Hayley Burgess said the community loves helping with her business because of what it stands for, reports the Liverpool Echo.

A mum’s bedroom idea is set to make a difference for hundreds this Christmas. Hayley Burgess, from Birkenhead, is the brains behind Hopeful Haven – a Wirral non-profit organisation that prides itself on extending a helping hand to those in need. The 37-year-old, who lives in Bromborough, does house clearances for free, takes the items found, and either fixes them up to sell or, if in suitable condition, offers them to those who have just gotten off the streets and moved into a home. This can be anything from providing cutlery and furniture to cookers. The money raised from the sold items is fed back to a self-funded charity to buy hats, scarves, and tents for those experiencing homelessness.

The mum-of-three told the Echo: “Our organisation tackles homelessness and poverty from the front line. We try our best to make life on the streets easier to handle. We see first-hand that poverty and homelessness are becoming more and more common, and more so than ever before. We all need to stick together and stay strong. You look around, and you see so many people struggling. It made me want to do something.” Hayley’s business idea started over a year ago after she was donating coats and toys to schools for children at Christmas time. She realised there were elderly kids who were also missing out and didn’t have clothes. After seeing this, she felt the urge to do something.

She said: “I had to do something for these disadvantaged people. We went from my bedroom, where this all started, to a little shop. We outgrew that within months, and now we have a place on Grange Road in Birkenhead. This place is massive but I’d say it’s still not big enough because people keep donating. They love what we do and what we stand for – helping those in need. It shouldn’t be happening to anyone, people out there in the cold, in the freezing temperature. It’s horrible to see and heart-breaking. I couldn’t imagine being in that position. One thing I find is that they are the most loyal and giving people despite the situation they are in. We went to help an old lady recently. She was next of kin in the house, but she didn’t live there; it was a family member who had died. She had two weeks to clear the home, so she was thankful for us to take all her belongings and do good with them, and we were thankful to her.”

Hayley’s business is helping out at an event organised by Paul Hession from Rainbow Toffee, Everton’s LGBTQ+ supporters group to offer the “joy of the festive season” to everyone—no matter their situation. On Sunday, December 8, an evening of Christmas performances on Blundell Street is taking place with a three-course meal and gift for everyone. Jake Lee who won the ‘Heart of Gold’ award at the Rainbow Toffees awards ceremony in August at Liverpool Central Library has donated £500 to cover drinks at the bar, ensuring everyone can enjoy a festive toast. Paul said: “In times of need, the strength of a community is measured by its ability to come together and uplift those who are less fortunate. Compassion and collective action can change lives and remind us all of the power of unity.”

Families placed in hotels in England are being forced to live on snack foods, putting young people’s health at risk, reports the Guardian.

Homeless children placed in hotels are developing rickets and other diet-related health problems because their parents lack anywhere to cook. The Magpie Project, which works with homeless mothers in the east London borough of Newham, where more households are living in temporary accommodation than anywhere in the country, said families living in hotels were eating an unhealthy diet of takeaways and snack foods because they had no cooking facilities or anywhere to store fresh produce.

“We are seeing a lot of malnutrition and dental decay,” said Gifty Amponsah, who leads the Magpie Project’s mothers’ rights group. “We are also seeing developmental delays. Instead of proper food which meets children’s nutrition needs, they are being given drugs for gastro problems like constipation and acid reflux.” The latest figures for Newham show that in October there were 114 children in emergency accommodation, which could be either a hotel or B&B. The majority were under nine years old.

Monica Lakhanpaul, a consultant paediatrician at Whittington Health NHS trust in London, said she sees the knock-on health effects of families living without kitchens. She treats children living in hotels who are not eating properly because of a lack of dietary variety or food that is appropriate for their age, but also youngsters who have full bellies but lack essential nutrients. “We have children with rickets. Everybody thinks it is an old Victorian disease, but it’s coming back,” she said. Lakhanpaul, who is also a professor of integrated community child health at University College London, is researching the health impacts on families living in temporary accommodation. She added that poor nutrition could have lifelong consequences for children placed in hotels: “Nutrition is critical at every step of a child’s life, whether they are still in their mother’s womb or in the first five years of life, when their brain is developing the fastest and their bones are developing.”

