SCANDAL The homeless children living in B&B squalor
VULNERABLE FAMILIES GIVEN TEMPORARY HOUSING BY COUNCIL IN PLACES UNFIT FOR BRINGING UP YOUNGSTERS
PREGNANT and with a three-yearold in tow, Steph was checked into a bed and breakfast by the council’s homelessness service three weeks ago.
When she saw the state of the guest house – flea-ridden and drug-infested – she was brought to tears. But with nowhere else to go, there’s no choice.
“He’s bored to death and he’s not got a single toy,” the 22-year-old says, nodding to her restless toddler, as we sit in the hotel’s dingy lobby. “I’ve had to lose half his stuff because I’ve got nowhere to put it.
“You’ve got to keep your pram downstairs during the day. I went out down the road with him and when I got back there was weed in it like someone had been leaning over, skinning up. “I just want to get out.” If Steph’s story sounds shocking, it is, by the same token, appallingly common.
Family homelessness in Manchester is rising at an extraordinary rate. Since 2014, the city council has gone from placing around 120 families like Steph’s in emergency accommodation to a staggering 1,400 this year, thousands of children made destitute as rents soar and benefits remain frozen.
As those numbers have rocketed and social housing has failed to keep pace, decent homes have, essentially, run out. Now the council is spending ballooning sums of cash on hotels and temporary accommodation, including places where families feel desperately unsafe.
During a six-month investigation I have lost count of the families I’ve discovered who have lived three or four people to a tiny hotel room for weeks or months on end, often relying on food banks and pound bakeries for meals, barred from having visitors or even a kettle.
Some are banned from being in their rooms at all during the middle of the day, left to wander the streets with their kids, banned from having TVs in their rooms, one suitcase between them all.
Many others, like Steph, are also sharing their space with drug addicts, while one charity has repeatedly raised similar concerns about paedophiles.
As a charity worker tells me early on: “You wouldn’t stay in some of the hotels even if you were a p **** d student.”
For children such as Steph’s little boy, it means life without a nourishing meal. Sleepless nights, dirty washing, virtually no possessions, an anxious parent.
“The fire alarm goes off three times a night because people are smoking upstairs,” she sighs.
“The washing machine, I put my clothes in it but it didn’t wash them. So I’ve had to stand there half the night handwashing in a sink this size.” She demonstrates a space of about six inches.
“I did use the toaster, but it sparked in my face.”
Single mum Chloe was placed in the same hotel last year with her children, after being evicted because her Gorton landlord wanted to put up their rent by £70 a week.
Her experience is brutally similar to Steph’s. “It was horrible,” she says. “Me, my son and my daughter were three to a room, sharing a kitchen that was disgusting. I refused to use it. If we went outside for fresh air, there were alcoholics and drug addicts hanging around.
“We felt so unsafe. I wouldn’t even let her out to go to the takeaway round the corner on her own. My daughter started scratching – she was getting flea bites. Both of us were.”
Her family lived in these conditions for three months, she says, adding that she kept nagging the council, saying they had been there too long. “I cried every night.” Even once homeless families have moved out of B&Bs, they will then spend months or years in emergency homes, thanks to the city’s affordable housing shortage. In a string of stark cases, including Chloe’s, we found youngsters – including babies – had then been living among mice or rats in some of these houses, with damp on the walls and bugs in the beds, scared to go to the toilet at night because of the cockroaches, their health at risk.
They travel miles to school, never quite feeling settled, or sure, or normal, or permanent. No end in sight.
Family homelessness such as this is difficult to research, because while the crisis is bleak and vast, it is also hidden.
But at food banks, the awfulness of the conditions shows itself regularly.
At the Trussell Trust’s Fallowfield and Withington branch, manager Colin says he has repeatedly contacted both individual hotels and
You’ve got to keep your pram downstairs... one time there was weed in it like someone had been skinning up
the council on behalf of parents who come in from across the city for ‘kettle packs’ – emergency food parcels that can be made using just the hot water in their rooms.
