When Melissa’s parents moved abroad in 2002, she and her one-year-old child needed help to find a place to live. Her local London council placed her in temporary accommodation. “They told me I’d be in it for six weeks,” she said. “I’m still in it today.”
Shocking as it may seem, the housing crisis and lack of affordable rents in some parts of the UK mean a growing number of people have spent huge chunks of their lives in temporary accommodation. For some children, it is all they have known.
Melissa (not her real name) said she had been placed in three different properties over more than 20 years. Though she is in work – as an experienced and senior teaching assistant – she cannot afford London-level private rents.
“I got an eviction notice from my first property, then it was back to the homeless department,” she said. “They wanted to send us to East Sussex, but I don’t have any family there. My kids were in school. Leaving London meant uprooting my children’s lives – and once we left, we would no longer be the responsibility of the council here.
“We got put into a temporary bed and breakfast-type place, which was infested with mice, cockroaches – you name it, it had it. Shared bathroom, shared kitchen – it wasn’t a place you should eat or prepare food.”
She and her now adult children have been in their most recent accommodation for almost a decade. The government says the vast majority of temporary accommodation is appropriate for those living in it, and is of a standard befitting a stay potentially spanning many years. Melissa says she is constantly battling mould and damp. “My house is not liveable,” she says. “I literally have to throw out clothes. You have to throw out furniture.”
According to data reported by the Observer, an increasing number of people have been in temporary accommodation for 20 years or more. The number who have been in it for more than a decade is in the thousands. And campaigners are sounding the alarm over the impact this has on children.
“Experiences like Melissa’s are all too common,” said Matthew Bolton of grassroots action group Citizens UK. “We meet families stuck in temporary accommodation for years: infants with no space to learn how to crawl, children developing asthma from mould, and adolescents sharing bedrooms with their parents. How can we expect kids to succeed at school when there’s no space to do their homework and they arrive at school exhausted from lack of sleep and traumatised by rodent infestation?”
Citizens UK wants improved standards and a time limit on stays in temporary accommodation. Other organisations, such as the charity Shelter and the Local Government Association, also say this is a growing crisis. However, they worry that a statutory maximum stay might have unintended consequences and say the solution lies in building significant numbers of homes to let at affordable rents.
Melissa is now helping to campaign and highlight the issue. She says the impact on her children worries her the most. “My children are now adults,” she says. “But they’ve never had somewhere they could say: ‘We live here. This is home’.”
