Dickensian Britain

Well said, spabbygirl. You work at the sharp end and know the true heartbreaking reality.

I work in fostering and adoption as a social worker and these stories are just average. I can't tell you their exact stories but think of multiple moves in care as there aren't enough foster carers (you need a house big enough for at least 1 extra bedroom) a young person not at school, she's so behind because of her problematic home life its easier to mess around at school rather than let it be known she's way behind. I can't tell you how much I loathe this gov't cos we used to have Sure Start Centres and Youth Groups started by Labour which helped parents so much. Needless to say there are more children in care now, the squeeze on money will add to family stress now. And we have a prime minister richer than the king, who tells hard up working families to get another job. They have another job, it's called parenting. I can't wait to get this gov't out

There is still no excuse for sending a child to school without breakfast.

The Shelter website explains what BnB accommodation is and how unsuitable it is for families. No cooking facilities, no separate bathroom facilities.

It is nothing like a BnB you might stay in on a holiday.

B&B accomm for the homeless is nothing like the cosy seaside guest-houses of childhood holidays.
they are grim. and often risky environments.
breakfast, if provided at all, is often a box of cornflakes left at the end of a corridor.

Germanshepherdsmum

It is and I don’t think there is an excuse for it. Breakfast doesn’t have to be expensive, and presumably for those housed in a B&B it’s included in the cost. Does anyone know otherwise?

B & B accommodation for the homeless means being housed under a roof which is usually used for B & B. I have little experience of this, but the experience I did have didn't involve the provision of any food. It didn't involve any equipment or space for preparing food either.

Not providing safe, decent housing makes absolutely no financial sense in the long run. Just like Margaret Thatcher's ravaging of the working class ensured a culture of reliance on welfare for generations, the stress and deprivation of having no home to call your own, reliant on charity and pisspotical decisions by clueless politicians when all you want to do is have some agency over your circumstances is catastrophic. It almost guarantees a tsunami of ill health, both physical and mental - desperately poor nutrition, the grinding despair of coping each day with no hope anything is going to change anytime soon - is literally soul destroying and traumatic and will, at some point, have to be addressed at a far greater financial cost than building sufficient housing.
Short sighted and very, very cruel.

It is and I don’t think there is an excuse for it. Breakfast doesn’t have to be expensive, and presumably for those housed in a B&B it’s included in the cost. Does anyone know otherwise?

I started teaching 50 odd years ago in a school in a very poor area, full of children who would arrive each day hungry. You would think that in a civilised country ( ?) this wouldn't be happening still.

Years later I moved to a different part of the country and found the same story. This was in the days before breakfast clubs. I started providing cereals etc but was stopped as it classed as "abuse" I now realise that the county authorities were right because any child could have had an allergy to the food I brought.

I don't know about anyone else here but I think the idea of a child starting their school day distressed and hungry is awful.

Oreo

Homeless means living in temporary housing or B &B doesn’t it? Are the numbers bumped up by asylum seeking families and those here legally like Afghans who are waiting for permanent housing? London social housing has been a problem for a while and yet more and more people coming to live there, a real problem for any council there.

People seeking asylum have legal status until their cases are resolved.

Developers build shared ownership properties for housing associations, they don’t retain ownership of them. The most urgent need is for affordable rental properties, not more shared ownership. But developers don’t want affordable rented housing on their sites because private purchasers don’t want to live next door to rental housing. As I said upthread, Shoreditch, where this school is situated, is building more council housing than any other local authority in the country - something the article fails to mention.

Shared ownership is quite popular in the South East so part deposit and part rental. Over time probably profitable for the developer too.
I think local authorities have a role to play in resolving planning permission in cooperation with local developers.

Iam64

Many of our former mills have been converted into high quality apartments. They’re the mills that were built away from the poverty and squalor that still exists closer to our town centre. These apartments are in ‘desirable’ areas. Their cost reflects that.
Our council, like many others, can no longer fulfill its statutory responsibilities.

I would imagine that converting a former mill into any kind of habitable units is expensive and it just isn't viable to convert them into low cost housing for the homeless.

When I went to school in the forties there were children who lived in the workhouse and children from working class and well off families. We were all in the same classes. This was in the middle of London - Chelsea. The workhouse was in Dovehouse Street. and my brother was invited by his friend to go for tea there.

BTW talking of Peckham, a slightly older friend told me how in the 60s, when she was a hedonistic art student, her mother urged her to buy a house in Peckham - a Queen Anne/Georgian (I forget which) small-ish terraced house could then be bought for £1k.

She turned her nose up - who wanted to be bothered?
Just a year later the price had gone up to £2k. And she took her mother’s advice.
Obviously it would have needed ££££ in modernisation over the years, but she still lives in it, and it’s now worth around £1m.

