Babies attacked by cockroaches in filthy B&Bs that thousands of kids call home
There are currently 1,400 children in Birmingham forced to call cockroach-infested bed and breakfasts, hotels or other refuges home as the country faces a homelessness crisis, a special report has claimed.
Clare is one mother suffering under the current situation, living with her nine-year-old daughter in a Birmingham B&B. She says their sleep has become so disrupted they each have an outfit ready to throw on in case fire alarms go off, triggered by late-night cooking, smokers or vandals.
The ear-piercing siren at has woken them up so often they want to make sure they're not outside in just their pants when it happens again. Clare explained: "It broke my heart that they had that to worry about on top of everything, and that I could do nothing to control it. I just had to tell them it was going to be all right soon, even though I had lost faith that it would be."
As it stands, there are more than 4,000 families in Birmingham who have nowhere permanent to call home. In total, that's 17,250 people, including 8,560 children. More than 660 of those families - including 1,420 kids - live in B&Bs and hotel rooms.
Birmingham Live interviewed homeless support workers, teachers and homeless families, from whom they heard a number of horror stories from inside the unofficial B&B system. One family told how their baby was left with cockroach bites while sleeping in his cot, while another told how they called a room in a similar establishment their "home" for a staggering three years.
Baby boy has spent his life in hospital as doctors are 'scared' to discharge him
The report found how a two-year-old and their siblings lived in a trashed room, which was "not fit for an animal", with their mentally-ill mother for weeks without anyone raising the alarm. Another family decided to trade in the B&B for their car due to a bed bug infestation.
Mum Clare reflected on her fear that the experience may have forever scarred the youngest of her two children, whose autism made life in a hotel a particular challenge. "There is no privacy, the sense of anxiety and uncertainty are constant, everything you do is under scrutiny, there are rules and regulations, and you are at the mercy of the actions of so many other people. There is so little you can control."
Now in a permanent council home, Clare has emerged from the experience determined to see change for others and pushes for better housing across the city with the Fair Housing Campaign. "Living in a hotel or B&B is not a holiday. Forget the slogans like 'home is where the heart is' - that's nonsense if 'home' is a squalid room. It is a dire experience, no matter how helpful the staff or how nice the surroundings - and to be honest, more often than not the conditions are awful and the support is barely there."
The Barnardo's charity's Birmingham temporary accommodation officer Charneze St Juste sees the impact on families first-hand in her role, funded by the city council, supporting parents and children at risk or already caught up in homelessness. But despite the best efforts of some providers to raise standards and provide better care, and the input of the council and charities, she witnesses the degrading conditions being experienced still - from bed bugs in cots and beds, dirty mattresses, queues to use the communal kitchens, overt drug taking in the corridors and families living off cheap takeaways.
"I visited one hotel where hundreds of families are living that is struggling to control an infestation of cockroaches that have run through the premises. One mum showed me red marks on her baby that she thought was a rash but it was in fact the marks and scratches of cockroaches. I see so many mums really at the end of their tether, struggling with their own mental health, stuck in a room often with three or four children, from newborns to teenagers."
She recalled one ill mum living in squalor inside her temporary accommodation room with four children, including a two-year-old. "It was not fit for an animal to live in. It was diabolical. There was no bedding on the beds, the mattresses were discoloured, there was food on the floor, the walls were damp, the tiling was falling off the walls, it was really awful. She had not been seeking help and nobody had checked up on her, she was just not coping at all."
Charneze spoke too of one B&B on Hagley Road she visited recently to find the door into the premises itself so dirty she could barely bring herself to touch it. "It's obvious the standard of the rooms they provide are not going to be up to much if that is what they deem an acceptable place to work in," she said, and so it proved. The family were crammed into a single squalid room."
"In one recent case a mum and children who had left a violent relationship were placed in a B&B in the city as an emergency - the next night the man they had left had tracked them down and moved into the room along the corridor. Stories like that are not as rare as they should be," said Charneze.
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