Homeless with 2 young kids

Hi,

I need some advice on how to go about my situation. I would really appreciate if someone could share their advice and knowledge with me.

I’m a single mum of 2 girls (one is 2 years and the other is 4months). For the past 20 years I’ve been living at my family home with parents, brother and sister. It’s a 3 bedroom Housing association flat and my parents are tenants.

As the years have passed by we have outgrown the house especially me with my two daughters. In total we are 8people, it’s become really tight.

I have contacted many agencies as I wanted to rent privately but I’ve been rejected many times as their clients don’t want someone who’s currently on benefits. I can’t start working just yet as my youngest daughter is only 4months.

Living with my parents has become extremely difficult and over crowded so I received an eviction note from my father which lead me to informing my local authority that I’m in threat of becoming homeless. On the eviction note I had 2 months time and was originally meant to leave by 25.07.2019 but my case worker called my dad and asked if my stay can be increased to 31.072019 - my dad agreed to extending my stay. My case worker said this should give me time to find somewhere private (even though I’ve been searching a lot beforehand) and it should give him time to find me a 2bedroom flat or in worst case scenario I would go into emergency shared accommodation.

So today the 31st I went to my local authority and they found me a shared accommodation local. When I arrived their it wasn’t what I was expecting, it was really run down and their were two sets of steep stairs. The kitchen was on ground floor and my room was on the first floor. My local authority said they don’t take it into consideration that I’m with two kids about the kitchen being downstairs. When I arrived their, their was two doors. The main door and the second door were both unlocked and fully open. The house was located on a main road with lots of passers by. The caretaker arrived to give me my rooms keys and I told him both front doors were opened and explained my concerns as I have two young children and find that unsafe. He told me that he has an idea of who leaves the door opened and has warned her many times about not leaving the door opened but she ignores it and says she doesn’t do it. So I disagreed about staying there as I really did feel unsafe especially that it’s happened on many occasions and no changes were made.

My local authority said if I turn down their emergency homes they won’t help me. I feel like they haven’t taken my circumstances into consideration. I haven’t been picky but that was completely wrong - as a parent I couldn’t stay there , even the caretaker agreed and said I should go to my council again.

What rights do I have and can I take any legal acts on this?

I would really appreciate your help, this has been very stressful for me.

Many thanks

Hi Sara … welcome to an extremely quiet forum as I type.

Your posting screams one word … SHELTER … the experts on housing in the UK.

Contact details :

https://www.shelter.org.uk/

( Difficult to see from your postings what rights you would have had as you were not the tenant of the HA property ? )

Sadly , they may have been able to assist before the latest turn of events … as soon as you were asked to leave in May
( Exact process not stated , nor legal status of all involved , but … that’s for SHELTER to investigate. )

Now , more a crisis situation ?

Can’t the father help you? Surely he has
interest in his kids wellbeing?

Unfortunatly this is the way the council works, my friend was in no pets, no children housing . She became pregnant and had to move into emergency accommodation-homeless hostel, months later was given a lovely flat so good news from there.

The council have a duty to meet and they have met their duty and if you say NO they will and do say well we offered you and you refused.
Despite the fact it is clearly unsuitable for a single mum and kids.

Shelter or the citizens advice or even an advocate could help argue your case with the council.

If you are male, the council has no duty to rehouse, that sounds very unfair but that was what I was told.

The council do sometimes give you B+B accommodation which may be a bit better if you have a nice friendly B+B owner.

Private we had the same problem unwilling to take people on benefits, the landlords have to wait weeks for the housing benefit and just don’t want to. If the council could fast track payments but they just don’t.

There is such a shortage of suitable housing, around here any plot of land is sold to a big housing group to build whopping big houses half a million plus.
Instead of building hundreds of cheap affordable one bed/2 bed flats or houses which is needed for workers on low wages.

If you could find someone and house share, a good friend/mate thats a possibility.

The only other possability, if you can get a list of housing associations from the council, contact them, look out for them doing new builds and put your name down.

The government is supposed to building thousands of new council houses every year, i think in our town, only 37 or some low figure was quoted.

This isn’t a dig at you Londonbound, but I hate it when someone says The Council in singular, I worked for my local Council for 16 years and witnessed first hand the carefree way the Employees were paid. We have over 400 Councils in the Uk.

I witnessed a chief executive earning £250,000 a year while doing a four day week, taking voluntary redundancy after 18 months service and getting paid nearly half a million. A senior head of service earning £90,000 a year harassing his secretary and getting a large pay off to leave so it wouldn’t go public…

If people could really see how Council tax was spent they would be outraged, Company Cars, Plush Pensions while letting people like Sara rot in squalid accommodation…

I used to deliver leaflets a round of about 500 houses, and the amount someone would say “don’t bother mate no one lived there for years”. Perhaps 30 houses were empty.

I did that round for 8 years and those houses very few anything happened just empty.

Times that all over the country, thousands of empty houses, thousands of homeless people or living substandard accommodation.

But these were nice houses 3 bedroom houses a lot of them, could have moved in the next day.

I think now the government has introduced some sort of scheme if a house is empty after so long you have to rent it or compulsary purchase to counter the housing problem.

I can’t remember but there was an investigative journalist he did a tv programme on this subject.

“The Department for Communities and Local Government say there are over 200,000 empty homes in the UK totalling £43 billion”

But Sara is having problems finding suitable housing, its just not on.