BBCOn the ground floor of the Willow Lodge guesthouse, Habiba and her brother, Hamif, hopped around in the tiny bedroom they share with their mother. They did their best to dodge the stacked suitcases, two beds, a small table and a refrigerator, but they had little room to move.
“We need more space,” says five-year-old Habiba. This small double room with bathroom in east London has been the family’s home for seven months, and Habiba has had enough.
“We need a big space for me and my brother. [to play]and there is no sofa like in the old house [had]”
“Whenever she played with her toys,” said her mother, Jamanu, “she had to put them back if the food was ready because we didn’t have a dining table. We ate on the floor outside the toilet.”
While the room is described as temporary accommodation, the family does not know how long they will live there. The uncertainty means Habiba is still attending the same school, although it is now two buses and an hour’s drive away.
Like many others living in the neighbourhood, the family are victims of a “no-fault” Section 21 eviction, which allows landlords to ask someone to leave at short notice without giving a reason. Charities say the measure is a major cause of homelessness as tenants often find they can no longer afford to rent privately at current market rates.
Despite the previous government’s long-standing promise to ban no-fault evictions, no-fault evictions increased 30% from April to June this year compared to the same period last year.
This week, The new Labour government promised to finally end the practice through a Tenants’ Bill of Rights.
The government said that from next summer, landlords would have to give such households a longer notice period before evicting them and provide a valid reason, such as that they wanted to move in themselves.
But for the London Borough of Redbridge, which is providing support to the Willow Lodge family, the situation is worrying.
The situation is similar in many other local authorities, which spend large chunks of their budgets on providing temporary accommodation.
In the smaller room next door lives Romel Peters and her two sons. They have lived here for 15 months. They too were made homeless after a no-fault eviction. The family wanted to find another apartment but Romel said a private two-bed room would cost £1,600 a month, which she said was too expensive.
The two boys, aged seven and eight, share a double bed, while Romell sleeps in a single bed next to them. “We eat, sleep, play, wash, bathe, brush our teeth, everything in this room,” the 37-year-old said. But maybe not for much longer.
Redbridge Council wanted the family to move to another temporary home, three hours away in West Bromwich, West Midlands. She refused.
“I’m from Redbridge and my family is here,” she explains.
“Everything I’ve ever known, everything my children have ever known, is in Redbridge. If we moved three hours away from here, we would have nothing. We would have no support, no friends, no one to contact regularly.”
The council said her refusal to move meant she had deliberately made herself homeless and therefore it was no longer obliged to help the family. They must leave Willow Lodge within three days.
Redbridge Council told the BBC it was offering her support in finding work and school, in addition to offering her alternative accommodation in the Midlands.
While Willow Lodge is at least closer to Romel’s support network, residents say they have had some issues with the property, including cockroaches in cupboards and, in recent months, infestations of bedbugs and rats.
It was claimed the kitchen had two four-ring stoves, but only one worked, and the microwave door was broken.
Despite the challenges, there are often queues to use the facilities – at least 20 people live in the house, including 12 children. However, they cannot use the kitchen after 10pm, and they say the only washing machine does not work after 5pm.
Residents say landlords get between £400 and £800 a month in rent, depending on the size of the room.
A Redbridge Council spokesman told the BBC the council expects all landlords to provide accommodation of an acceptable standard and in such cases the council will urgently inspect the property and discuss any concerns with the tenants.
It added that it expected landlords to work with the council to carry out any necessary remedial work as a matter of urgency.
The BBC has attempted to contact the landlord for comment through the council but has yet to receive a response.
In addition to rising no-fault eviction rates and rising rents, cost of living pressures and immigration issues are also putting enormous pressure on the temporary accommodation system.
English councils to spend more than £1bn on temporary accommodation in 2023-24an increase of more than 50 percent from the previous year. These costs were caused by a record 117,450 families in short-term housing, including more than 150,000 children.
Redbridge Council said it spent £52m on temporary accommodation last year, a figure they described as “shocking” and “simply unsustainable”.
The council said: “The stark reality is that we can no longer afford to keep people in temporary accommodation due to high prices in London’s private rental market.”
In three days, Romell Peters will be moving out. But first she has to send her sons to school — and she has decided not to tell them, because they may not come back.
“I don’t want to create worry. They’ve just started school so I want them to focus on adapting to their new environment.” However, her own stress level was “huge. I didn’t sleep all night.”
When Romell returned to the guest room, other residents appeared. They were there for different reasons.
A 65-year-old woman said she had lived in Willow Lodge for three years and that the residents of the other two rooms were sent there by the Home Office.
The two families – a Sudanese man with two children and a Pakistani woman with a 10-year-old son – recently had their asylum applications approved and were given the right to continue living in the UK.
Saina, from Islamabad, said she was grateful the country had taken them in. She knew no one in the UK and was willing to move anywhere they could “start a life” as long as her son continued to receive counselling for mental health issues.
A few hours before she was due to leave, Romell Peters received a call from Redbridge Council. They had changed their mind and hoped to help her find a permanent two-bedroom property in the area within days.
“I’m relieved. It’s frustrating that it took so long to get support, but I’m excited for the future,” she said as she picked her sons up from school to tell them the good news.
But a week later, Romell and her sons were homeless, couch-sitting with family members. The council had stopped paying for their stay at Willow Lodge, and their offer of help finding new accommodation had not been acted on. The uncertainty of homelessness continued, and like thousands of other families in England, it all started with a no-fault eviction.