TerriBull

I read the article, an appalling situation for families to be in, I wish there was more effort in putting these domestic issues to the fore as an absolute priority. Housing or lack of it is a number one problem a perfect storm of more people chasing a lack of affordable rental property, thanks George Osborne! why have politicians so little foresight his efforts made umpteen landlords withdraw their properties from the market and as a result rents have sky rocketed.

Peckham, Brixton and Camberwell have become desirable areas for the 20/30 somethings to move to, thus squeezing the stretched rental market further. My son after university and before he got together with his girlfriend and bought a house way out in Bucks, rented a house with some uni mates in Peckham. Similarly a couple of my husband's grown up grandchildren after university gravitated to Brixton/Camberwell. Their generations love those areas now.

OTOH it was Gordon Brown who helped to fuel the massive rise in buy to let in the first place, by retaining mortgage interest relief for landlords, while scrapping it for owner occupiers.

When was that ever fair?
And who ever thought it a good idea that so many millions in housing benefit should go into landlords’ bank accounts, rather than maintaining existing social housing, or providing more?

God knows I’m no fan of the Tories or George Osborne, but at least he did eventually reverse that rule.

I dare say that Labour thought that a huge rise in the availability of private rentals, would absolve them from having to do much about the provision of social housing. And like just about everybody else, they did not foresee how property prices (and subsequently rents) were going to soar far further into the stratosphere.

Many of our former mills have been converted into high quality apartments. They’re the mills that were built away from the poverty and squalor that still exists closer to our town centre. These apartments are in ‘desirable’ areas. Their cost reflects that.
Our council, like many others, can no longer fulfill its statutory responsibilities.

MerylStreep some charities have been very active in providing housing over the years for example, The Peabody Trust and Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Maybe a joint effort between local authorities and housing associations/charities is a good way to increase housing supply?
There are about a quarter of a million empty homes in the Uk and that’s interesting too. More work to be done to increase supply on a number of fronts.

One of my daughters just returned from one of her shows in London and she commented on how very unequal things had become . The previous time she was there, just before Covid, it wasn’t so noticeable. Hopefully this isn’t right and she was judging by a small number of people she met. I have doubts,though, from what people here are saying.

Curtaintwitcher

This is the reason why there used to be workhouses. The idea may horrify decent people, but at least the destitute had a roof over their heads. There are plenty of empty warehouses and disused mills in the country. I'm surprised that local authorities haven't already brought them into use to provide temporary homes for those who need them.

How would you suggest the local councils buy these ex mills and warehouses taking into account that a lot of them are on the brink of bankruptcy?
Not so simple is it?

It’s too simplistic to say that poor people shouldn’t try to live in expensive areas - surely these areas need people to work in shops, restaurants, hospitals, care homes etc, so it’s where the work is. Affordable decent housing for such people is not beyond the wit of man to provide, as it was in the past? Trouble is weve gone down the greedy capitalist route. This country is the most unequal in Europe and has some of the highest levels of deprivation. So we’re world beating at something.

MaizieD

^I guess saying that taxation doesn’t fund spending is only relevant when you’re saying it?^

WRT 'relevance' I was referring to the money the Treasury is getting from the property sales to non residents foreigners.

As taxation doesn't fund spending the government could indeed invest in doing something about homelessness, but that's a different discussion, isn't it?

Why? Seems completely in keeping with the OP to me. Spot on GSM.

HousePlantQueen

Curtaintwitcher

This is the reason why there used to be workhouses. The idea may horrify decent people, but at least the destitute had a roof over their heads. There are plenty of empty warehouses and disused mills in the country. I'm surprised that local authorities haven't already brought them into use to provide temporary homes for those who need them.

I do hope this is a joke?

I don’t believe it’s a joke.

We researched our family history back to 1640 on dad’s side. The mid 19th century saw children going into the workhouse for brief periods. It became clear, these were periods of little work for agricultural workers. The conclusion was the children were briefly in the workhouse when no work meant their parents couldn’t feed them.
Things improved when family members moved to the north west to support the Industrial Revolution. 12 hour shifts in the dark satanic mills, including for 7 and 8 year olds. Life expectancy of labourers differs in different papers but the ages in Liverpool 31, in Manchester 32 are often quoted.

So yes let’s go back in time

HousePlantQueen

I read the article and agree that it is an extreme case, but sadly not unusual. The causes are many but the one that caught my attention was landlords renting to single people instead of families. It is not unusual to pay £900 pm for a room in a shared 3 bed house, considerably better return for a landlord than a family. I don't know what the answer is, but I applaud the school for the efforts they make to keep their pupils in school. If the parents had a regular home within walking distance of school, perhaps they would then be able to work more hours GSM? Moving from hostel to hostel, travelling over an hour on public transport to collect and drop off children at school isn't compatible with even a school hours job, let alone moving away from your support/child care network.

The only solution is council housing with controlled rents. It's much healthier for any community to be mixed with a variety of jobs for different skillsets and affordable accommodation for those who will never be high earners. The "market" will never be able to fulfil that need without state intervention.

Thanks for replying ronib.