When Amal had stopped crying, she apologised. “I wake up so sick, you know? I have to go to study but I feel so sick.” A victim of domestic violence and now a single mother, she lives with her three young children in grimy temporary accommodation in Tooting, south London. She was telling me that Wandsworth council, which has a legal obligation to house the family, tried sending them to a rented flat on the outskirts of Newcastle, then suggested West Bromwich. She’d never heard of either place. “I said to them, ‘I already told you, I have a job interview in London, I am studying in London, my children are at school in London, my ex-husband visits every week to help with the children.’” West Bromwich, the council insisted, was her last chance. Otherwise she would be declared “intentionally homeless”, and be put out with her young children on the street. “They said, ‘just one option: West Bromwich.’ If I said no, they wouldn’t give me another chance.” This was one London council’s response to the housing crisis – to spend £5m on properties for their poorer families, hundreds of miles away, while across the borough, the Meccano scaffolds… Read full this story
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