8th All-Party Parliamentary Group for Households in Temporary Accommodation meeting.
Date: 25/02/2025
Time: 16.00-17.00
Location: Room W3, Westminster Hall
Joint Secretariats: Shared Health Foundation (SHF) and Justlife (JL)
Attendees in person:
Dame Siobhain McDonagh MP (Mitchem & Morden, Labour), Sam Pratt (SHF), Mike Reader MP (Northampton South, Labour), Helena Dollimore MP (Hastings and Rye, Labour), Theo Shaw (staffer to Mike Reader MP), Rhydian Crabb (staffer to Siobhain McDonagh MP), Eliza Castell (staffer to Danny Beales MP), Emily Jones (MHCLG), Andrew Achilleos (staffer to Margaret Mullane MP), Rebecca Dove (Headteacher), Dr Aaminah Verity (GP and Health Inclusion Campaigner), Erica Scott (Citizens UK), Emily Barker (4 in 10), Iva Pehlivanova (SHF), Isabel Kaner (SHF), Morgan Tebbs (Justlife).
Number of attendees online: 34
Panellists:
Theo Shaw, Staffer for Mike Reader MP and lived experience
Dr Aaminah Verity, GP and Health Campaigner
Rebecca Dove, Headteacher
Sam Pratt, Policy and Communications Lead, Shared Health Foundation
Agenda:
4pm. Introductions from Siobhain McDonagh MP, Chair (5mins)
Opening video – SAFE Campaign
4:05pm – In conversation with Theo Shaw (10 mins)
Theo has lived experience of living in Temporary Accommodation and now works for an MP in Parliament.
4:15pm Dr Aaminah Verity. GP and health inclusion campaigner (5 mins)
4:20pm Rebecca Dove. Headteacher (5 mins)
4:25 Update on the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill (5 mins)
Video of Minister for Homelessness
4:30pm Comments and questions from MPs and Zoom (25 mins)
4:55pm Final words and actions from Chair (5 mins)
Meeting
Siobhain McDonagh MP, Chair of the APPG:
Welcomes and introduces the campaign video
Sam Pratt:
To Theo – Can you tell me about your time in temporary accommodation as a child?
Theo Shaw:
I have been in temporary accommodation twice in my life – I was born in TA and lived in a mother and baby unit that was run by the local authority until I was 3, my mum was a teenager and care leaver herself so ended up in that window post-16 where she fell through accommodation gaps and ended up homeless and so that’s where I spent the first few years.
When I was 16 I ended up in TA again and lived in two different facilities before I was 18, before moving to University. I moved local authority areas in that time, from the London borough of Havering up to Bolton in Greater Manchester. The first place I stayed at was a hostel. It had a bed, 7pm to 7am, with the expectation that for the rest of the day, you were at work or college. I then moved to a building run by a charity where you had your own flat, with other residents that were also homeless. It was funded through housing benefit that went straight to the charity. We had what was back then income support but became universal credit. You had to pay service charge and your bills out of that money and so there wasn’t really very much left over at the end of it.
I was there for two years prior to me leaving for University. I think it is a brilliant charity and I am still in contact with them and do some work with them. I had a really positive experience with the housing side of it, but as the video shows, it’s the other parts of the experience that are difficult, such as accommodating college and letting services know.
Something from that video I hadn’t thought about, when the little girl is falling asleep in class, just how noisy where I lived was. You’re living in a block of flats with 40 other people in the same position as you, and they’ve all got their own different issues so it was impossible to sleep. I remember being tired all the time while I was at college.
Sam:
It sounds like there was a lot going on, with lots of moves and support services might not have been aware of what was going on. How do you think your college, GP or other support services would have responded if they knew your situation?
Theo:
My circumstances were slightly different in that I was street homeless for a couple of weeks and the way that I got help was by telling my college myself because I didn’t know anybody where I was living anymore, the family placement I had, had fallen through. I was stuck not knowing who to contact. So my friends had noticed me being more tired and dishevelled and I was too embarrassed to say anything, but they encouraged me to talk to the safeguarding team at college and I informed them myself. They are the ones that helped me get the placement through the local authority with the charity. The college was helpful once they were aware but there was no way for them to know that and the GP surgery, I actually got off-rolled when I eventually changed my address. I got a letter saying I was no longer in their area so I needed to change GPs. That was the only contact I had from the GP during that time. It was a case of, if I had not reached out to contact them and inform them they wouldn’t know. It is different at the age of 16 compared to 7 to have the foresight to do that, but the services wouldn’t have been aware at all had I not informed them.