The number of people made homeless in England has surged to record levels this year as private rents have continued to outstrip wage growth and housing benefit, which the chancellor announced will be frozen for another year. Many homeless families are now placed in hotels without kitchens as councils are struggling to source enough homes from private landlords, who can now make more money on the open market. Analysis in October by Citizens UK, a civil society alliance, found that the number of children living in hotels longer than the six-week legal limit has risen by 663% in three years, from 490 children in 2021 to 3,250 in 2024.

Mia – not her real name – and her five young children were placed in a hotel by Oldham council after she was evicted in May. The family lived on sandwiches and dehydrated meals such as instant noodles during their six-month stay. The hotel did not even provide breakfast. “You can’t afford takeaways all the time, so we’d have Pot Noodles for lunch and ham and cheese sandwiches for tea,” said Mia. She also had no fridge in the hotel room to store insulin for her four-year-old son, who is diabetic. After five months living there, he started losing his sight. “He was tripping over a lot. He constantly had bloody knees. He walked into the road at traffic lights. I mentioned it to my health visitor and she took him for an eye test. [His eyesight] was really bad. She put it down to being in the hotel room. If you don’t get your diabetes under control, it affects your health.” While there was a communal fridge in the hotel, only the staff had access to it. Mia’s son needed insulin with every meal and before bed. “In the end, I sneaked in a mini fridge,” she said.

The Magpie Project has called on the government to immediately fund councils so they can set up more community kitchens for families to use in homeless hotspots as well as provide fridges, hobs and microwaves in hotel rooms where possible. In the longer term, the charity would like to see a ban on placing families with children under five in hotels. “This is a national problem, “said Amponsah. “There are a lot of kids all over the country who are going to bed today without home-cooked food. And children are the future of this country.”

Elaine Taylor, deputy leader of Oldham council, said she was aware of Mia’s situation: “Due to safety concerns, each room at the accommodation this family was previously housed in does not have a fridge. But the reception is staffed 24 hours and a fridge there is accessible.” Taylor added that the hotel was near a church with cooking facilities. She said the family had now been moved to accommodation where they could cook. “Sadly, this family’s situation isn’t unique. We currently have more than 700 households living in temporary accommodation because, like many other local authorities across the country, housing demand massively outstrips supply, and our housing register has thousands of people on it waiting for suitable accommodation,” she said.

Newham council said there had been a 26% rise in applications for homelessness assistance since last year. “This level of demand means that we are forced to use [hotels and B&Bs] more often than we would like,” said a spokesperson. But the council added that Newham had still managed to reduce the number of families in emergency accommodation.

The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government said it was “completely unacceptable” that suitable provisions were not made for those with health conditions. “We have been clear that councils must ensure that temporary accommodation meets the needs of the household and should keep suitability under review,” said a spokesperson. The department said the government had committed an additional £233m of funding to help prevent homelessness and rough sleeping.

Led by King’s College London, a study will recruit 360 people in England and Wales to explore benefits of scheme, reports The Guardian.

Researchers are conducting the UK’s first major scientific trials to establish whether giving homeless people cash is a more effective way of reducing poverty than traditional forms of help. Poverty campaigners have long believed that cash transfers are the most cost-effective way of helping people, but most studies have examined schemes in developing countries.

The new study, funded by the government and carried out by King’s College London (KCL) and the homelessness charity Greater Change, will recruit 360 people in England and Wales. Half will continue to get help from frontline charities. The other half will get additional help from Greater Change, whose support workers will discuss their financial problems then pay for items such as rent deposits, outstanding debts, work equipment, white goods, furniture or new clothes. They do not make direct transfers to avoid benefits being stopped due to a cash influx.

