‘It’s scary… we have nowhere to go’: The families coming to terms with being homeless this Christmas
In the corner of a cramped hotel room, there’s a small Christmas tree. Two stockings hang from the window ledges. There isn’t room for much more. Bunk beds and a double bed take up much of the space.
The rest of the room is filled with the possessions of a family of four who have found themselves suddenly and unexpectedly homeless.
A year ago the prospect of having nowhere to live never would have occurred to Adam, his wife and two children, who were living in a three-bedroom home in West Bromwich that they had rented for eight years.
Adam works as an electrician and his wife works as a teaching assistant. They had always paid their rent on time.
But their children, Holly, 12, and her younger brother, will now be among a record number of children who are homeless this Christmas.
Holly in her old garden
They are two of the almost 139,000 children in England who will spend Christmas in temporary accommodation. It’s an increase of 14% from 2022 as the number of homeless families hits the highest since records began.
In September, just as Holly was starting secondary school, their landlord told them he had decided to sell their house.
“It was gut-wrenching leaving, because that’s all the kids have ever known really,” Adam says.
“We were evicted through no fault of our own – we always paid our rent and everything like that – it’s just the landlord wanted to sell up at the time.”
They quickly found they had nowhere to go.
‘It’s soul destroying’
Adam explains: “Where we were for eight years, the rent stayed pretty much the same all that time, so to then be suddenly kicked out and see what the going rate is now for rental markets… it’s astronomical really… it was too much for us to even consider.”
The family have joined the long waiting list for a council house but are resigned that they will be spending at least the next month in the hotel room in Birmingham provided for them as emergency accommodation.
“The anxiety of it not knowing when we’re going to be out and when my children are going to have their own rooms again… it’s quite soul destroying really,” Adam says.
“We’re hoping sometime early in the new year we’re going to have better news.”
The hotel where they’re staying is on Hagley Road, one of the main routes into Birmingham. It’s lined with hotels and B&Bs that have become shelters for the city’s homeless.
‘Like we’re in prison’
A few doors down, Nadia and her three teenagers share a hotel room. They’ve been homeless since 2021, and face their third Christmas in temporary accommodation.
“It just becomes unbearable after a while, just like we’re in a prison, just four walls,” Nadia says.
Nadia and her three children share one room
Don, 17, and his two sisters have to do their school and college work sitting on their beds. He says all he wants is his own space and a home he can invite his friends to.
They’re not allowed visitors and he doesn’t like to tell his classmates where he lives.
The family became homeless after falling behind on payments on their privately rented house. Nadia says she scrolls property websites for other private rentals but simply can’t afford them.
Instead, they wait and hope for a council house. But their circumstances have been made worse because Nadia lost her job as a care support worker last year.
She says she received a call from the council to say they had found her family a house in Walsall, 15 miles away from Birmingham. She doesn’t have a car so told her employer she couldn’t come in anymore. Then, on the morning they were due to move, she was told the house had fallen through.
Nadia and her family’s belongings remain in bags
“I’d lost my job already, so basically I lost my income,” she says. She’s now in training with the Jobcentre but still has no idea how much longer they will have to wait for a home.
The problem isn’t going away
The experiences of these two families are mirrored across the country.
“If you look at the sort of overarching reasons, we don’t have enough affordable housing,” says Matthew Wilkins, head of value for money at the Centre for Homelessness Impact.
“Local authorities will place people in B&Bs where they have no other options to go into. The latest data suggests that that’s really increased,” he adds.
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The bill to councils in England for temporary accommodation has spiralled to £1.7bn, up from £1.2bn three years ago.
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‘I was evicted and I became homeless’
“The situation we find ourselves in now suggests that the spending of some authorities on homelessness and temporary accommodation is such that it could pose a risk to the financial sustainability in the longer term,” Mr Wilkins says.
“If you take one particular case in one particular place, we calculate that almost 50% of people who are housed in temporary accommodation in the private rented sector in London will be there for around five years or more.”
This provides little hope for children like Holly who has two wishes this Christmas: “To get a house and to make my family happy,” she says, adding that life is currently “quite scary, because we don’t really have anywhere to go”.
UK
What women in prison miss most, the prison schemes helping them rebuild their lives and why fewer may end up going to jail
In a workshop in the far corner of the Styal prison estate, glass, plastic and metal are being smashed to the beat of pumping music.