I had been under CAMHS for years at that point, they were not aware that I was homeless and that I had been moved out of borough. There was no communication between the services I had been working with. I had a post-adoption support worker, they were not aware I had been made homeless until the college told them. There was no network of support and no continuity of information between these services.
This is less of a personal perspective, when I was at university I worked as a support worker for young people. A good proportion, probably about 80% of my time as a support worker, was informing these services of the changes in circumstance of the young people and keeping them informed. There is no requirement to do that, but it made it impossible to get the kids the help they needed without doing so. We often found barriers when it came to the local authority, some are different and better than others, but at least in Lincolnshire, we were getting nothing. The council were not taking proactive steps to ensure that information was being shared. It wasn’t possible to get the right support for them without it.
My personal circumstances make it a bit different, my age definitely helped as I was able to tell them myself. But for the younger children, if they didn’t have anyone to advocate for them the information would not get passed on and it was really affecting them at school.
Sam:
Where are you now? Where are you working?
Theo:
I work for Mike Reader MP. I was Mike’s organiser during the general election campaign. I worked for the Labour Party for a year and a half prior to the election and I’m his parliamentary lead now.
It’s not a situation I expected to be in, I wasn’t sure that I was going to finish my A Levels as they are not really at the top of your mind when you are homeless. I was really lucky that the charity I got placed with and the accommodation I was placed in, as they gave me a support worker who I am still in touch with. He had gone to university and knew that I was quite academic, so pushed me a lot, but also helped me access support services, helped me fill out my Uni application, declare estrangement and put me forward for bursaries. Without me being very lucky in that housing provider, I probably wouldn’t have graduated and definitely would not have ended up working for the Labour Party as a result. I had a very rare positive experience with my TA because I’ve heard horror stories from my friends who never got adopted and grew up completely in foster care and then got passed between TA and moved around a lot as children. They didn’t have the same experience and have not ended up in the same place. If there is anything that can be done, like this campaign, that can mitigate the risk and lack of control to make sure that relevant services are informed and families are supported through that experience, the better. You have much more of a chance of getting outcomes like mine.
Sam:
Reads out written testimony.
Rose is a parliamentary staffer to an MP also. It would be interesting to know how many other people work in this place that have similar stories as well. Rose has written this but she could not make it today.
“When I was studying for my A Levels, my family were evicted from my childhood home that I had lived in my whole life. I was away for the entrance interview for Cambridge and had left thinking I would be away for a few days and return to the place I called home.
My family were placed in TA 2 and a half hours away from home and my school. As I was close to sitting my exams I had no choice but to carry on trying to attend my school. I confided in a teacher who tried their best to find somewhere for me to stay locally but it didn’t work out, meaning I had a long commute every day and had to find somewhere to sleep in between lessons.
Before we were evicted, I had been receiving support from my GP with my panic attacks and had confided in them about what was going on in my personal life. But looking back, at no point was this information communicated with my school. So it ended up just being me receiving the bits of support in silo.
I had no desk to study so I would do my work on the floor. When the pandemic hit I was left trying to cope in TA that was very poor and dangerous. I think that joined-up support would have been able to help identify that I wasn’t living in appropriate living conditions whilst trying to stay in school for the time during lockdown.
I am fortunate enough that I have been to uni and work here in Parliament. I am trying to use my voice as much as possible to help people experiencing this now, this is one of the reasons that I am standing for councillor in the upcoming local elections so that I can push for more support for those living in TA and can help implement the SAFE in my local area.”
What you were describing really resonates with Rose’s story, it’s you as the young person having to advocate for yourself and through your experiences so far, it must have been very difficult having to go to the school and the GP to tell them your situation. We want to remove that awkwardness and potential shame, and the barriers that young people, families and children have when placed in TA as it can be the most complex and chaotic period of your life and we want to make sure it is as healthy as possible. What did you notice about Rose’s story that resonates with yours?
Theo:
Not having a desk and nowhere to study. I was talking to Mike about when I was staying at the hostel and had nowhere to do my work, so I would sit at the bus stop near the accommodation to do my homework. The accommodation didn’t have WiFi, they would suggest you get a phone SIM with unlimited data for £20 a month, but I didn’t have the money. Finding time to do homework and trying to stay in college as late as possible to use their wifi, you don’t think about impacting your schooling.
When you experience something like that, it can really either destroy you as a person because it is really, really hard, or you can come out of it wanting to change things. It definitely contributed to me wanting to be a support worker myself. My support worker had a huge impact on my life, so if I can do that for someone else as Rose is with her role in Parliament. I remember being absolutely shocked that informing all these services isn’t something that happens already. There are so many things in our scenarios, lots of other people I know from TA, their lives would have been so much easier if they had not had to jump between services, advocating for themselves and if it was something that could have been done uniformly for services it would have been much better.