He knows the hotel that Steph and Chloe were placed in and says the conditions there, as in many others used for homeless families, are ‘disgraceful.’ When I suggest booking a room to take a look, he advises me to take flea powder.
“The conditions people are living in are absolutely horrendous,” he says. “The other week I had someone suicidal because they were living in one particular establishment. I know of one baby who was born while in there and the family is still there 12 months later.
“There was a family of five on the council’s waiting list given a duvet with cigarette burns that was filthy.
“We have had issues where we’ve had to ask the hotel to put the heating on, to make sure the beds weren’t covered in bloodstains. Places where the windows are broken: these are the conditions families are living in.”
There’s another dimension, too, one that should send shivers down the spines of social workers.
“One dad said he was concerned that one of the other residents was putting his hands around his children and that he found him rather creepy,” says Colin of one hotel.
“He was told ‘deal with it’ and he said ‘well, I’ll rip his head off.’”
When families present to Manchester council as homeless, which they are doing currently at a rate of 80 a day, initially the town hall will find them a bed wherever is immediately available. That means putting them wherever they can find.
A few weeks ago I checked into one hotel used by the council with a colleague. Outside was a pile of dirty mattresses.
The window didn’t lock properly, the carpets were filthy, cigarette smoke filled the hallways. While it was no place for kids, the toys and ornaments leaning against one downstairs window suggested they were living there nonetheless.
Charity worker Rosetta Ceesay, who herself was homeless several years ago and has since worked with homeless families, knows many who have stayed in that hotel and others like it.
“I met so many people that were telling me the same story over and over again,” she says.
“I met some really young families, a young man and his wife and four children stuck in there in one room. It was absolutely appalling.
“They didn’t allow the people in there to eat breakfast in their restaurant or go to the bar, even to buy a pack of peanuts, so they were treated like second-class citizens.
“These people were getting up early in the morning and going to the pound bakery to get tea and toast to share between the four. It was pitiful. They weren’t allowed to cook in the room.”
She continues: “They took the TV out when they put a homeless person in so they wouldn’t hang about in there.”
When she initially tells me that, I assume it must be a one-off.
But then Chloe says her hotel also banned her from having any visitors, or food in her room, although in the end she broke the rules because the kitchen was so disgusting.
Nevertheless it is only when someone shows me the ‘licence agreement’ families are asked to sign at another hotel regularly used by the council that it really hits home.
The badly-spelt document lists separate 23 rules, including: no food in your room, no kettle, no TV, no radio, no other electrical appliance of any other kind. You will be barred from the hotel between 1.30pm and 4pm each day. You will not have any visitors, of any kind, even family.
You are only allowed to bring your basic belongings. “One suitcase only,” it warns.
At the very top of the agreement, the hotel also demands that people list any prior convictions ‘for insurance purposes,’ including if they are a ‘pedophile’ [sic].
I know this document has been raised with the council, because I have seen its response. It simply said there was nowhere else available.
Food bank manager Colin says he is genuinely worried.
“We have questioned the city council over and over again about putting kids in these types of places,” he says.
“I reported one safeguarding issue at another hotel three weeks ago and haven’t heard anything.”
The council says it inspects the bed and breakfasts it is using, but Rosetta says: “To me, if the council have seen the property and allowed people to live in it, then they’re allowing themselves to be ripped off. It’s just mismanagement.”
Manchester council spends a lot on B&B accommodation for homeless people. In 2013, its hotel bill was £650,000. Five years later, it is £3m. The hotel Steph and Chloe stayed in received around £400,000 from the council in 2016.
And while the town hall wouldn’t name the establishments it uses under the Freedom of Information Act due to safeguarding concerns, through charities and local councillors I know the worst ones.
While many of those used will be clean and upstanding, TripAdvisor’s reviews of the most notorious – which somehow manage to run as commercial operations as well as council accommodation – are instructive. Most paying guests rate them ‘terrible.’
Choice descriptions include ‘scary,’ ‘terrifying,’ ‘full of drug users’ and ‘like a prison.’
Numerous people recount being kept up all night by groups of people drinking, fighting, taking drugs and even having sex publicly until the early hours. There are accounts of toilets akin to the one from the film Trainspotting, of people collapsed from drug overdoses in the communal areas, of ambulances waiting outside when they check in.
