The plight of our homeless families
Almost a year after the M.E.N. lifted the lid on the city’s ‘hidden homeless’, we reveal that the problem is spiralling out of control
THE moment Clare’s life slipped out of her control was when she walked into a filthy bed and breakfast in south Manchester last year. A young mother of three small children, her family had just become homeless through no fault of their own.
But, in a city crippled by a breathtaking rise in homelessness, her only option was this grimy hotel room provided by the council, in an establishment that felt to her more like a rehab centre than a home. If she refused, she would be deemed to have made her children intentionally homeless.
With no cooking facilities, surrounded by drug addicts, the reality dawned.
“I just thought: this is my life now, this is the children’s lives now,” recalls Clare, a qualified teacher.
“The dirt on the beds, that was when poverty began. Our standard of living had been taken away from us.”
After a week, she followed the same path hundreds of other people are now forced onto each year, in a crisis that just keeps escalating. With perilously little housing available, the council moved her into temporary accommodation in Oldham, miles away from her support networks. “We were put into isolation.” Almost a year ago, the M.E.N. lifted the lid on the scale and reality of hidden homelessness in the city. But since then, it has only spiralled.
Demand on the city’s homeless services in 2019 is, as one council official tells me, ‘staggering.’
Last month nearly 1,700 people came to the town hall either because they’re already homeless, or fear they are about to be.
A great many of them are families. Manchester is housing 411 per cent more homeless families in temporary accommodation than in 2015, currently around six every day. Initially, that usually means being placed in a hotel. That could mean a Travelodge ten miles away, or it might mean the bed and breakfast – and others like it – that Clare describes, one of the establishments the M.E.N. visited for our investigation last year.
On September 30, when Manchester United were playing at home and the Conservative Party conference was in town, the city and surrounding boroughs ran out of hotel rooms for homeless people altogether. One family had to be split up because a room couldn’t be found to accommodate all of them, while another had to be put on a train to Sheffield.
The same is the case for vulnerable single people, who are also owed a legal duty by the council when they become homeless. One man released from a mental health institution last month was also given a ticket to Sheffield, because the council said there was nowhere else. People have been sent to hotels in Chesterfield, Glossop, Preston and Burnley.
When a colleague visits the waiting area outside the council’s customer service department on Friday, it doesn’t take long to find someone in a similar position.
Edwin Firth, 55, tells her he has serious health problems, including with his eyesight, meaning he can only work part-time. But his landlady needs his room back and he now can’t find anywhere in the city within his price range.
He doesn’t know where he’ll sleep tonight, so he has joined the queue at the council’s front door.
“I’m depressed and down but short of going and jumping off the top of a multi-storey car park, what can I do?” he tells her, sadly.
A year on from our last investigation, none of the causes of this crisis have been addressed.
People on low incomes here, in a city that still includes some of the most acute deprivation in the country, have fallen victim to Manchester’s soaring popularity, austerity and a dysfunctional housing system.
There are around 17,000 people on some form of housing benefit in the city’s private rented sector, many of them in work, but rents in pretty much every neighbourhood are rocketing way beyond what they receive. That’s on top of people like Edwin, who doesn’t claim benefits because he doesn’t want to be a burden, but simply doesn’t earn very much.
Authorities are often powerless to stop landlords from evicting people when they want to charge more rent or sell up.
Social housing is barely being built and continues to be sold off under Right to Buy, 40pc of it later finding its way into the private rented sector, where rents are then charged at market rate. Less and less of the social stock that does still exist is becoming empty, because people understandably are staying put. Young people can’t get mortgages and graduates are increasingly staying in the city after university, so everyone is fighting for private rented stock.
And because people on low incomes often can’t win that battle, more and more of them are ending up homeless.
John Ryan, hub manager at Shelter’s Manchester branch, calls it a ‘perfect storm’ for the city.
“I don’t think you can count the human cost of this, the human cost of putting people through this system that’s broken on lots of levels,” he says.
He describes one case Shelter dealt with recently in which a homeless mother and her three sons had been put in a hotel. But the mother had mental health problems and kept losing the key card to the hotel room, meaning they kept getting kicked out.
“These three lads slept in a bus shelter overnight and still went to college. I ran out of money to pay for hotels for them in the end.
“It took two months of them having somewhere, not having somewhere, then being on the streets again and no recognition that this mother had mental health problems that meant she couldn’t comply with the strict rules at the hotel.”
