Alicia was six months pregnant when she found herself homeless and standing in front of a derelict pub, reports the Metro.

Having recently lost her father, alongside her grief came the heartbreaking loss of the home they shared. With nowhere to go, the local authority put Alicia in a hostel, then transferred her to temporary accommodation – situated above the grotty London bar. Although it was meant to be a short-term solution for the mum-to-be, Alicia ended up spending two horrendous years in the damp, bed-bug-ridden flat, alongside her baby son Aeon.

Since then, the family have found themselves stuck in a vicious cycle of cramped, unsuitable, and unsafe temporary accommodation. It means that Aeon, now six, has spent the entirety of his young life classed as homeless, with Alicia tirelessly fighting for her family to have somewhere secure to call home since 2019. ‘I’ve been in survival mode for six years, and it’s had a huge impact on my wellbeing,’ Alicia, 39, tells Metro. ‘It’s also really affected my son. I just don’t want any of this done in vain.’

As tragic as their circumstances are, it’s sadly an all too familiar story with homelessness in England now at its highest levels since records began. Housing charity Shelter says there are 172,420 children currently homeless in temporary accommodation in this country. Meanwhile, a staggering 4.5 million children (nearly a third) are classed as living in poverty. These conditions have been fostered by housing shortages, with private landlords charging premiums for often shoddy and ill-kept accommodation.

With the average price of renting in London thought to be between £2,218 to £2,712, this perfect storm of negative factors has resulted in families being and forced to live in shoddy, vermin and mould-infested environments to avoid being pushed out on the streets. Recalling her first home above the pub in London, Alicia says: ’It was disgusting. There were so many issues with damp and bed bugs. It was no place for my son to grow up.’ The arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic and its subsequent lockdowns meant Alicia and Aeon were forced to live above the derelict building for longer than anticipated, with the global crisis resulting in Alicia’s battle for better housing effectively left forgotten.

While the local authorities admitted they ‘neglected’ their duties at the time, the second accommodation the pair were placed in wasn’t any better. ‘I had drug addicts next door, and there was always fighting and knife crime near us,’ Alicia remembers. ‘The final straw for me came when other residents nearly burned our house down while myself and my son slept inside.’

Now in their third temporary housing arrangement, a block of flats owned by a private landlord, Alicia is still finding her family plagued by issues. The most pressing are mould and mice infestations, which have resulted in Alicia and Aeon developing health problems and effectively has rendered their kitchen unusable. Aeon has even been forced to go into hospital due to ongoing ill-health. ‘My son has breathing issues because of all the damp,’ explains Alicia. ‘There are moments when he stops breathing at night. I feel like I’m getting bounced around, and you start to feel forgotten. We both have anxiety and keep our guards up. I’ve seen mice running all over the counters and I flinch whenever I hear a trap snap, as I have to deal with a dead mouse which has been decapitated with blood all over the floor.’

‘Every time I’m in the living room, I feel scared,’ adds Alicia. ‘I want to be able to go into the kitchen to make my son a nice Christmas dinner, but I don’t feel comfortable or safe in there. I don’t feel like I can be relaxed. I have ongoing PTSD and feel like I’m spending most of my time fighting the system.’

Alicia has repeatedly reached out to her private landlord to make basic fixes to their accommodation – but to no avail, leaving the mum feeling dismissed and ignored. ‘The mould is just painted over, or they’ll send a pest control man that puts poison down but doesn’t really fix the underlying causes’, she explains. ‘They’ve told me the mice are ‘coming through the window’, or fed me lines that seem dismissive. Instead of presents for my son, I am having to get mouse traps and mould remover – although I can’t reach a lot of the mould myself.’

The uncertainty around Alicia’s living arrangements has meant that each of Aeon’s Christmasses have been unpredictable and haphazard, rather than a magical time for the young boy. ‘When you’ve lived in three different places since 2019, it’s hard to build routines or feel at home,’ explains Alicia. ‘The constant stress and anxiety, as well as the physical health problems, has taken an emotional toll on myself and my son – who does not deserve this at all. It’s not just about having a roof over our head – it’s about my child’s wellbeing and ability to feel secure.’