Many paying customers tell how they booked a room and – essentially correctly – concluded they were staying in a homeless hostel, posting horrified photos of taped-up electrical sockets, filthy showers and plastic bags over the light fittings.
Council officers insist families are only placed in such institutions for the shortest time possible, and that they are fully inspected. But councillors are getting increasingly concerned as their casework starts to form a pattern.
At a September council meeting,
Didsbury Liberal Democrat Richard Kilpatrick warned of the hotels used by the council: “I’ve seen some of them in the centre and south of the city and I wouldn’t want anyone to stay in them.”
Two months later, he still has concerns.
“I went to have a look at a couple of them and I thought: If this is the emergency provision, I wouldn’t know where to start if I presented myself as homeless,” he says.
“If you’d already gone through the destruction of your dignity by having to present your family as homeless, you’re then faced with the state of some of the B&Bs in the city, which are just outright scandalous.
“I just don’t think a lot of them would pass housing standards.”
The rise in families living in stopgap accommodation across Manchester is driven by several factors, but those working in the sector agree the big issue is evictions, driven by the growing gap between income – particularly people on housing benefit – and private rents, especially in the south of the city.
Lauren Edwards, team leader at Shelter’s Manchester branch, has seen her family casework double in 12 months, to just under 700 last year.
She says ‘Section 13’ notices, when landlords evict tenants at the end of their 12-month lease in order to put up the rent, are now an increasing factor – as well as ‘section 21’ evictions, when the landlord simply wants the house back, often to sell it.
“It’s becoming a bigger and bigger reason,” she says of the people coming through her door.
“People can’t access affordable homes.
“We see people looking on Manchester’s social housing website, Manchester Move, for years, and they’ve still not been offered anything. The council is facing a bottleneck, because rents are so high and there’s no social housing available.”
The picture is borne out by a quick look on Rightmove. While Local Housing Allowance – the private rental equivalent of housing benefit – is £532 a month for a family needing a three-bed house in much of the city, in most areas there’s nothing available for that, apart from houseshares.
At the time of writing, the cheapest house to rent in Moss Side – excluding student lets – is on at just under £800 a month.
So when families are evicted through no fault of their own, there is nothing to move into, and they become homeless.
Lauren stresses rising rents in south Manchester are not confined to the traditionally ‘posh’ areas like Didsbury and Chorlton.
“It’s happening in places you wouldn’t necessarily expect, such as Moss Side, Hulme, Rusholme.”
As a result, the council has seen rocketing numbers of families coming through its door, particularly from south Manchester.
After first placing them in a B&B or hotel, it will then move them into temporary housing, usually provided by a private letting agency receiving a fixed rate of more than £200 a week in rent.
Manchester council’s expenditure on such accommodation has risen six-fold in the past five year: from £1.6m to just under £10m.
But at a council meeting this week, the town hall admitted that it only has two officers checking the quality of the 1,400 houses it uses, at a pace of around 50 a month. In certain cases, it shows. Colin shows me a photo of mice nibbling comfortably in the corner of one such house in east Manchester.
People living in such homes – including that one – account for many of the cases coming into Fallowfield and Withington food bank, he says.
“I’ve got someone at the moment living in piles of mouse droppings,” he says. “There was a family who moved into their emergency housing and there was rat poison placed around on trays where the threeyear-old could eat it.”
Elsewhere, another mum, Katie, tells of rats, slugs, mice and big black flies in the emergency housing her family was placed in for a year.
She was made homeless last year after the landlord of the home she lived in with her disabled children and grandchildren in Rusholme decided to sell up.
With nowhere large enough available on the market, partly because many homes had become multiple
In one family’s emergency housing, there was rat poison placed on trays where the three-year-old could eat it...
occupation for students, her family ended up presenting as homeless. “It was a hellhole,” she says of the house in which they were placed.
“There were rats. Then the problem started getting worse because we started getting mice.
