Too often, complaints about the housing crisis are dismissed as plaintive mewlings of the metropolitan moneyed class, disgruntled at their state. But for some people, the housing crisis is a matter of life and death.
Two stories in particular pull this into sharp aspect. In late September, two-month-old Donald, sleeping with his homeless parents in a car in Bournemouth, died during the night. The parents had approached two councils for help but were told they did not qualify for emergency accommodation. This week, Warwickshire county council published the findings of a serious case review that saw a 10-week-old premature baby named in the review as “John” die on the night his parents were evicted from their housing association home.
Donald’s mother told a local foodbank she had fled Poole due to an abusive ex-partner, and had approached both Bournemouth and Poole council for help with housing. Poole council said that although the mother “was not eligible [for housing], she was provided with as much support and guidance as possible”. Claire Matthews, the foodbank manager said that the couple were unable to raise a deposit for a flat and were in dire straits.
The Warwickshire report into John’s death concluded services working with the evicted family “had not fully understood the issues at the heart of the case, and could have done more to mitigate the impact of the family’s eviction”. The report states that John was born six weeks premature and discharged from hospital after two weeks. The family were issued a final eviction notice one week later, and evicted in September 2013. John died sleeping with his parents on his grandparents’ sofa that same night.
The most vulnerable families, and the most vulnerable tenants of all – children – are at the sharp end of the housing crisis, entertaining no hope of home ownership, but in desperate need of a roof over their head. The decimation of Britain’s social housing, combined with the swingeing central government cuts to local authority funding has pushed councils’ ability to provide temporary accommodation to breaking point. As a result, families fall through the net, or are told they fail the local connection test, and end up in the most desperate situation imaginable for parents: homeless with children.
The cause of death for both young babies is unclear, but homelessness is not a situation that provides health benefits for anyone, least of all young, premature and extremely vulnerable babies. You’d hope we’d have progressed as a nation to a stage where every child could be housed adequately: instead, in 2013 and 2015, two babies died without so much as a bed to sleep in.
The solution is not, as the Conservatives suggest, to force councils and housing associations to sell social housing off with a vague but unsupported mandate to rebuild homes on a like-for-like basis, which hasn’t happened since right to buy’s introduction and won’t happen now. Housing must be seen as a human right for every citizen, young and old, and funded accordingly.
No child should end up with nowhere to call home, or be born into complete housing precarity. Every child should be offered the best start in life, regardless of their parents’ economic status: being homeless before you can even talk or crawl is so far removed from that to be obscene. A civilised society would have a functioning safety net to ensure no child ends up homeless and dying before their first birthday without an address. The deaths of John and Donald suggest that thanks to the housing crisis, Britain may not be a civilised society.
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