Women at workstations are dismantling electronics with the energy of gym enthusiasts.
TVs and laptops, discarded at local recycling centres across England, have ended up here, on the edge of Wilmslow, Cheshire.
But amid the whiz of drills, the crunch of screens being separated from their plastic casings and the clatter of electronic boards ripped out and chucked in big bins, something else is being recycled – women’s lives.
“You get a lot of frustration out, because obviously a lot of girls have got a lot of anger, you know,” says Joanne*, who is serving time for drug offences.
She has joined this activity not for the £10 per 70 TVs she breaks apart, but because the programme – called Recycling Lives – could give her the skills and the support to keep her out of jail in the future.
Only 12% of women are employed six months after leaving prison, compared to 25% of men. In the general population employment levels between men and women are 78% to 72%.
Ex-prisoners with a job are far less likely to re-offend. So, women prisoners are at a disadvantage. Often a man is connected to the crime they committed.
“For 90% of the women in prison, there’s always a male involved in why they’ve committed crime, it is the case with me as well,” says Joanne, who tells me she was pressured into dealing drugs by her partner.
Official Ministry of Justice statistics say that at least 60% of women in prison are victims of domestic violence and most will have experienced some form of abuse as a child.
Many, too, are mothers and they feel the guilt of separation every day. Joanne says of her son: “It’s my sister picking him up from school, not me.
“It’s my sister there on Christmas day, not me. Birthdays, all the special occasions. It’s heart-breaking.
“People think prison is easy. You are ripped away from your family and your children. It’s not easy.”
As if in illustration, the glass cracks on an iPad, as she peels it away with her screwdriver.
Official figures say there are around 3,500 women in prison and it is estimated that about half are mothers.
‘I’m trying to give them a future’
The workshop manager Yvonne Grime knows this all too well. A former serial offender herself, she’s the first former inmate at Styal to now hold a set of keys to the prison.
“The biggest thing for me [as a prisoner] was leaving my children,” she says, “and I still carry that guilt round, but I have come through it.”
Part of her redemption is to help the women in her workshop. The Recycling Lives programme transformed her life, and she wants to give back.
She says: “I’m trying to give them a future. I’m trying to give you some hope that they can that they can change.
“Get the children back, find a job, find a home. There is light at the end of the tunnel.”
Her work is part manager and part mentor. “When I first started, I thought I’m just going to come in and run this workshop,” she said.
“I didn’t realise I had to be their mum, their dad, their brother, their sister, the doctor, the nurse, the everything that comes with it.
“If I had a salary for every one of those professions, I’d be absolutely minted.”
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Styal isn’t what you expect a prison to look like.
Inside the high fences and barbed wire are sixteen austere red-brick Victorian houses.
Once an orphanage, they’re now the prison’s accommodation blocks.
Ted the prison cat, wanders from block to block, and has already served several of his nine lives in the compound.
Along with recycling TV sets, women can learn to guide and drive forklift trucks.
They are quick with their tools, spinning through one appliance after another with remarkable and methodical destructive pace.
But the real advantage of the programme is that it continues on the outside. Only 6% of people who go through Recycling Lives go on to commit further crime. The general reoffending rate is 25%.
In a warehouse in Preston, former inmates are involved in recycling food from supermarkets and farms, then sent to foodbanks.
Here we meet Naomi Winter, who – three years since being released from jail – is now a manager at the food distribution depot.
The hardest thing about prison for her too was being separated from a child.
“I was put in prison when my baby is only three months old,” she said.
“So, it was like losing an arm, like losing a piece of my DNA.
“I still woke up for night feeds in the night and stuff like that.”
She says there wasn’t the mental health provision inside of prison to help her deal with post-natal depression, and she spent way too much time alone with her thoughts.
She was in and out of prison for drug offences and violence eight times by the age of 30 and first jailed aged 15, for breaching an anti-social behaviour order (ASBO).
She feels even short prison sentences can ruin lives, and says: “You take women who’s robbed a block of cheese to feed the child.
“They put them in prison for 28 days. They take the home, take the kids, they lose the family, and they get out with nothing. You just create a criminal right there.
“You’ve just created a woman who’s got nothing to lose. You’re also releasing them with a sleeping bag in a tent and telling them to go and sleep in the woods.”