Having reached out to the charity Shelter to get further support, an advisor helped Alicia to understand her legal rights and guided her through her options for securing safer, more suitable temporary accommodation. Now, as the nights get darker, she feels more confident that she can focus on making Christmas as special as she can for Aeon.

‘I try and create small traditions, and we use arts and crafts to make homemade decorations. I try and get things cosy with blankets and lighting candles, and hide really small gifts or surprises for Aeon to create fun memories for him,’ she says. ‘I just want something to be done, and thanks to Shelter, I’m now not afraid to use my voice to make this happen. I’m not asking for much; I just want a stable home where my son feels happy.’

Public Law Project’s latest report finds that the average universal credit sanction is hundreds of pounds more than a court fine imposed on a criminal, reports the Big Issue.

Universal credit sanctions are “higher and more severe” than the average criminal court fine, new research has revealed. Claimants lose 100% of their universal credit as a result of a sanction. Public Law Project’s new report found that this equated to a loss of £525 for a single claimant over the age of 25 sanctioned for the median length of time in May 2025. The average court fine issued to people who had been convicted of a crime was £283 in 2024, by comparison. Researchers at Public Law Project also argue that the sanction is likely to be “more damaging” than criminal court fines. While universal credit claimants lose 100% of their benefit, criminal court fines can often be paid in instalments.

The weekly sanction amount for a single universal credit claimant over the age of 25 is £91.70. In contrast, the recommended weekly instalment for a count fine for someone receiving benefits is £10. The government has said that sanctions should be used as a “last resort” and that there should be “safeguards to ensure vulnerable people are properly protected”. However, Public Law Project has found that sanctions are frequently applied for first-time ‘failures’. This includes in circumstances where something has happened which is out of the claimant’s control – such as a health emergency or when digital and language barriers have made it difficult to navigate the benefits system.

Caroline Selman, senior researcher at Public Law Project, said: “Government must be mindful of the experience and realities of individuals who face additional barriers to engaging with the system, including where people are digitally excluded, face language barriers or who are navigating an unfamiliar system, for example as a refugee. The solution is not to simply improve access to appeals or make tweaks to the safeguards that apply (although those things are also needed) – the current regime has been shown to fail on its own terms and should be revoked or failing that, fundamentally reformed.” Public Law Project found that more than four in five cases (86%) that were supported to appeal were decided in favour of the person sanctioned.

Claire Stern, deputy chief executive of Central England Law Centre said: “When 86% of appealed sanctions are overturned, the issue is not individual non-compliance – it is a system that penalises people for circumstances they cannot control, blocks access to justice and ignores the barriers they face. The government’s claim that sanctions operate as a last resort is wholly at odds with the lived reality of the people we support. Until this regime is revoked or fundamentally reformed, people will continue to experience avoidable hardship, worsening health, and prolonged exclusion from work. Meaningful change requires a system that understands people’s lives, not one that punishes them.” Sanctions have led to claimants needing to use food banks, incurring debt and suffering with their mental and physical health – which can lead to a reduced ability to search for and undertake work.

A DWP spokesperson said: “We’re determined to get more people into good, secure jobs. That’s why we are stepping up our plan to Get Britain Working with the most ambitious employment reforms in a generation, as well as modernising Jobcentres and providing tailored support through the Connect to Work programme. As we shift our focus from welfare to work, skills, and opportunities, it is right that there are obligations to engage with employment support, look for work and to take jobs when they are offered.”

However, Selman said that the Department for Work and Pensions’ (DWP) sanctions regime is “counterproductive – knocking people back and blocking their pathway to work rather than opening it up”. The average time for Central England Law Centre cases to reach a tribunal hearing was seven months. Selman claimed that “reimbursement of unlawful sanctions at that stage, does not adequately compensate for the harm caused by a period of extreme financial hardship already experienced”.

