This Christmas has been extra special for Emma Hayes and her young family.
“We really went to town on it this year with lots of decorations,” she says. “Knowing we would wake up safely in our own home on Christmas Day.” Last year was a very different story. After battling a 25% rent increase, the family found themselves facing eviction on December 20.
“Five days before Christmas Day, there was a knock at the door,” Emma, 36, from Harlow, remembers. “It was 8am, so my daughter went, thinking it was Nanny.” Her eight-year-old was instead handed a Section 21 ‘no-fault eviction’ notice. “The landlady gave it to her,” says Emma. “She said her son needed the property. I tried to put on a brave face, but I was in shock, heartbroken. I felt like such a bad mum.”
A year on, with the help of Shelter, Emma has found a new place to rent with her partner Josh and two kids. But their story cuts to the heart of what the housing crisis really means – and why solving it is at the top of the Government’s list of problems. It’s not a crisis of bricks and mortar but of homes – safe places where people can put up a Christmas tree or spend time with family.
Housing charity Shelter says that safety will be denied to an estimated 354,000 people this Christmas, including 161,500 children, who will be homeless as the year draws to a close. This year, the number of households with children who were either threatened with homelessness or already homeless increased by 3.9%.
Emma’s family is only just coming to terms with what they’ve been through. “It has been such a stressful time,” Emma says. “I ended up with high blood pressure and had to be induced for my son’s birth. “My daughter was moody and irritable – a different child. She needed drawing therapy to help her deal with the anxiety.”
Meanwhile Aimee, 29, a housekeeper, from Sheldon, Birmingham, spent last Christmas in temporary accommodation in a hotel with her young children after being illegally evicted by her private landlord. “There were old chips and ketchup stuck to the windowsill, mould everywhere, cockroaches and bed bugs,” she remembers. “We all needed treatment for bites. We couldn’t use the shower, fridge or shared kitchen it was all filthy.
“The water from the taps came out black – it wasn’t even safe to brush our teeth. The children were crying, begging to go to my mum’s. I felt like the worst parent for taking them there. My daughter kept trying to run away. The children couldn’t really understand what was happening – we’d had a normal, nice life until now. It didn’t feel real.”
Not only was the hotel unsanitary, it felt unsafe. “I was told it would be just for women, but there were men there too and it felt very unsafe from the start,” Aimee says. “At night there were people going up and down in the corridors.” Even so, Aimee tried to make it feel like Christmas for her girls. I put the tree up, but it just felt like a nasty dream. We stayed at mum’s the night before as we just couldn’t face waking up there on Christmas Day.”
The daily school run meant leaving at 7am to catch two buses, and they made the four-hour round trip to Aimee’s mum’s house to get showers a few times a week. “We had to leave the place between 7am and 8pm every Tuesday so it could be sprayed with insecticide,” she says.
This year, after receiving advice and support from Shelter, Aimee spent Christmas at her new two-bed home close to the kids’ school. “I’ve replaced the bad memories with good ones,” she says. “Even doing the normal things, waking up in our own beds, opening presents, cooking Christmas dinner – it all felt brilliant.
“When you’ve not had the basics, like a safe place to sleep or your own kitchen, you don’t take these things for granted any more. It’s scary how quickly everything changed for us. People have prejudices about who is homeless and why – but it can really happen to anyone.”
Zee’s family were given their eviction notice on December 16 last year. The family doesn’t celebrate Christmas but had been planning a festive break. “It was so scary,” she says. “My son was asking, ‘What will we do, it’s winter? Are we going to have nowhere to live? Are we homeless?’” Zee, 36, works for Shelter, and her young son found themselves evicted from a place barely fit for human habitation. “There was always damp and mould,” says Zee, from East Lancashires.
“My son kept asking me why his room was ‘broken’. I was picking some clothes up from the settee one day when a mouse popped up, then I was seeing them everywhere. There were flies coming out from behind the bricked-up fireplace. When I told the landlord he just joked about it being a dead body which I didn’t find very funny.
“Then we had a problem with a gas leak – it could have killed us. It really affected my son, and my mental health.” This year, Zee has been able to find social housing, and they spent their first Christmas in years in a warm, clean home. It is a home now,” she says. “It was a new property, so everything works, and no-one has lived here before.
“It’s such a good feeling, being able to shut the front door and know it’s ours. When we got the keys, and I gave my son his key, it felt like we’d won the lottery. It’s security and safety, peace of mind and being able to tell your child they’re safe.” These are the lives Labour proposes to change with its pledge to build 1.5 million homes. The Government has set itself a target of 370,000 a year to reach its target – a milestone that hasn’t been hit in a single year for more than half a century.
But after years of neglect, the Government also needs to solve an ‘affordability crisis’. According to Shelter, we need at least 90,000 new social rented homes a year to catch up with rising need and make good the shortfall in housing supply. Millions of children’s Christmases – now and into the future – depend upon it.
You can donate to Shelter here.
