EVIE's STORY

Fizzing sounds of sparklers and starbursts of gold danced across the screen of Evie's phone. These special effects embellished a video of her jangling keys outside her new front door. She hadn't known what to expect before moving into the freshly built social housing. It had to be accepted “sight unseen”. But she’d been the lucky one, Evie thought as she stood there. Her friends couldn't say the same. With no alternatives offered, they had been forced to take social housing tenancies in areas they didn't know, and in properties full of mould, cracks and vermin. Some had gardens, but these were more like swamps than safe places for their children to play.

After proudly messaging the video to friends and family, Evie slid the phone into her pocket and took a moment to take in the surrealness of her hopes met. A place for her family to root, to grow, to rebuild after years of exhaustion – wedged into cramped hotel rooms and temporary flats with three children and all their belongings.

Evie turned the key in the lock and opened the door for the first time. She took off her shoes and stepped in. An icy coldness greeted her feet. The house had no flooring. In that moment, Evie had a flashback to a former tenancy with only stone-cold concrete. Her youngest son Josh smiling and running towards her. The fall on the hard stone floor. The broken tooth, the inconsolable cries she tried to comfort. Perhaps this new house was not the promised-for end of her journey through poverty, debt and mothering on the edge.

The Debt Trap

I am here today to tell you about my lived experience of homelessness and debt.

A Bit of Background

I was working in the primary school my children attended. My son was around six years old and in Year 1. My daughter was around five years old and in reception class.

Domestic Violence

In 2009 I left the marital home with my two children as I feared for our safety. The key workers at the refuge insisted on using the term Domestic Violence – two words I would soon come to realize encapsulated the life I had been living. We arrived at the refuge with just one suitcase and remained there for 18 months waiting to be housed and trying to rebuild our lives.

School

Initially, when we moved to the refuge, I left my job and enrolled the children into a primary school closer to where we were staying, but we were all very unhappy. With the help and support of our previous headteacher, I returned to my job (part-time) and took the children back to the one place that would be familiar and stable for them.

Homeless and in Debt

Shock #1

The tenancy was in his name only.

He had previously convinced me that only one signature was required for a married couple on a Tenancy. I had been deceived.

Shock #2

I now had a £13,000 debt solely in my name.

During our marriage I had been coerced into taking out various bank loans (as he was not eligible) to cover shortfalls in rent, bills and daily living costs. He continuously promised he would pay it off when he found a job – he never worked!

The human costs of living in temporary accommodation are the focus of this chapter. Families are caught and imprisoned in a limbo that is fundamentally antithetical to their happiness, health and life chances. As London councils recognize, having “secure and stable housing is fundamental for accessing opportunity and maintaining wellbeing”, yet the reality of what is transpiring deviates so far from this ideal that it constitutes a “national emergency”. In 2023 a collaboration was born from this emergency, between the housing charity Shelter and IKEA UK. The organizations teamed up to design a “Real Life Roomset”, to be displayed in IKEA stores. Hiliary Jenkins, sustainability business partner at IKEA and Ireland, explained to us why they chose to recreate temporary accommodation in four of their English stores:

The roomsets bring family homelessness “out of the closet”, aiming to offer customers a disturbing visualization of this emergency. They are part of Shelter and IKEA UK's collective call for the government to build more social homes. We visited the Swedish brand's inner-city Hammersmith store in London to take a closer look.

Lucky … ?

Knocking on the door of a terraced house on the edge of a Manchester suburb, we were greeted by Alyssa, a participant who you are yet to meet. Her youngest child perched on her hip, Alyssa smiled, invited us in and ushered us to sit down. As we crammed onto the single small sofa in the living room, we were struck by the lack of furniture. The house looked like it had only recently been moved in to, despite the fact that Alyssa and her family had been living there for almost a year. When we asked what the house had been like when she first moved in, Alyssa recalled that it had been totally bare, no furniture, no white goods, not even flooring. Nervous about taking on new debts, Alyssa has been slowly furnishing the house as best she can with her limited funds, prioritizing the flooring and her children's beds. There's no room in her budget for an extra sofa, despite being a household of five – they have to pile on together, or take turns sitting on the floor. Alyssa shrugs: she's been through worse.

Originally from Mozambique, Alyssa and her family moved to Portugal when she was in her early twenties, although her mother and some of her siblings moved to Manchester shortly afterwards in the hopes of finding better work opportunities. After nearly a decade apart, and by this point with two children of her own, Alyssa decided to move to Manchester to be closer to her family.

Irhaa picked up the Pritt stick and applied some glue to the back of the paper cut-out. Turning it over and pressing it firmly against the rolled-out collage paper, she looked back from the sheet. Affixed to the timeline of her life was now an image of a glass milk bottle and cup filled with black milk. “He was just one of those people, if he said, ‘the milk's black’ and you’d be like ‘are you daft? It's white’, he would start an argument.” Irhaa was talking about Auraq, her husband and father to their four boys. His emotional manipulation and distortion of reality – gaslighting – had lasted 13 years. We first met Irhaa in May 2022 at a baby bank that also provides holistic care for families who are homeless or at risk of homelessness in Greater Manchester.1 We sat together in an office there, a small room with bright blue walls and a frosted window. On the sill sat a tissue box adorned with the affirmative mantra “Thrive”.

Standing up from our swivel chairs, Irhaa traced her biography on the “journey map” we were creating. This was a visual representation of her journey through and beyond the times of abuse perpetrated by both Auraq and his mother.2 The collage paper held down with a potted cactus on one edge and a stapler on the other, Irhaa wrote on each of the glued-down houses – each representing a house she had lived in – what it was like, the dates she lived there and the financial circumstances she faced in each.