Cases like Clare’s are also familiar to his case workers.
She and her children became homeless because they had fallen victim to crime in their previous house, meaning they weren’t safe and had to be moved out at short notice.
The hotel in south Manchester was
I’m depressed and down, but short of jumping off a multistorey car park, what can I do?
Edwin Firth
just the start. “It was a B&B no family should ever set foot in,” she says.
“Anyone who has stepped foot in there knows that a single mum with three kids should not be put in there, but it was ‘beggars can’t be choosers.’ If you don’t go in there, you’re making yourself intentionally homeless.
“We were exposed to druggies, alcoholics, people were trying to get into my room.
“We were then given temporary accommodation in Oldham and given an hour to get out. I didn’t see the property, they just said you need to come and sign for it. I was away from all my support, all my support was in Crumpsall. I couldn’t access any services whatsoever because although Manchester had duty of care, it said yeah, you’re in Oldham.”
When her violent ex-partner tracked down her new address, she still couldn’t get moved. Eventually a solicitor from Greater Manchester Law Centre managed to win her case, meaning she was moved into social housing this summer after more than a year in temporary accommodation. But she says the entire experience ‘destroyed’ the family, who are now all on medication for anxiety.
“I felt dehumanised,” says Clare of the system. “You’re not seen as a family, you’re seen as a number.”
John Ryan says the system is broken both on a human and on a public spending level.
“The real issue is the damage it’s causing the children and to the parents themselves,” he says. “When you’re dispersed in temporary accommodation, it’s not yours.
“You can’t hang a picture on the wall. You might be there one year, two years. It’s not your home. It’s the damage to mental health, not only the mother but the children as well.
“And these children change schools three times in that period. They’re more likely to be in the homeless numbers in the future as well.
“And to do all this, the city is spending millions to pay for it.”
Manchester’s spending on hotels and temporary accommodation is certainly striking. Five years ago, it was spending just less than £3m a year. This year it’s on course to spend £19m, but the government recently rejigged the funding formula using old data that didn’t reflect the scale of the problem here – meaning Manchester now has a £3.5m grant shortfall.
At the same time the Homelessness Reduction Act, brought in earlier this year in an attempt to prevent the problem before it starts, places new duties on councils to help people on the cusp of destitution. Local officials say the principle of that is great – but there is nowhere to put people. Plus, it didn’t get enough extra cash to pay for it.
“This, combined with the roll out of Universal Credit and the impact of other welfare reforms, has created a perfect storm financially for the city,” says one officer.
Manchester council was arguably slow to see the crisis looming a few years ago.
In the past year, however, it has started working with landlords in an attempt to try and prevent some of the no-fault evictions blighting the city. They can’t always do that, but sometimes they can buy enough time to find the family somewhere else, or in some cases help pay off rent arrears.
It has also been inspecting its temporary accommodation stock after we raised concerns about damp, pests and safety. Officers failed 90pc of that housing on some kind of standard, while 18pc were found to have a serious ‘category one’ health and safety failure. The council says all those houses have either been ditched or are subject to ‘improvement plans,’ although Shelter says it regularly sees cases where the work hasn’t been carried out.
The council is still using the hotel Clare describes, meanwhile, arguing it has no other option.
Yet the drivers for the crisis rest with government. Workers in the housing sector fear plans to ban no-fault evictions – known as Section 21s – are now drifting under Boris Johnson.
The housing benefit freeze, which would cost billions to reverse, is not something his administration has been keen to talk about ahead of an election, while social housing has barely been mentioned.
John Ryan believes the council does want to tackle the crisis, although he – like many others in the city – questions whether the town hall has been squeezing enough affordable housing cash out of the developers rushing to build market-rate flats in the city centre.
But he thinks ultimately the issue rests with government.
“Societally, we don’t value people at the bottom end of the scale,” he says.
“We have to get housing back on the agenda,” he added. “Shelter is apolitical, clearly, but in this general election housing has to be right at the top of the agenda.
“Boris Johnson is talking about police and crime and the NHS, all of which are important. However you have to get the basics right, and housing is a basic.”
For Clare, life is slowly being rebuilt. But the experience has opened her eyes, not least to the way landlords and hotel owners are getting rich off a broken system.
She has started putting together ‘response’ packs for families who are moved into B&Bs. Increasingly she is also being invited to talk to officials and politicians in the city.
She added: “Right now, we’re learning how to live again, to live a normal life again.”