Public Law Project is recommending that the current sanction regime be entirely revoked or fundamentally reformed to ensure sanctions are only ever applied as a genuine last-resort measure, after a clear warning. Sanctions should also be less severe, it said. It also wants to see stronger safeguards to protect people, particularly for those who face additional barriers when engaging with the system, and for there to be a more accessible review and appeals process.

Researchers are additionally urging the government to take action to understand and be more transparent about who is impacted by universal credit policies, including sanctions and conditionality. Stern said: “Sanctions are stripping people of the security they need to live, let alone to move into work. Our casework shows the current regime is not only failing on its own terms but driving people into crisis through no fault of their own.”

Liverpool was once praised for its tolerance, but housing shortages are driving fearful, unsettling behaviours – and people are blaming outsiders, writes John Harris in the Guardian.

Here is the dream, if you can afford it: gleaming apartments, close to Liverpool’s waterfront, complete with penthouse swimming pools with views of the north Wales mountains, and sumptuous rooftop gardens. They are mostly bought by investors who then rent them to local professionals: three years ago, a report on early sales of flats in one development said that 40% of early buyers were from Australia, China or Singapore.

Ten minutes’ walk away, you can witness a very different spectacle. Every Monday night, a charity called Liverpool In Arms hands out food in the city centre, to queues of people. Some are homeless; others have a house or flat to live in, but can’t afford to eat. While I was reporting on the city’s housing crisis for the Guardian’s video series Anywhere But Westminster, I watched its volunteers in action for the best part of an hour: they told me the need they try to meet has doubled since last year.

I spoke to a 50-something man who had failed to keep up with a £20 weekly surcharge and the rent on his flat, and then had his benefits withdrawn by the Department for Work and Pensions’ sanctioning regime: he suddenly had nowhere to live, and was clearly in a state of complete disorientation. The same was true of Jimmy, who was sleeping rough, and described being endlessly tortured by one of the city council’s cruellest policies: its insistence on summarily disposing of people’s tents, with everything they contain.

I asked him about the prospect of somewhere permanent to stay, and his eyes filled up. “I’ve got more chance of sleeping in that bed there,” he said, and he pointed at a sumptuous double bed, festooned with cushions and pillows, in the illuminated window of Primark.

The next morning, I went to an advice service run by the Merseyside Refugee Support Network, full of the frantic bustle of very fragile lives. In a warren of rooms next to a city-centre church, there was a steady stream of people faced with one of the asylum system’s cruellest features: the fact that, with a handful of exceptions, if you are granted residency in the UK, you will now be served notice of the need to leave accommodation funded by the Home Office in a matter of weeks. The result, as I saw, is a rapid pipeline to living on the streets.

They arrived in an upstairs room, carrying letters from the Home Office contractor Serco. A man from Eritrea, who carried the sense of someone who was utterly terrified, showed me the instructions issued to him and his wife: “The Home Office has told us you have been granted permission to stay in the United Kingdom. You are still required to leave the property no later than 12 noon, which is [on] the date given in the attached notice to quit.”

He was being helped by a volunteer who had come to the UK to escape war in Sudan. “They’re going homeless – they have not any choice,” he told me, before he described what often happens next: the handing-over of tents and sleeping bags, and another increase in the numbers of people who huddle in Liverpool’s doorways.

According to the housing charity Shelter, in the 12 months leading up to March 2025, Liverpool city council received 2,048 applications for homelessness support, a 25% increase on the previous year. The most recent data shows 12,764 households on the city’s social housing waiting list. But one figure is particularly shocking: reflecting the fact that most local authorities now lack either the means or will to build anything more than paltry amounts of new social housing, the city’s “additional social rent dwellings” in 2023-4 totalled – and read this slowly – five.

