From the outside, there appears to be nothing unusual about Harris Primary Academy Peckham Park in south London. On any weekday morning, you will find teachers standing at the school gates, welcoming children as they file in for another day of learning. Almost 300 children aged between four and 11 are taught here – and more than half of those children are homeless. It is a remarkable, repugnant reality that should shame us all.
Behind each child is a story of instability and despair. They arrive at school having spent the night in a homeless shelter, a hostel, a bed and breakfast or on the floor of a family friend’s living room. They live transient lives in temporary homes, forced to share beds with their siblings or their parents. Some may have lived this way for days or weeks, sometimes months. For others, it may be all they have ever known. Some of the children leave for school from one hotel, only to be taken to a different hotel when the school day has ended.
This is not an isolated case. More than 150,000 children are living in temporary accommodation in England, the highest number on record, and some are being housed in homes that are putting their lives in danger.
In 2021 I stepped inside a tower block and on to the soaking wet carpet of a one-bedroom flat in Croydon, where Fransoy Hewitt and her two young sons had been placed by the council. The whitewashed walls had turned black, a furry fungus growing on every surface. Water cascaded through light fittings and into plug sockets, plunging the property into darkness.
The family’s belongings had been destroyed – the sofa was drenched, rendered unusable. So too were the curtains and many of their clothes – covered in thick, furry spores. Hewitt had put buckets under the falling water, and when she ran out of buckets, she placed the small plastic baby bathtub she had once used to bathe her sons under the leak to catch the dirty water from above. The dripping was unrelenting.
Fear of electrocution meant Hewitt no longer turned on the lights. She would use the torch on her mobile phone to guide herself and her five- and seven-year-old boys between rooms, being careful not to slip. The floors were sodden. From the kitchen she would hear the squelch of her sons’ trainers on the soaked living-room rug as they played. This wasn’t living, it was surviving, but she feared they wouldn’t.
Her calls and complaints to the council over many months had been met with silence. That was until our report aired on ITV News, and the family were immediately moved out. An independent inquiry later concluded the health of tenants was put at risk and that the council failed to keep them safe.
The next day, we received hundreds of emails from tenants in social homes and temporary accommodation facing similar horrors. That report took me beyond Croydon to properties across the country, where the conditions were barely believable and totally unlivable, leading to an investigation that continues more than three years later and has turned into a podcast series.
Councils and housing associations are failing to carry out repairs and tenants are trapped with nowhere else to go – left to rot, like the walls around them. A chronic shortage of affordable housing means there is no alternative. Soaring rents have priced low-income families out of the private rental market and the mass sell-off of council homes that began under Margaret Thatcher means that those with a social home, no matter what its condition, are forced to feel grateful for it. For many, it is squalor or the streets.
Those 150,000 children and their families are victims of the state’s long and dangerous retreat from housing. Successive governments have failed to provide enough homes, failed to protect them from the excesses of the market and failed to regulate landlords – private and social – to ensure they make basic repairs and keep their homes safe. If you wanted to create a housing crisis, you would do to the letter what Britain has done in the past 40 years.
What hope is there for this nowhere generation of children? They are victims of a housing crisis that every day casts a wider net, trapping and traumatising families and damaging young people’s education, their physical and mental health, their prospects and their view of power and authority.
In the UK, housing is chronically underreported as an issue in relation to its size and significance. It may be partly – and perhaps crudely – explained by the fact that on a personal level, it is a secondary issue for the majority of those in senior positions in media and politics; most have been fortunate enough to live during a period when the cost of housing, even in London on a modest salary, was eminently affordable.
Politically, the tide is shifting. Even before Labour came to power, the former housing secretary Michael Gove accepted that significantly more social housing had to be built. Yet he didn’t commit to a number and neither has his latest successor, Angela Rayner. The new government is being remarkably unspecific about its plans for social housing. That has to change. Labour must set out how many of the 1.5m homes it promises to build in the next five years will be social homes.
It must surely summon the spirit of the postwar Labour government and embark on a large-scale social housebuilding programme of genuinely affordable homes to rent as well as buy. Instead of continuing to sell off homes through right to buy, ministers must direct all their efforts into retaining what stock we have left and providing the kinds of homes that will free families from a life of squalor and uncertainty.
Safe, secure, affordable housing is the bedrock of happy, healthy lives. Where we live determines so much else. Home is where we start from.
