OPINION EDITOR’S LETTER
I paid careful attention. I wondered when the chancellor in his budget statement would get to issues around a genuine national shame and unveil details on how he would deal with it. But the answer came there none.
Last week, it was revealed that temporary accommodation had contributed to the death of dozens of children in the UK. Between April 2019 and March 2023, 55 children in England died unexpected deaths, with the place where they lived being a factor. Of these, 42 were aged one or under.
Imagine that. You have no home. Your family is placed somewhere non-permanent, it might be a hostel or some sort of B&B or some other place that, due to the national chronic housing shortage, is damp and unsuitable. And then your infant child dies. And then what? You’re a statistic, a headline for a moment before somebody says something must be done and then the camera moves on.
There were 139,000 children in temporary accommodation in England by last Christmas. When this government came to power in 2010 that number was just over 60,000 – that doesn’t include those children in temporary places in the devolved nations.
While any number of children at all in temporary accommodation is not welcome, sometimes, due to family situation or a need for a place of security, there will be children and families who desperately need it. But when that place of shelter is so poor it is contributing to the death of infants, not in a report from Engels in the mid-19th century but here, now in the 21st century, and when the total number of children impacted is bigger than the population of Chester or Norwich, we should not accept this. We should not turn away and allow any collective national shrug. Each of those children will see life choices limited, they will be damaged by going through what they went through. The ripples for them, their families and society, will quickly turn to waves.
The costs now are huge too. The bill for housing families in temporary accommodation across England for the coming year is estimated to reach £2.
