The children’s commissioner’s report on homelessness, revealing that thousands are growing up in converted shipping containers and former office blocks (Report, 21 August), receives a totally inadequate response from a government spokesman of which ministers should be publicly ashamed: “No child should ever be without a roof over their head.” A government with an ounce of humanity would state that no child should ever be without a permanent, secure home.
As it is, if they are not in shipping containers, 83,700 homeless families with 124,000 children in England can be spending up to 10 years or even longer in temporary accommodation, moved several times by councils and landlords, sometimes into a single room in a homeless hostel for months or even years, other times into property not fit for habitation, disrupting their education, torn from one community after another and never knowing when, if ever, they will live in a secure home of their own. There are no solutions in sight. They are the victims of UK governments submitting UK land to the unlimited demand of the national and international wealthy, when the supply of UK land is inevitably limited by our island coastline. That market has made large British landowners ever richer. The wealthy have catastrophically deprived the children of low-income renters of the public land needed for truly affordable, secure homes.
Rev Paul Nicolson
Taxpayers Against Poverty
• The report on kids in temporary accommodation is shameful enough, but the scandal goes deeper. In London, councils place families in neighbouring boroughs, disrupting school and work life. If they worked together they would save money, ease disruption, and keep families in areas they have grown up in.
Gary Martin
London
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