More than 1 million children in UK sleep on floor or share bed, study finds

More than a million children in the UK either sleep on the floor or share a bed with parents or siblings because their family cannot afford the “luxury” of replacing broken frames and mouldy linen, according to the children’s charity Barnardo’s.

The charity says increasing “bed poverty” reflects growing levels of destitution in which low-income families already struggling with soaring food or gas bills often find they are also unable to afford a comfortable night’s sleep.

Acute hardship was forcing families to adopt desperately improvised sleeping arrangements, it says in a report published on Friday. An estimated 700,000 children were sharing beds, while 440,000 children slept on the floor, leaving them tired, anxious and finding it hard to concentrate at school.

Parents and kids were often forced to share a bed, the Barnardo’s research found. Some parents would sleep on sofas or chairs to vacate their bed for their children. Other children would spend the night on mattresses or blankets on the floor, sometimes without sheets or duvets.

Some of the most vivid findings included a three-year-old having to sleep in a baby cot, a 17-year-old sleeping in a seven-year-old’s bed, and a parent sleeping on a child’s single mattress. Many families saw replacing broken beds as an unaffordable “luxury”. With soaring energy bills, even regularly washing bedding was hard.

More than 336,000 families could not afford to replace or repair beds in the last year, Barnardo’s estimates. More than 204,000 families said their children’s bed or bedding was mouldy or damp because putting the heating on was too expensive and more than 187,000 said they couldn’t afford to wash or dry bedding.

“People take it for granted everyone has a bed,” mum of two Shelley Nicholson told the Guardian. Last winter she slept on a sofa in her unheated front room, her daughters sharing a double mattress on the bare concrete floor next to her. For many people in poverty like her, she added, having a bed felt like a privilege.

Nicholson, a part-time charity worker, and her daughters live in a housing association property affected

Shelley Nicholson with her daughter Ash, right. Nicholson, who is on universal credit, loses around a fifth of her £1,000-a-month post-rent income through benefit reductions. Photograph: Richard Saker/The Guardian

Photograph: Richard Saker/The Guardian Shelley Nicholson and her daughter Ash, 16, at their home near Carlisle in Cumbria. The family have been impacted by ‘bed poverty’.