Siobhain:
Introduces Dr Aaminah Verity, GP and Health Inclusion Campaigner.
Dr Aaminah Verity:
I am a GP, I work in Lewisham, and I work in a mainstream GP practice that is in an area of high deprivation with a high proportion of people experiencing homelessness. I am currently running a programme leading GPs as health equity fellows for their primary care networks and we support them to partner with local community organisations that can design interventions to address health inequalities.
Through my work in my own clinic room and networking with health equity fellows, we quickly identified that if we were talking about health inequalities, poor quality housing is one of the main drivers and really significant drivers of health inequalities in Lewisham.
We partnered with Citizens UK to start supporting our residents and navigating the health and housing crisis. So many patients tell us that they are at risk of becoming homeless, they say they are in debt, in food or fuel poverty due to unaffordable housing. We are never directly informed when they then become homeless and move into TA. We do see the impacts of our patients suffering due to the uncertainty and disruption to their appointments from being moved around. They miss hospital appointments, medication supply is interrupted, they don’t attend screenings and face long commutes to see their registered GPs. Along with the psychological burden of being in TA, which is a lot of the time completely substandard.
We see asthma cases that cannot be controlled because symptoms are constantly being triggered by environmental exposures mould and damp, leading to life-threatening emergencies and recurrent consultations as well as A&E attendance.
We see skin conditions, accidental injuries, particularly common in children from overcrowding in unsuitable accommodation. There is a really severe burden of the impact of the mental health crisis being in overcrowded environments, lack of temperature control and damp/mould. The stress can really impact chronic health conditions that worsen as families are moved around, navigating their homelessness.
Most practices have a separate team of staff that deals with registrations and deregistrations. When a family moves out of catchment and tries to make an appointment, the team flags the administrator and sends a letter to suggest moving to a new GP or being out of catchment area and often does not come to inform the GP. Often it is in the patient’s best interest to be registered closer to their address as registering and access is not easy away from their address. But if the patient is not able to advocate for themselves then there is no way of knowing that moving away was not their choice and can leave them without healthcare. If we are made aware that they are vulnerable then we can support them in many ways. We can make sure they have flexible appointment times. They can be linked with care coordinators who could support them with navigating referrals now they are out of area. We can open up discussions about what is the best way to support them now they are outside of the area and is it better for them to register locally or can we help support them here. We can make sure they have access to regular medications and reviews. We can also provide proactive referrals to allied professionals called social prescribers who can identify other support services to help families stay well.
The most important is that we can make sure they are triaged appropriately and prioritised for appointments, and be on alert for safeguarding concerns. We can make sure every contact counts. We do this in Lewisham and lots of other practices are doing but this requires capacity and resources that overstretched general practice doesn’t really have. Working with Citizens has started constructive work with the council and ICS, with headteacher colleagues so we can better support families experiencing homelessness. We have identified some of the key needs and one of these is having access to transparent and more equitable ways of escalating those who have increasing needs and those who are in immediate stress.
Working collectively has ensured we can advocate for whole system change. The level of need in Lewisham is really staggering, but we are edging towards a system that has a consistent message and offer of support that is more equitable. I believe in proportionate universalism, in general practice, we need to have more resources so we can make the extra allowances for those that are most in need and are vulnerable to achieve the same health outcomes as those who are not vulnerable. There is a lack of consensus on the cohorts that we need to prioritise and funding to match the need and the proactive identification of at-risk groups such as this campaign is really vital so we can shift the dial on health inequalities. We must go further and link this to increased resourcing for areas of deprivation where significant amounts of funding are spent supporting families through issues such as homelessness.
Siobhain:
Introduces Rebecca Dove, Headteacher.
Rebecca Dove:
I am a Headteacher at one of the largest primary schools in Lewisham. I am also Chair of all the Lewisham headteachers, in something called the Leadership Forum. All the headteachers were feeling very stressed with the TA situation and for those families. We worked with Citizens UK and we managed to enlist the help of Will Cooper, our local councillor. In doing that, we realised that the GPs were feeling the exact same, so we now have a group where we meet with GPs and headteachers. We work hard together, but there is still such a long way to go. We have worked with Will on getting a directory to help us know who to go to and when. One of the biggest things, for us, when a child becomes homeless, it is very difficult to work out where in the homeless journey they are. We meet so many dead ends in trying to connect them to the right support.
I was trying to get a family help when they became homeless that morning, and I hit 15 dead ends during the day, finally getting them accommodation at 10pm that night. It is knowing how to navigate the systems. This is really complicated. We have worked with Will on the directory and an escalation policy, with a much more direct route of getting to who we need to quickly. It has worked on a couple of occasions.