In the last year alone, private rents across the city have gone up by an average of 9.6%. While I was in Liverpool, I met a single mum called Helen, who works for the local ambulance service. Up to now, she has rented the house she shares with her 15-year-old son – which has damp walls, ceilings covered in mould and an upstairs window that won’t shut – for £600 a month. But her landlord recently hit her with a no-fault eviction notice – because, she suspects, he is set on charging a new tenant the £1,400 monthly rent he now gets for similar properties, which are presumably in a much better state.

The numbers of people waiting for social housing, she told me, means that unless she and her son endure a spell of homelessness, they are highly unlikely to get that kind of help. So she is trying to somehow find a way through all this impossibility, with precious little idea of what comes next. As we talked, she mentioned a seemingly indelible part of the online conversations she sees about people in her predicament. “I see the messages on Facebook [that] blame the asylum seekers: ‘If it wasn’t for these people coming over on the boats, you’d get your house.’ That upsets me tremendously. Cos it’s not right.”

None of these are specifically Liverpudlian problems: they form one particularly vivid element of a national story split between an ever-growing crisis, and housing policy that is still nowhere near to convincingly dealing with it. On the upside, the Renters Rights Bill – which offers people such as Helen a range of new protections – is about to receive royal assent. Ministers say their £39bn social and affordable housing plan will deliver at least 180,000 homes for social rent by 2036. But spending on that policy has been back-loaded to the end of the current parliament – and besides, the target amounts to only 18,000 a year. On the ground, therefore, everything still feels terribly fragile and uncertain.

In London, housing policy is about to undergo the utterly absurd change that was recently decried by my colleague Aditya Chakrabortty, whereby developers will be free to build even less “affordable” housing in return for even greater public subsidy. Liverpool city council, meanwhile, has just started a public consultation on its target of 30,000 new homes over the next 15 years, but any hardened specifics on social housing are hard to come by (its latest draft Local Plan says the council will require large developments to set aside 10% of homes for social rent, but clearly, this won’t get near current levels of need). This is the focus of a brilliantly energised new campaign called Help – Housing Everyone in Liverpool Properly. It keeps its collective eye on the city’s gleaming new developments, and also wants to steer the local conversation about housing away from blaming outsiders, and blurring the politics of housing into asylum and immigration: the city’s crisis, they say, should bring people together rather than pulling them apart.

Which brings us to a particularly disquieting shift. Liverpool has long been credited with the so-called “Scouse exceptionalism” that supposedly makes its people less prone to belligerent expressions of national identity and Little Englandism. But in many neighbourhoods, there are now streets festooned with union flags and St George’s flags. In the midst of what I heard about its housing shortage, they began to look like a desperate, distorted show of a fear laced with defiance, and proof of an unshakable political fact: that if you make people feel scared about something as basic as the roof over their heads, they will sooner or later start to behave in very unsettling ways.

Rents across England continue to rise as the numbers of households in temporary accommodation across the country are at a record high, writes Meghan Owen for the BBC.

Meanwhile, the amount of housing benefit private renters can claim – the Local Housing Allowance (LHA) – remain frozen as it has been for most of the past decade. Housing sector organisations, including landlords and homeless charities, are urging the government to unfreeze LHA, fearful that it’s driving more renters into homelessness.

Artist Esther Planas, 65, rents a one-bedroom flat in Hackney, east London and claims Universal Credit (UC). She fears she is just one small rent rise away from homelessness. “It’s like you’re in quicksand. Nothing is stable under your feet. Things mutate all the time. Rents are crazy, and nothing is out there to protect you.” In 2023, Esther applied for homelessness after her landlord tried to raise her rent by £500 a month, which she couldn’t afford.

Hackney Council mediated and the rent rise was reduced to £200 a month – something Esther’s local housing allowance only just covers – but she fears it could happen again. “I am really scared because for the moment, they’re letting me be… [but] if my rent was risen again I would have to claim homelessness.”

