Homeless in London? Here's a train ticket for Birmingham

The plight of a mother and daughter forced to live in a hotel room 127 miles from their former home in the capital

 
When Aisha was evicted from her flat in East Ham, east London, on 15 April, she packed her belongings in a suitcase and went with her six-year-old daughter to the council's housing office in Stratford, hoping for help to find somewhere else to stay in the area. Instead she was given a train ticket to Birmingham, and details of how to take the bus from the station to the Bailey hotel in Edgbaston, a hotel providing emergency accommodation 127 miles away. 

For the past month, she has been sharing a double bed with her daughter in a room scarcely bigger than the bed, living out of the suitcase, and surviving mainly on cold snack food from the corner shop because it is hard to get access to the hotel's kitchen, which has just one stove – four hotplates – shared between residents of the hotel's 25 rooms.

The Bailey hotel is currently home to six families from Newham, moved out of London by a council that is in the grip of a severe housing crisis.ome of them have been moved pre-emptively in advance of the forthcoming benefit cap, which will limit total welfare payments to £500 a week for families, and will be implemented this summer. 

Others have been moved out of London because Newham has run out of cheap accommodation within the borough. Over the past year, central London councils, themselves struggling to find affordable places to house their tenants, have been moving them to cheaper areas such as Newham, reducing the available affordable stock in that borough, so that Newham has had to start moving people farther out.

Newham council is currently housing 29 families outside the borough: 10 in Birmingham and others in locations such as Leicester, Southend and Northampton.

It expects that number to grow. In a statement, the council said it was "experiencing housing pressure".

Earlier this month, Aisha, 43, was told that the council had found her a permanent place in Hastings, East Sussex. She packed her suitcase and made the 193-mile journey to the south coast with her daughter, to look at the flat. She was told she had no choice about whether to accept the property, but she also found out that it was not yet ready to move into, so she returned by train to Birmingham. She is now unclear when, or if, she will be moved there.

"The government admits that over 7,000 London households will lose over £100 when the benefit cap hits and many will be forced out of London."

In a statement, Newham council said the area had high poverty levels "resulting in high demand for the cheapest properties". "We have a shortage of good-quality housing, with approximately 24,000 people waiting for a council house …

Government changes to the benefits policy have put Newham's private rented sector under increased pressure and restricted the number of properties available for us to house homeless families," it said.

"Unfortunately there is not enough housing of sufficient quality in the borough to meet the high level of local need and we have been forced to consider other options. "In addition to this, changes to the benefit system will mean some properties available now would become unaffordable in the future, to the detriment of both residents seeking help with housing and the council."