Naomi Winter feels even short prison sentences can ruin women’s lives
Alternatives to custody
The government recognises that prison isn’t working for many of the women who end up there.
It’s why, with women being mostly non-violent offenders and serving short sentences, the government is setting up a Women’s Justice Board to look at reducing the number who go into prison with alternatives such as community sentences and intervention projects tackling the root causes of re-offending.
The Lord Chancellor and Justice Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, told Sky News: “For many women, prison isn’t working. Most women in prisons are victims themselves. Over half are mothers, with a prison sentence separating parent and child.
“That’s why I am establishing a new Women’s Justice Board, tasked with reducing the number of women in prison by exploring alternatives to custody for female offenders.”
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Chief Executive of Recycling Lives, Alasdair Jackson says: “There are certain things we all need as human beings: One is a place to live, one is a job to be able to pay for that place to live and then a support network.
“But there are a lot more factors that women have to contend with; there’s children, there is maybe domestic abuse, there’s everything that goes on around that, but when you give people a chance, when you give people the skills that they need, it is life-changing.
“And when you change a woman’s life, you are often changing the family’s life and the children’s life.”
Alasdair Jackson says ‘when you change a woman’s life, you are often changing the family’s life’
Prison is supposed to be part punishment, part repair job. But there are limited programmes like Recycling Lives, and for many women entering jail currently, the only recycling is back into criminality.
* names have been changed
The world’s oldest man has died at the age of 112, the Guinness World Records has announced.
John Tinniswood was born in Liverpool on 26 August 1912, the year the Titanic sank. He was a lifelong Liverpool FC fan, born just 20 years after the club was founded.
He died on Monday at a care home in Southport, Guinness World Records said.
In a statement, his family said: “His last day was surrounded by music and love.
“John always liked to say thank you. So on his behalf, thanks to all those who cared for him over the years, including his carers at the Hollies Care Home, his GPs, district nurses, occupational therapist and other NHS staff.”
In April 2024, aged 111, he became the world’s oldest living man, following the death of 114-year-old Juan Vicente Perez from Venezuela.
Mr Tinniswood was born in Liverpool on 26 August 1912, the year the Titanic sank. Pic: Guinness World Records
Mr Tinniswood’s key advice for staying healthy was to practice moderation. “If you drink too much or you eat too much or you walk too much; if you do too much of anything, you’re going to suffer eventually.”
But when asked the secret to his longevity after turning 112 in August, Mr Tinniswood put it all down to “just luck”.
“I can’t think of any special secrets I have,” he said. “I was quite active as a youngster, I did a lot of walking.
“Whether that had something to do with it, I don’t know. But to me, I’m no different [to anyone]. No different at all.
“I just take it in my stride like anything else, why I’ve lived that long I have no idea at all.”
Mr Tinniswood was named the world’s oldest man in April this year.
Pic: Guinness World Records
Apart from a portion of battered fish and chips every Friday, Mr Tinniswood did not follow any particular diet, and said earlier this year he felt “no different” turning 112.
“I don’t feel that age, I don’t get excited over it. That’s probably why I’ve reached it.
“I just take it in my stride like anything else, why I’ve lived that long I have no idea at all.”
He lived through both world wars and was a Second World War veteran – having worked in an administrative role for the Army Pay Corps.
In addition to accounts and auditing, his work involved logistical tasks such as locating stranded soldiers and organising food supplies. He went on to work as an accountant for Shell and BP before retiring in 1972.
He met his wife, Blodwen, at a dance in Liverpool. They were together for 44 years before Blodwen died in 1986.
Mr Tinniswood was the oldest surviving male Second World War veteran.
Pic: Guinness World Records
Mr Tinniswood is survived by his daughter Susan, four grandchildren and three great-grandchildren, and lived to be the fourth-oldest British man in recorded history.
His family added: “John had many fine qualities. He was intelligent, decisive, brave, calm in any crisis, talented at maths and a great conversationalist.
“John moved to the Hollies rest home just before his 100th birthday and his kindness and enthusiasm for life were an inspiration to the care home staff and his fellow residents.”
The oldest ever man was Jiroemon Kimura from Japan, who lived to the age of 116 years 54 days and died in 2013.
The world’s oldest living woman, and oldest living person, is Japan’s 116-year-old Tomiko Itooka.
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