The WiFi situation is horrendous for our families. As I have left to come here, I have left a parent who is in TA, in my office using the WiFi because she has to fill out her application for benefits. The impact that is having on school and the children’s schooling is huge. There is a huge amount of pressure on attendance, but we have families travelling in from Ilford. I have a dad who brings his child to school every day but it is so far away that he cannot work and cannot get home and back in time for pick-up. He is so desperate not to leave his school place because he feels safe and supported. That is the day-to-day reality of school. Ofsted wants us to get brilliant results and improve attendance, but what is going on on the ground makes it really difficult to do that.
We offer lots of support to our families but we only know if they tell us. Some families are very private and are ashamed. I have a little girl that is only 5 years old, and she is on her 7th place. She doesn’t have books to read, they can’t physically move them between those places. I think, on the ground, the impact of TA on children and their families is colossal. We only hear, by accident, only by us being nosey and being at the gate in the morning, or them being late, or tired or hungry, is how we find out, then we do our level best to support them. It is then how we can best navigate the system as well as educating. It lands to the Head in primary education as there is no one else.
Sam:
Update on the amendment to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill. There is space for an amendment in Clause 4 in relation to information sharing and the single unique identifier.
We have been rallying support from MPs for an amendment, as well as trying to get into the Department for Education to try to get the Minister to table the amendment.
Introduces the video of the Housing Communities and Local Government evidence session with the Minister on the enquiry into Children in Temporary Accommodation.
Siobhain:
We need to write to Rushanara and to the Education Department because departments do not work well together.
Opens the floor to comments and questions.
Mike Reader MP:
Nutrition was a really interesting one for me. People talk about looking for children who are hungry, but Theo, you had the reverse experience?
Theo:
Things to do with environmental issues, I actually gained a huge amount of weight when living in TA because once my service charge and my immediate bills were covered, I had £2 left over at the end of each week. I lived exclusively on food donations that were compiled into the reception of the accommodation. It was things like takeaway foods and tinned foods with low nutritional value but very calorie-dense. You were encouraged to take much more food than you needed because the food would get thrown away if it wasn’t taken. This contributed to my tiredness, it does not help children with their concentration in school as they are not getting the vitamins they need.
Stuff that goes to food banks is prioritised locally to make sure people do get some fruit, however, this is not always possible and a lot of the packages contain unhealthy food.
Rebecca:
There is no fridge to keep fresh produce for families in TA, there is an emergency fund at school that helped to pay for a fridge for a family to buy fresh produce.
Theo:
Because I was on the payment meter, when it came to my electrics, I would often choose when to turn the fridge off, as that was the most expensive appliance, and also not to use the oven because you couldn’t really afford to. I had to make sure that everything was turned off as much as possible, so you’re not really cooking but living on things out of a packet that don’t need to be cooked. There was a charity that was run by a local Mosque that would bring around food once a week that was nutritional, but it was not sustainable. There were 60 young people living in this building living on takeaway food. It is not helpful for concentration at college.
Fiona McLeod (online):
Outlined her and her son’s negative experience of trying to get help from school and mental health services while in TA. Her son’s education and mental health were severely impacted and he was only listened to when he reached crisis point. She asked what the response should be once services are notified. Is there going to be the backing of funding to support the services that we will notify to increase the capacity and resources for them? Does there need to be more training on the impacts of TA? In her borough, you are looking at 15 years in TA, if you’re lucky. What about those children that are spending their entire primary education in a hostel or B&B? Is there funding from the Government, not local councils, so that it isn’t this postcode competition as to where you get support and how long you spend in TA due to housing stocks in different areas?
Siobhain:
We know that the campaigns we create are not the complete solutions to problems, but they are things we think we can achieve to make things better.
One of the reasons that families are reluctant to inform services is because they are worried those services will be taken away. In some cases, they are not always wrong in assuming this. I am constantly fighting for support from service providers to stop this.
Jane Cook (online):
Today, it has been 25 years since Victoria Climbie died and 3 years after Victoria’s death, Lord Laeing launched the review with 108 recommendations and one of them was the notification system. I am thrilled to see this campaign is still ongoing. We had the NOTIFY system in London but this took several years for several of the councils to sign up to it and now it doesn’t function. I know from my health visitor colleagues, they often find families just by chance. Maybe going into a hotel, suddenly a family appears at a clinic, and that is the first they know about a family in their catchment area. It is a huge safeguarding issue, as well as health.
When I talk about family hubs, we need a Magpie Project in every ICB. The Government is talking about family hubs pilots, and that is just a recreation of Sure Start.
