A mum was made homeless with her three children after the landlord kicked them out even though they paid the rent on time.
In a heartbreaking story becoming all too common in the UK today, sisters Nylah, Macie and Bella have been jumping from hotel room to hotel room for months.
Channel 4’s Britain’s Evicted Kids: Dispatches, which airs tonight, followed them over six months as they joined 120,000 children living in temporary accommodation.
In one heartbreaking scene in the documentary, Bella celebrates her birthday in a hotel room without her friends.
‘I’m hoping that my gift is to go to a house,’ she says, ‘and that’s all I want.’
Clarissa, 32, was issued a heart-wrenching eviction notice followed by a Section 21 order to force her to leave her family home in April.
The trainee midwife was left frustrated by the move considering she had made the £600 rent in time and had never fallen into arrears.
But the landlord wanted to sell the two-bedroom property, leaving the family without a roof over their heads as inflation swelled to 9%.
Clarissa lives in Birmingham with her fiancé Theo and daughters Bella, seven, Nylah, three, and Macie, two.
The mother helplessly watched as Bella packed up her dolls and carted them into storage.
The family desperately sought help from their local council — yet strained by high demand and a threadbare budget, officials could only house them in a hotel in Walsall a one-and-a-half bus ride from Bella’s school.
Bella had to move in with her grandmother to make it to her classes, meaning she was split up from her family who now lived outside the borough.
‘I’m finding school difficult,’ Bella said in the documentary.
‘I just think about mummy at the hotel and stuff like that because I think that it’s hard for her being a mum.’
Local authorities are required to find families a home inside the borough where they live, but housing shortages mean this wasn’t the case for some 26,000 households in the first three months of 2022, Dispatches found.
For Bella’s family, the exhaustion is building as they must move hotel rooms every 28 days while the council finds a temporary flat for them.
The weight of her family’s plight is heavy on Bella’s young mind.
‘I don’t want to be a mum. I don’t want to have babies,’ she said.
‘Do you know why? Because it’s going to be hard and I don’t want it to be hard. I’m going to buy a house instead.’
The family are in no way alone. The UK is facing a deepening housing crisis that is forcing renters not only to choose between food and heat but having a home too.
An increasing number of Brits are fighting to have a roof over their head as record-high rents and a social housing crisis close in on them like a vice.
Two-thirds of renters are worried about having enough in their pockets to cover rent at the end of the month, according to survey data from housing charity Shelter, shared with Dispatches.
And they’re taking drastic steps to make sure their landlords don’t kick them out. One in four private renters have cut back on food or skipped meals to make rent.
In the UK, the average person spends around 30% of their paycheque on rent, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
But as wages fall out of step with rising inflation, rent prices are increasing at the fastest rate in five years, adding even more strain to millions of households.
ONS data showed in February that rents rose 2% in 2021, but this already dizzyingly increase will likely worsen as mortgage interest rates now climb with rent hikes expected to follow.
The number of families who are homeless or are at risk of being homeless has shot up by 22% in 12 months, an analysis by Dispatches found.
For the majority of homeless families like Bella’s, worries over money continue to haunt them in short-term housing.
A third of people in temporary accommodation have cut back on heating and electricity, while a third have turned to food banks as they struggle to keep up with rent payments, a survey by Shelter found.
Low-income families on housing welfare have few choices when it comes to finding a place to live.
Just one in 50 properties are affordable, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism found.
In Bella’s neighbourhood, this figure shrinks down to only one in 100. In 19 regions across the UK, no properties would be affordable.
Shelter chief executive Polly Neate said: ‘The cost of living crisis is worsening every day, and the government is catastrophically failing to do anything that will help families keep a roof over their heads.
‘Despite countless promises, the government has yet to ban no fault evictions, which leave people in constant fear of losing their home.’
‘Homeless families trapped in temporary accommodation are switching off the lights and skipping meals to keep paying the rent on grim hostel rooms, that no-one could ever mistake for a “home”,’ she added.
‘Most people don’t realise homeless families have to pay rent, but they do, and it’s going to be an impossibly hard winter for thousands.’
Channel 4’s Britain’s Evicted Kids: Dispatches airs tonight at 7.30pm.
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