Laetitia lives with her newborn daughter and son in a London house with four other families and an infestation of mice in the communal kitchen. They have a sparsely furnished room with a bed, a cot and a broken cupboard from which all their possessions spill out. Laetitia struggles to sleep because tenants shout through thin walls, while her four-year-old son is terrified of the mice and won’t go into the kitchen.
The gently-spoken 28-year-old is desperate to move and has been trying to save some universal credit to put down a deposit on a private rental. But Laetitia is classified as “destitute”, falling below the weekly £155 income threshold for the size of her household, and has just £10 a day to buy food, so saving is not an option.