EVIE's STORY, REIMAGINED

Fizzing sounds of sparklers and starbursts of gold danced out of Evie's phone. These special effects adorned a video of Evie jangling keys outside her new front door, to be sent to friends and family. Her mind wandered back to when she first got the call inviting her to come and view the freshly built social housing. That first visit, the friendly housing officer meeting her at the front door, showing her around her potential new home, asking her whether she was happy with the house. Evie and her three children had been living in temporary accommodation for several months by that point. The accommodation she’d been provided was comfortable enough, and she’d received help and support from her local authority throughout this period of homelessness, but living in uncertainty had been hard on them all.

She put the key into the lock, turned it and stepped into her new home. She smiled. It was as wonderful as she’d remembered. She took off her shoes, enjoying the feel of new carpet under her feet. She took a look around, noting the furniture and white goods that the local council had provided her with. Everything was second hand, a little tired, but it was a great starting point, giving her the breathing room to save for new furniture over time, once she was fully back on her feet. And Evie had been able to bring with her the small numbers of possessions she did have as the costs of moving these had been funded by the local council. The walls were all painted in a colour she loved, one she chose to calm the nervous system with the help of a free, trauma-informed designer for women and children who had experienced domestic abuse.

We find it very difficult institutionally [as housing professionals] to step back, and say, well actually, is there something more complex behind this [homelessness]. We have reporting systems that say tick box A or tick box B. It is the same with rent arrears, so as soon as someone is in significant rent arrears, they are on a little pathway that ends with one of those letters with red writing on (that people put in the bin), that actually says, you know, you are going to go to court.

You [as a housing professional] are already on a way of thinking, whereas we know from the report that the CIH Cymru did ten years ago, that said domestic abuse, is one of the leading drivers of rent arrears. So, it is standing back and using professional judgement, looking at relationships and households in the round, and STOP expecting victims to be as pure as the driven snow, because if I was experiencing things that people are experiencing on a day-to-day basis, I do not think it would bring the best out in me. So why do we assume that of everybody else? …

I think that one of the things that dawned on me gradually, was, not just the fact that housing is where most domestic abuse takes place, and it can be a solution [for a domestic abuse survivor to move], but also how it can be a cause. And I think the housing shortage has contributed to living arrangements … meeting someone and moving in with them three months later, you will both save something on the rent as you only have one rent to pay … and then suddenly it all goes a bit wrong, the relationship needs to finish at that point, but housing keeps you together … there aren't enough places for people to live.

Homeless after her relationship broke down, Sam and her three young children were placed in a hostel room like this. Concerned about her safety, she moved out, sleeping in a car for seven weeks while her children stayed with a friend.

Finally, she was given new accommodation which was no better than the first. There was black mould everywhere and a lingering smell of cannabis. There was a hole in the door where the letterbox should have been, and on two occasions, she was assaulted while living there. Worst of all, Sam was separated from her three children yet again because her temporary accommodation was an hour and 40 minutes away from their school. The constant upheavals and separation tested the resilience of the family.

Thousands of families are stuck in places like this because they have nowhere else to go. IKEA have joined forces with Shelter to highlight this issue and call on the government to build 90,000 new social homes a year. By 2030, our aim is to ensure that half-a-million people have access to a better life at home.

Arriving at Orla's temporary accommodation and waiting for her to answer the door, we noticed a letterbox mounted on the wall, stuffed with what looked like bills peeking out, as if trying to make themselves known. After a short while, a tired-looking woman in her mid-twenties opened the door. Orla offered to give us the “grand tour”, as she called it, but seeing as there were just three rooms, this didn't take long. A kitchen barely big enough to stand, let alone cook in, a tiny windowless bathroom and a room that acts as a combined living and bedroom where Orla and her baby daughter have been living for over a year. As Orla's daughter is under one year old, she does not technically “count” as a person according to the council's housing policy, meaning she is not accounted for in overcrowding policy or statistics. Orla has done her best to make the living-bedroom functional and pleasant for her and her daughter – in the corner, a travel cot doubles up as a colourful ball pit, and every day Orla blows up an air bed to sleep on, “I put it down, and then tonight I’m going to blow it back up again!” Every inch of the room is made use of, with IKEA storage units she bought tucked behind the door to try and create more room for her daughter to play. But no amount of organization can hide the limited space and poor quality of the accommodation.

Before Orla's daughter was born, she had been living in a rundown private rented property, piecing together her rent through a range of zero-hour contract jobs.

To be honest with you it [living in temporary accommodation] was quite traumatizing, especially after coming out of 15 years of abuse with my husband. I had three disabled children. And I was put into a B&B, which was full of men. There was no cooking facilities. There was the tiniest sink, so anything we could wash up, you had to wash up in the shower where we washed. We was all literally in one room.

I had a teenage girl and two young boys, and the boys had got severe autism so that in itself was very traumatizing. I just felt like I was slightly out of area, no support at all, isolated, trying to manage changing over bills and things like that when you’ve been uprooted. The whole situation was just very overwhelming and just traumatizing in all honesty. And there wasn't suitable accommodation for the children even if they didn't have special needs for such a long period of time. It just made everything a challenge.

I was constantly being retraumatized time and time again. There was no consistency, it was hard to manage routine, with no cooking and washing facilities, having to keep the kids out and active and entertained, then taking them home and trying to do bedtime routine. There's no way for them to play. It affected my mental health and well-being massively and it did traumatize the kids even more so after they’d been through such a traumatic time in their lives. I just felt really alone and really like no one was helping me like and I know obviously I’m really grateful that I managed to get a roof over my head, you know I don't want to say I’m not grateful because I am, it's just it was a very difficult time in my life….