“Then there was poo in the cupboards, leaks coming through the ceiling in my grandson’s room. There was the bath coming through the kitchen ceiling on a regular basis through the wiring, dead rats in the kitchen.”
Over time, she says great clouds of black flies started accumulating.
Everyone in the house came out in a strange rash, which the walk-in centre said was scabies. The agency told her to keep the door shut so the rats would stop getting in, she says, but she was told they were within the structure of the whole terrace.
In Longsight, a family’s case only came to light by chance.
When Manchester Tenants Union knocked on their door to see if they were happy in their housing, their
One little girl said she was too scared to go to the toilet in the night because there are cockroaches and mice
plight came tumbling out. They were living there with a 10-month-old baby, in a house infested with cockroaches and mice, bedbugs in the furniture. Water had been leaking through the electrics – causing the electricity to trip – and they had been without hot water for most of the weekend because the boiler had broken.
When the union raised the matter with Manchester council, it said the house ‘would have been’ inspected before the family moved in, although it could not locate the inspection report to prove it.
Union spokesman and Burnage councillor Ben Clay says the organisation is ‘very concerned’ about the quality of private sector accommodation being used by Manchester council for homeless families, adding: “Our work supporting renters, and this investigation, shows the town hall needs to do better.”
Meanwhile Chloe – having lived in the same filthy hotel as Steph for three months – was eventually moved to temporary housing in east Manchester, where the family has remained for two years.
She shows me the spots where she has shoved kitchen scourers into every crevice and taped them over, to keep out the mice.
“I can still hear them though,” she says.
“It’s freezing. My son’s room is like an ice box. The ceilings in the upstairs bedrooms are damp and I think that’s why my daughter always has a bad chest.”
Her kitchen wallpaper is peeling due to damp, a problem she says has been repeatedly reported. Upstairs smells strongly of damp and the house is, as she says, freezing. She currently has a vase placed on top of a hole in the sideboard where mice like to squeeze through, for good measure.
Within all of this, it is the children who bear the brunt of the squalor.
One south Manchester primary headteacher spoken to by the M.E.N., who did not with to be identified, describes these youngsters as the ‘collateral damage in an area where there isn’t enough housing.’
The crisis has been getting ‘continuously worse over the last 12 to 18 months,’ she adds.
“They’re being sent to sub-standard accommodation, it’s often overcrowded, they’re isolated because they’re nowhere near their friends.
“We had one little girl who said she was too scared to go to the toilet in the night because there are cockroaches and mice. She’s Key Stage One, so she’s under seven.
“There are families who talk about there being no secure locks on the doors or broken windows, so the rain comes in.”
A generation of these children are growing up sleep-deprived and hungry, she says. Many will travel for hours across the city on public transport from their emergency housing in east Manchester to her school, getting up at 6.30am to catch two or three buses.
Over time, the impact on a child’s education can be ‘extreme,’ she adds, with long-term absence becoming more likely, their mental health and future success blighted.
Unsurprisingly, the children’s commissioner for England, Anne Longfield, is horrified at the situation in Manchester.
“I’m truly concerned about families being placed into these situations,” she says. “Clearly it will have impacts on every aspect of their lives: their health, their security, their ability to get to school in the first place, but also the schooling itself.
“The insecurity of the accommodation eats away at every area of a child’s life and drives all the factors that we know hold them back.
“Life is being put into this temporary waiting room. But for kids, one year or two years can feel like a lifetime.
“Everything taking place in these places – which by their nature are a stopgap – seems endless.”
In the meantime, 2,000 Manchester children will spend this Christmas in emergency accommodation.
Labour councillor Julie Reid, whose Gorton ward includes a large
amount of the city’s emergency housing, told colleagues at a September council meeting that the bleakness of their lives harks back to an earlier time.
“Not since Cathy Come Home have we seen anything like this,” she said, of the seminal 1960s TV play about homelessness and family poverty that shocked Britain.
“My casework is primarily around this type of thing and I think stories... stories tell a thousand... you know, you can feel it, can’t you?
“You can feel it.”
ALL THE NAMES OF MOTHERS QUOTED IN THIS ARTICLE HAVE BEEN CHANGED