Professor Michael Sanders, who runs KCL’s experimental government unit, said: “What we’re trying to understand is the boundary conditions for cash transfers. When does it work? For whom does it work? What are the amounts you need to give people in order to make it work?” One of the first cash transfer schemes was in Mexico in 1997 and since then they have been used around the world. But most evidence is from low and middle-income countries, and there has been opposition from politicians and the public, who often believe people will spend the money unwisely.

Last year researchers in Canada found that giving CA$7,500 (£4,285) to 50 homeless people in Vancouver was more effective than spending money housing them in shelters, and saved around CA$777 (£443) per person. Small-scale studies have taken place in the UK, such as a scheme by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation in 2012 which helped 12 rough sleepers, but Sanders said these are believed to be the first large-scale studies. As well as the trial with Greater Change, KCL researchers are working on four other similar studies. Greater Change has helped around 1,300 rough sleepers and other homeless people in London and Essex over the last six years.

“On average, every person we help saves around £35,000 [in public spending],” Jonathan Tan, the charity’s co-founder, said. About half of their clients have been involved in the criminal justice system. Government figures show 13% of prisoners become homeless after release, putting them at greater risk of reoffending. Some have told the Observer they re-offended in order to return to prison – the reoffending rate in England and Wales was 33.2% in 2022 for offenders released from custody or starting a court order.

“We know that of our ex-offending cohort, who are prison leavers, fewer than 9% of them have reoffended 12 months on,” Tan said. The charity says 86% of the people it helps out of homelessness are not homeless 12 months later. The KCL study is a way of establishing whether or not that success comes from dealing with easier cases. “We don’t think it is because they probably send us the more entrenched cases,” Tan said. “But we won’t know until the randomised control trial finishes.”

The numbers of rough sleepers and those living in temporary accommodation in the city is soaring, with charities and services at breaking point: A Special Report by the Liverpool Echo.

In a cramped first floor room of a church building in Toxteth, a young woman is sat quietly on a chair, a look of anguish etched across her face. The woman is from the east African country of Eritrea and doesn’t speak any English. Today she is visiting the Merseyside Refugee Support Network charity, which is based in the St Anne Church in Overbury Street. She is in desperate need of help. Through the charity’s resident translator, Alhussein Ahmed, the woman tells the ECHO that for the past five nights she has been sleeping in the doorway of the KFC business in West Derby Road. “In the street it is cold and there is rain,” she explains. “Drunk people approach me and I don’t feel safe. I am scared a lot.”

Alhussein explains that the woman, who arrived in the UK as an asylum seeker, became homeless after she was granted right to remain in the country as a refugee. After this decision, she was evicted from her Home Office housing with nowhere to go. Asked why she had to leave Eritrea she shakes her head and states: “Long story. The government wanted to put me in prison.” This young woman is one of a huge number each day that are continuing to come through the doors of this small charity facing destitution and homelessness on the streets of Liverpool. The ECHO visited the building last year as charity bosses warned of a humanitarian disaster in the city – now things may be even worse.

In the room next door we meet a young man who we spoke to this time last year. He is from Sudan and when we last saw him he was sleeping in the car park of the Royal Liverpool Hospital. While he is no longer on the streets, his situation remains bleak. Charity manager Seána Roberts explains that the man is now living in temporary accommodation, which amounts to a tiny room with just enough space for a bed and nothing else, not even a chair. He has nowhere to cook food or wash clothes. Seána regularly washes his clothes for him and as we are speaking she digs out a new winter coat to offer him from her diminishing supplies. “It is essentially better than the streets but not much if you can’t wash your own clothes or cook your own food, which he hasn’t been able to do for a year now,” explains Seána. “He has a complicated story. He is a lost soul as a result of the trauma he has gone through in the past, but this is not a life he is living, he has now life.”