Sustainable funding for all of this is needed, Lisa Gavern in Surrey with a multidisciplinary team so that we are not only notifying but ensuring that they are being practically responded to. Campaigns about access to kitchens so it is the whole package that needs to come together. The standards of accommodation or people being in a hotel room for over a year, as well as constant moves. It is time for change so I am excited to see this campaign being launched.
Siobhain:
My friend and health visitor in my constituency relies on watching delivery men around hostels and hotels to see if a family has moved in to be able to find the children.
Helena Dollimore MP:
I represent Hastings and Rye, we have the highest number of children who live in TA in the South East anywhere outside of London. This is an issue we have been very aware of for some time, but when Shelter was able to put those figures together of that stat, 1 in 27 children in Hastings living in TA, it’s really helped us push the issue onto the agenda. I would really urge colleagues to think about, we all know the issues of TA, how can we as much as possible put this out into the public domain? The recent media coverage you had was really powerful and a step in the right direction, we need to think about how to do that more.
I have a lot of people who are moved into TA in Hastings from somewhere else. I wondered if we have any statistics on numbers of children moved to areas from elsewhere, am I able to ask for this as the MP?
Also, the stories of children in TA are very powerful, when we all as MPs deal with different decisions that come before planning committees and projects for building new homes when there is a good case for them to be put through, I often think that if every planning committee had been sent a letter by a child living in TA, they might think differently.
Siobhain:
We should know how many children have been moved to the area, as councils should be notifying the receiving council when they place anyone there as it is a requirement of the Code of Guidance. The questions are are the councils doing it and are the housing department in the council in Hastings seeing them?
Sam:
There is no way to code for TA in the NHS so we have no data on accidents or illnesses. Go and ask your ICB how many kids in TA attended your local A&E this year, they won’t have that data because we don’t write it down. Same for education also. The more data we have, the more work we can do.
Aaminah:
One of the things about asking what’s next, is how can we link this up with other Government strategies? Such as with the NHS 10-year forward plan and the prevention, community-based care and if we make TA and homelessness a priority of who are the people who health and housing and education need to be supporting, there is a real impact on having the cross-departmental and how do we support the different services? In our local ICS, we are trying to push for a population health management system to identify the most vulnerable cohorts. This includes data sharing between local councils, health and education. We need to think of this as a ‘no wrong front door’, if someone comes to a service asking for help then they need to be identified as vulnerable and provided with wrap-around support. What are the other APPGs that you could be synergising with?
Siobhain:
Perhaps, we should contact the relevant health ministers to invite them to a meeting?
Sam:
We have invited them, and have had no response.
A question from the room:
As a retired GP, working in Lewisham, is any research being done in this area? It does seem so incredibly key that we don’t know where the children are coming from and how long they are staying. Which boroughs are sending them? Are people being notified? That wouldn’t be that difficult to do.
Sam:
The most recent research is, Inside Housing did a load of FOIs around how many children by age group and where they were placed last year, but that was FOI requests rather than a full research project or being able to have the data to pull and analyse the data. In answer to your question, no.
Siobhain:
The exponential rise of TA usage in London has meant that more and more people are talking about it and trying to get somewhere, so in my own council, which is Merton, I got all the departments together to say ‘What are we going to do and how are we going to ensure that a child dependent on special needs transport who gets moved out of the borough doesn’t lose it straight away?’. I’ve been in contact with local government bodies to try and talk about it but people are very protective and don’t necessarily want to tell others what they are doing because they are just trying to get by. But there is greater pressure to be much more transparent about the figures.
Dilraj Kaur (online):
Similar to GPs in Peterborough Citizens UK, we have been attempting to work with local councils to inform schools which children are homeless and placing a box on the form for councils to inform schools. Unfortunately, it is not mandated so this has proven difficult. We have had students given detention for coming into school with incorrect uniform as they are in TA and have no access to washing machines, only to find out they are homeless and have no access to free school meals.
Locally we ran a campaign with headteachers in Peterborough for a notification system and we won 3 years ago with the local council. It was hard as there were issues with GDPR. Unfortunately, they put this on another form and only 3.6% of schools were informed about children declared as homeless. How can we learn from this situation?
In addition, can we ensure children automatically have free school meals when and if the notification is approved?
Rebecca:
Lewisham has been trialling a campaign for free school meals for notifying sources. Parents do not have to apply anymore for free school meals, it’s an opt-out system, meaning the level of children eligible has increased. We had a 15% rise in the amount of children eligible. There are systems there that can work if something similar could be done for housing.
Siobhain:
Final remarks and thanks.
Meeting concluded at 5pm.