THE LOST FAMILIES OF LOCKDOWN
Plight of invisible, ignored and at risk children that politicians don’t discuss
UNTIL the pandemic, paediatrician Sarah Cockman had only really come across homeless children when they attended her hospital clinic.
She had treated them, perhaps referred them on to social services or to other doctors, but hadn’t seen their lives up close.
Then lockdown happened. One day a week, she began to visit the B&Bs they were living in to do outreach work on behalf of the local charity Shared Health. What she found shocked her, even after eight years as a qualified doctor, including practice at the Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital.
No face-to-face services had been reaching the families, she says. Health problems, from bed-wetting to anxiety, were mounting up. Children who should have been crawling or talking weren’t. Some had no access to hot food.
Leering men were hanging around on the same doorstep near the teenage girls who were trapped there.
The parents themselves were happy just to see her, she adds. To see anyone.
“They’re just so grateful that someone wants to give them help,” says Dr Cockman of visiting families during the lockdown.
“They will say ‘are you serious, you’ve brought food? It just feels like nobody cares about us”.
“It was only then that I realised the children weren’t in school and no community services were going out to see them.
“It’s the Swiss cheese model, where you keep falling through the holes and barely anyone on the frontline knows about you.”
The M.E.N. has documented Greater Manchester’s family homelessness crisis before, but during lockdown the horrendous situation facing these parents and their children has been compounded.
While councils here did move hundreds out of B&Bs and into temporary housing when the pandemic escalated, others remained in establishments – some of them the same ones we first raised questions about 18 months ago – with no cooking facilities, no communal or outside space and no face-to-face visits from health or homelessness professionals for several months.
Shared Health has distributed 2,000 hot meals to homeless families in Manchester alone during the pandemic.
Yet while the protection of rough sleepers has been high on the agenda for politicians here and nationally during the pandemic, little has been said about the situation facing these families.
Shared Health, which was set up by the philanthropic Oglesby Charitable Trust to tackle health inequality here, is worried.
It wrote to a raft of key authorities in Greater Manchester last month, including the mayor’s office, warning: “There is an absence of discussion and detail on a national level about the impact of Covid-19 on families who are homeless. We are gravely concerned about this ‘hidden homeless’ population, whom the pandemic has made invisible.”
Children ‘already barely visible to the state support system’ before Covid ‘are no longer receiving visits from community services and are not in school to access early help support systems,’ it wrote.
One health visiting team spoken to by the charity in May had not seen the families they were supposed to check up on for two months. B&B staff were increasingly having to handle problems usually dealt with by the state, such as safeguarding, usually with no training.
“Zero B&Bs have access to safe communal spaces and staff questioned had no knowledge of how to make safeguarding referrals,” added the charity, following a snap survey it had carried out of six hotels used by councils.
“We are concerned numerous homeless families across Greater Manchester are receiving no outside support to safeguard their health and welfare. This is leading to a health and developmental crisis amongst Greater Manchester’s homeless family population.”
Safeguarding is the charity’s biggest concern and has been for some time. Since the end of last year – coincidentally around the same time the mayor’s report into the failed Operation Augusta grooming investigation was being finalised – it has been warning against placing families in hotels with single adults. In some cases they include men recently released from prison. The
They will say ‘are you serious, you’ve brought food? It just feels like no one cares about us’
Dr Sarah Cockman
B&Bs are often used by several local authorities at a time, as well as by paying guests, meaning councils don’t necessarily know exactly what mix of people are in there when they refer a family in.
A dossier of case studies on safeguarding in these hotels, based on the charity’s interviews with hotel staff, families and health visitors at the back end of 2019, makes for grim reading.
It found children at risk of physical attack and injury, violent behaviour, drugs and sexual exploitation.
In one incident last October, a man was continually harassing some children playing together at a hotel. He then picked up a sevenyear-old boy and threw him against a pillar. The child injured his back and hand, becoming nervous and anxious afterwards.
“This incident alone should be cause for immediate action,” the charity told the authorities in November.
Health visitors told them of a mother with severe mental health problems, whose children were running in and out of bedrooms occupied by men also living there. The hotel didn’t make a safeguarding referral but instead threatened to evict her. Another mother, fleeing domestic violence with a 13-month-old baby, was harassed by a man with possible mental health problems, obsessively pushing notes under her door. The charity also spoke to hotel workers themselves, who are often at the sharp end of the crisis.
One happened to have a medical background, so took it on herself to make judgements about who should be allowed in when families were staying there. Some councils continued to pressurise her to take new referrals, so she would just pretend the hotel was full.
Another, a hotel manager, went to even greater lengths. She had heard so many harrowing stories from people staying in her B&B, including drug addicts and people just released from prison, that she herself had to receive therapy and decided to take herself off for mental health training.
She started sharing information with the manager of another nearby B&B also used by councils for homeless families.
“The managers keep a blacklist of people they will not accept as return residents, because she states that the councils will try and send back in people who have previously been evicted,” the charity told Greater Manchester’s health and social care partnership.
“The manager described incidents they have had of single people shouting and screaming in the hotel at night, a resident who defecated in the room and trashed it, a man beating up a woman and a resident who was attacking students in the local area.
“The reception desk is now surrounded by a protective screen following a violent attack on a staff member at the hotel.”
The M.E.N. understands all those case studies were from hotels in Manchester, although they will have received referrals from a range of boroughs, not just the city itself.
Asked about where it has placed families during lockdown, Manchester council said it does now have one family-only hotel, but added that on occasion there is no choice but to place children alongside single adults, including during the pandemic.