When we spoke to Seána last year, she spoke of the overwhelming number of cases of homeless refugees she and her tiny team were now facing. She blamed the previous government’s approach of racing through refugee decisions in order to cut down its enormous backlog, which forced desperate and vulnerable people out of their state-provided housing and onto the streets because of a lack of available accommodation in cities like this one. There is now a change of government, but the problem has continued. Seána points to her notebook of appointments, the vast majority of which are highlighted in pink. “The pink ones are people who are homeless, imminently homeless or destitute,” explains Seána. She says her team of four are each seeing an average of ten people each day who are in this position of crisis. “I think this is an ongoing clearance of the previous government’s backlog, but still no one is joining the dots to see the impact it is having on local areas,” she explains.

With often no housing solutions to direct people to, the charity has taken to handing out tents in a desperate bid to keep people warm as the temperatures in Liverpool drop below zero. “We’re handing them out every week,” explains Seána. “It all depends on how many we can get in, I only have three left at the minute,” she adds, gesturing at a small pile in the corner of the office. She adds: “Some people are too scared to contemplate lying down outside, whether in or out of a tent, so they just walk the streets at night, nipping in and out of places like Lime Street until they get moved on.”

Speaking about how the work of her charity has changed in recent years to meet this crisis, Seána sighs, before explaining: “We used to just help people with their employability skills, languages and benefits – but we are back where we are a year ago. Nothing has improved in how the situation is managed. The system is just not functioning properly.” The charity’s already thankless task was not helped in the summer when it became the target of the far-right riots. The church building, which houses the refugee network and partner charity Asylum Link was identified on the Telegram messaging app as a location for racist thugs to aim violence and vandalism towards as part of a country-wide plot. In the end, the violence did not materialise as the local community came out in force to defend the building – but the impact was huge.

“We had to close for three-and-a-half weeks,” explains Seána. “We boarded up the building and were making plans for what we would do if the place was burnt down. We were still doing what we could to support people while working remotely but we in the end we had six weeks where we were not functioning properly and it had a knock on impact.” The situation involving homeless refugees in Liverpool is one key part of a wider crisis in the city. Last year Liverpool City Council declared a housing and homelessness emergency as the local authority became overwhelmed with cases of people losing their homes, without anywhere to turn. The impossible situation Seána and her colleagues are facing is partly down the complete lack of housing options in the city. Just 1500 social housing properties become available each year in Liverpool and there are currently 13,000 people listed on the waiting list.

Liverpool Council, which is facing a budget blackhole of £28m this year, is struggling with the financial weight of placing people who it cannot find permanent housing for in temporary accommodation such as Bed and Breakfasts, that are often entirely inappropriate for their needs. A total of 1,245 households are currently in temporary accommodation, which last year cost the council more than £21m – a staggering 12,000 per cent rise in the last five years. This year it is forecast to be £28 million. Tragically, the numbers of those at the sharpest end of this emergency, the people now bedding down on the cold streets of this city, are also rising. The number of long-term rough sleepers in the city has risen by more than 40% in the past two years. Last month (October), an average of 29 rough sleepers were seen per night.

With temperatures dropping below zero this week, the situation has become even more difficult and dangerous for those on the streets. Walking through the city centre you cannot go far without seeing a tent or a person sat asking for help. Ray is 60-years-old, on a freezing Wednesday lunchtime he is huddled close to a shop in the busy Lord Street in Liverpool city centre as people rush by on lunch breaks or Christmas shopping trips. This is the first time Ray has found himself on the streets and he is distraught, speaking to the ECHO through tears. “I went into hospital and because I didn’t declare it, I lost my benefits, my housing benefits – they sanctioned me. So they stopped all my money and I couldn’t afford to pay my rent,” he explains. “It’s absolutely f****** baltic at the moment. I go in shop doorways, behind the back of shops. I had to sleep in a bin the other night. I am just trying to get my benefits again so I can start paying rent. I’ve tried to get help but I’m on a waiting list.”

