deteriorating state of housing in London and the collapse of the private rental sector,” said a council spokeswoman.
“There simply are not enough appropriate properties available. We will continue to assist people to move with practical solutions and our lobbying of the Government to urgently address the rental and housing crises will intensify.”
A report by Richard Sorensen, head of the council’s housing advisory service, says that after the final lockdown, the Government ended the pandemic ban on evictions. This sparked a surge of people finding themselves newly homeless.
The cost-of-living crisis has added more misery, as have rising rents, and the exodus of many private landlords from the sector in the belief that government red tape plus increased mortgage costs means they can no longer turn a profit.
Alex Firth, research and communications officer at campaign group Just Fair, has spent years investigating temporary housing in London and agrees that rising rents made a surge in homelessness inevitable: “And the term ‘temporary accommodation’ is very misleading, because it is often years that people are in these places.
“It is shocking that in one of the richest cities in the world kids are spending half their childhoods homeless.”
The impacts of life in temporary accommodation are numerous. Children don’t have a space to do homework, so their school work suffers.
If a family is given a flat rather than a hotel room it will generally be at what Firth describes as the “very worst end of the private rental sector. The sorts of properties that you would not be able to rent normally,” he says.
This means damp, cold and black mould, which has been linked to long-term respiratory disorders.
‘Nothing is affordable’
In Ealing there are currently 1,719 families — including 3,432 children — housed in temporary accommodation. And the shortage of rental homes for them means that from 2021 to 2022 the number of households living in hotels and bed and breakfasts shot up from 19 to 125.
Most, said a council spokesperson, became homeless after their living costs increased and they could no longer afford to rent privately.
Peter Mason, the leader of Ealing Borough Council, thinks the quickest way to ease the hardship would be to review local reference rates, the formula on which housing benefit is based.
The LRR has stayed static for years, rents have not. The result is that it is almost impossible for people on housing benefit to use that benefit to rent a home of their own.
“Nothing is affordable to them,” said Mason. “And if a landlord can rent to a small group of young professionals or someone on benefits, unfortunately we know what they are going to do.”
A short-term solution would be to review the LRR. More affordable homes are also required. And although Firth has some sympathy with councils’ pleas of poverty when it comes to house-building he thinks they could do much more in terms of training staff to at least treat homeless families with respect and compassion.
Another solution adopted by some councils is to export the problem, rehousing homeless families hundreds of miles from London in areas where homes are cheaper and more easily available. “It is just displacing poverty outside London,” says Mason. “It is a completely depressing situation.”
Mason is keen to build new homes in Ealing, but anything the council can do will be a drop in the ocean. He also thinks there need to be some “hard decisions” about building either on the Green Belt or in the home counties, creating new towns like those built after the Second World War to house displaced Londoners.
Firth wants housing to be fully recognised by the Government as a human right. “It is a human right in international law, but we don’t have it in our domestic legislation,” he said.
Legislation would force the Government to act swiftly to prevent situations like the one at Enfield’s Travelodge and would allow people whose homelessness isn’t dealt with to take the authorities to court.
Back in Enfield, Bent is more concerned with what to give her child for her next meal. “We try to make the best of things, but it is quite disheartening,” she said. “She is only three but even so my daughter has expressed to me that she doesn’t have a home, or a kitchen, and she notices the difference when we are at other people’s homes.”