The Resolution Foundation think tank estimates that Hackney has the largest cash shortfall in London – at £350 a month – between the Local Housing Allowance rate and local rents, according to analysis of the latest data. The foundation’s analysis omits four boroughs with the highest rents – which are calculated differently – and some boroughs don’t fall cleanly into LHA boundaries.

Forty organisations have sent a joint-sector letter to the government, calling for LHA rates to be unfrozen. Alice Walker, Shelter’s assistant director of activism and advocacy, says “people have to choose between eating and having a roof over their heads. There are far too many people stuck in temporary accommodation because they can’t afford to pay their rent.”

According to research by Crisis, as of November 2024, almost half (48%) of the 1.6 million private rented households in receipt of UC had a shortfall between the support they received and their rent, and fewer than three in every 100 privately rented properties listed in England were affordable for people on housing benefit.

Jenna Fassa from Hackney Food Bank says the increasing shortfall between LHA and local rents is driving more people to use their services. “We see a large number of working people. It’s not unusual for us to see professions like nurses, the occasional firefighter, policemen – key-worker roles who can’t afford the rents in Hackney. It’s not unusual for our visitors to be living in mouldy, damp and draughty conditions or small buildings where there isn’t enough space.”

The National Residential Landlords Association has also joined calls to unfreeze the LHA rate. Chief executive Ben Beadle said: “If the government is serious about improving access to rented housing, it has to unfreeze the Local Housing Allowance. It cannot be right that a system designed to support rental costs is failing to reflect rents as they actually are.”

However, renters’ groups including the Renters’ Reform Coalition are calling for the government to focus on capping rent increases. Jae Vail from the London Renters Union warns that “we cannot allow private landlords to profiteer and collect billions more pounds of public money every year”.

LHA rates were increased to the 30th percentile of local market rents in April 2024, at a cost of about £7bn over five years across Britain. A spokesperson for the government said it was tackling rising rents and the housing shortage with its commitment to build 1.5 million homes, including “the biggest boost to social and affordable housing in a generation. We’re also putting more money in people’s pockets by uprating benefits, making Universal Credit deductions fairer, and helping people move out of poverty and into good, secure jobs as part of our Plan for Change.”

The building in the city centre will help up 30 people without shelter per night, reports the Liverpool Echo.

As the number of people experiencing homelessness in Liverpool continues to increase, a support hub is preparing to reopen for winter. Since January last year, in partnership with Liverpool Council, the Whitechapel Centre has operated a night assessment hub to provide a safe space for those who find themselves without a roof over their head.

Plans have been submitted to the city council to reinstate the service for at least another six months from December 1 for up to 30 people a night. The Whitechapel Centre is a charitable organisation with significant experience of working with vulnerable individuals who may find themselves rough sleeping. If signed off by the city council’s planning department, the night assessment hub will be a temporary emergency response to the current housing crisis.

A planning statement attached to an application to change the use of a city centre building previously used to support rough sleepers set out how the scheme would work. It said: “The number of people experiencing homelessness, including people sleeping rough continues to increase. A high number of these people are approaching The Whitechapel Centre for help and assistance during night, via the Outreach Team.” The building in the city centre was previously used between January and March last year and between December 2024 and July this year.

The Whitechapel Centre, Liverpool Council, members of the public, businesses and other users of the city centre have valid concerns about the health and wellbeing of vulnerable people who remain outdoors during winter, it said. The statement added: “The Hub will provide a safe space from which to assess the housing and support needs of people finding themselves on the streets, providing another opportunity for intensive work with people sleeping rough to bring them indoors permanently and reduce rough sleeping in the city overall during the winter period.”

The hub will not act as a night shelter, but people assessed as sleeping rough will be permitted to stay overnight in a sit-up style provision until accommodation or other solution is sourced. It will provide a similar service to a day centre in that food will be provided and each person will have their other needs assessed while staying warm. Open between 7.30pm and 8am daily, the facility will be restricted to people sleeping rough only. No direct access will be permitted and anyone who has accommodation will not be allowed to access the service.