Further along the street, 47-year-old Ian is sat shivering outside the city’s flagship Liverpool One leisure complex. He has been homeless for two years now. “I did have a place but I went to rehab and I got kicked out. When I came out I didn’t have a place,” he recalls. “It’s so cold now, it’s bad. I go here, there and everywhere. Its freezing.” He says he has engaged with homelessness services but “there are no houses and I need a place.” For David Carter, who runs the city’s leading homelessness charity, the Whitechapel Centre, the situation is as alarming as it is depressing. He confirms that the month of October was Liverpool’s second worst ever in terms of overall numbers of rough sleepers with 182 bedding down on the city’s streets – 34 of those had recently been given a refugee status decision.

“That is a very scary number but it isn’t the scariest number,” explains David. “The scariest number is the number that remains out at the end of that month. At the end of October, we still had 106 of those people with no solution. It is so demoralising for our staff who can’t find a solution for these people. It feels scary in terms of our ability to make things work. Rough sleeping is sadly where we have seen the biggest increase,” David adds. “In the last financial year, of the 4,800 people who came through our doors needing help – which was a 10% increase on the year before – 1031 of those were seen sleeping rough. That’s 22% of everyone who needed help. When you look at Liverpool’s figures, of those 1,031, 748 were seen in Liverpool. That’s a 33% increase in the city from the year before. So the biggest increase is in the most dangerous and acute form of homelessness. That is what is so wrong. That is really scary.”

Cllr Sam East is the city council’s cabinet member for housing. He spoke this week about the scale and cost of this ever-growing emergency. “It is a moral imperative in a rich country to get people off the streets and it is appalling that this is a conversation we have to have,” he explained. “It is absolutely untenable in the long-term and a huge amount of that cost is absorbed by emergency, temporary accommodation, which unfortunately often tends to be in Bed and Breakfasts. The council is doing a huge amount of work to try and bring down the amount of nights people are staying in this type of accommodation. It is simply not a suitable form of accommodation for people and is also a huge financial pressure for the council.”

The council is now consulting on a new homelessness and rough sleeping strategy that it hopes will help to tackle the crisis over the coming years, but while a long-term plan is important, the dangers of homelessness are immediate.

Landlords are moving fast to force out tenants as the government’s ban on Section 21 evictions looms, with government figures revealing a spike in evictions by bailiffs, reports Property Industry Eye.

Labour has pledged to abolish Section 21 evictions, with the ban expected to be implemented by next summer. And Ministry of Justice figures showed that, between July and September, 8,425 households in England were served with Section 21 notices – an eight year high. The figure marked an increase on the corresponding period a year earlier and came as 2,830 households were evicted by bailiffs, a 23% hike on last year.

Housing charities called for the passage of the Renters’ Rights Bill to be sped up, with almost 110,000 households now having been evicted under Section 21 since Theresa May promised to ban it in April 2019. Crisis argued that the latest data “show the horrifying truth that tenants are still being evicted from their homes and left to face the nightmare of housing insecurity and homelessness”. Chief executive Matt Downie wants the bill moving through parliament to become law “as quickly as possible. No-fault evictions are one of the leading causes of homelessness. We need urgent action and stricter measures to protect people at risk of homelessness now and in the future,” he added.

Polly Neate, chief executive of Shelter, commented: “With renters being marched out of their homes in their thousands, passing the Renters’ Rights Bill and closing the book on the gross injustice of no fault evictions can’t come soon enough.” The Renters Reform Coalition’s Lucy Tiller noted: “Being forced to leave your home through no fault of your own is a disruptive and expensive experience that pushes many renters into hardship and even homelessness.”

Ben Beadle, chief executive of the National Residential Landlords Association, responded to the claims made by the housing charities. He said: “Over the last year the number of possession claims brought using a Section 21 notice has fallen across England and Wales. With data from Rightmove pointing to record numbers of rental properties up for sale, the best way to help tenants is to encourage responsible landlords to stay in the market.”