Many people now face a future where there will be no safety net for poor families. If you are wondering where the ideologically-led assault on the living standards of working class people in Britain is leading, you need look no further than the current treatment of destitute families. With laws in place that are supposed to protect poor families with children, the poorest live in misery in overcrowded, substandard accommodation provided by unscrupulous, unregulated landlords hired by local authorities. Where will the working class and poor go to live when social housing has been demolished to make way for high-density ‘luxury’ housing at high rents? Back to the future: in slum housing where losing your job, becoming ill or just bad luck will be life or death events.
Hackney Community Law Centre and Hackney Migrant Centre have produced a report on housing for children in need in London.* The survey is based on seven boroughs (unnamed) and case-studies of destitute families relying on section 17 of the Children Act 1989 to provide their basic needs. Mainly these families are migrants from outside Europe, often one-parent families, with a right to live at least temporarily in Britain but with the restriction of no recourse to public funds. The children may be British citizens, but because of their age they are unable to claim benefits in their own right. They are not classed as asylum seekers whose needs are met by the Home Office under separate legislation (see p16). Despite Section 17 being part of a raft of legislation intended to ensure that all children living in the UK have their basic needs met regardless of their immigration status or background, the report shows that this is far from the case.
The authors have seen an ‘alarming increase’ in the past four years in destitute families with children needing accommodation and financial support – in the last half of 2014, six London boroughs supported 1,570 families or children between them. The Hackney agencies have been forced to turn away many families asking for help because of lack of resources – the families who feature in the report are the lucky ones. Furthermore this crisis is expected to grow with changes in immigration law which govern ‘right to rent’. But this is not just a question of numbers. The report shows that, even when represented, these families are often denied support and even where they are successful in getting the local authority to undertake an assessment of children’s needs, the accommodation and financial support offered is often unsuitable and substandard.
Case studies in the report show the deprivation forced on them:
- The accommodation is often overcrowded, single rooms for entire families sharing a bed; a communal kitchen and bathroom shared with many other families. All the accommodation in a poor or even hazardous condition, often infested.
‘In April 2014 [Patricia and her two children] were moved to new accommodation where they lived for six months. It was overcrowded and in an extremely poor state of repair. The house was split into five ‘flats’ with multiple bedrooms; each bedroom was occupied by a different household. Patricia’s lawyer said that there were likely at least 50 people living in the building. In Patricia’s ‘flat’ were three bedrooms, a small kitchen and bathroom. She shared the flat with a family of six and a single man called David. … The toilet in the bathroom was often blocked. When this happened the family were forced to urinate in a potty and defecate in a plastic bag – they once had to do this for over a month. The room was very damp. When it rained, water leaked through the roof into their room. There was mould on the walls surrounding the beds. Both children suffered from asthma, exacerbated by the mould.’
- Denial of help on the grounds of a spurious ‘support network’
‘[Ona and her two-year old son] slept on the floor in a local church and washed in a washing up bowl. The space was unheated. They relied on a food bank for food. In May 2014, building works began at the church. Ona approached her local Children’s Services for support but they said she was not eligible because she could rely on her existing network. She went back to the church for a few more months, living amongst the building works. In August, [they] had to leave the church and sleep on night buses for three nights until, after advocacy from Shelter and Hackney Community Law Centre, the local authority agreed they had a duty towards the family under section 17.’ - No regard for location. Temporary accommodation is often far away from children’s schools, health care or the families’ support networks. Children are forced to travel three hours a day to maintain their settled school arrangements – in some cases with no extra financial help for travel. These families are most at risk of social cleansing to different cities, sometimes hundreds of miles away.
- No regard for the law. Overcrowding is a criminal offence and it is unlawful to place families in B&B accommodation for more than six weeks. Half of the surveyed families were housed in B&Bs at inflated rents. Government statistics show 2,570 families in England were accommodated in B&B accommodation under homelessness duties as off 31 March 2015, and 920 of those households had been in that accommodation for longer than six weeks. With nearly a third of MPs now themselves landlords (The Guardian, 14 January 2016) and large numbers of local councillors having joined the ‘buy-to-let’ gravy train, there is no hope of any decent regulation in the housing sector, even if local authorities were prepared to impose it.
Jane Bennett
* A place to call home: a report into the standard of housing provided to children in need in London. Available online: www.childrenslegalcentre.com/userfiles/A-Place-To-Call-Home-Electronic-Report1.pdf
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! 249 February/March 2016
