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Gimme shelter… three million people just a month’s pay away from eviction

Charity Shelter attacks 'grossly expensive' private rents and the financial insecurity that it brings.

Sheila Manchester

shelter

While a Tory donor has bet £300million against share price crashes for top British businesses following Brexit, three million people in England are one pay cheque away from losing their homes because they cannot pay the rent, says the housing charity Shelter.

The Government says that it has committed £400 million to help help homelessness and rough sleeping. Nearly half of all working people living in privately rented homes in England would be unable to afford rent for more than a month if they lost their job, the charity said in a new report.

“I have two jobs, but I’m still in a precarious position. If for some reason I lost my job, I worry how quickly we’d end up homeless,” Zoe, a 44-year-old single mother, told Shelter. “I know it’s the same for thousands of other people like me – when you scratch the surface so many people are living month to month.”

A report by the Children’s Commissioner for England in August says that thousands of homeless children are forced to sleep in converted shipping containers and guesthouses, in often dangerous environments.

shelter“Millions of working people are caught in an endless cycle of paying grossly expensive private rents they can barely afford – with all the insecurity that brings,” said Polly Neate (left) Chief Executive of Shelter. “Many are terrified that even a short-term dip in income could result in them losing their home for good.”

The government also said it had committed over 400 million pounds ($500 million) to help reduce homelessness and rough sleeping – along with pledging to deliver an additional 250,000 affordable homes by March 2022.

“Our reforms have increased the amount of social housing stock by 79,000 since 2010,” Britain’s housing minister Esther McVey told the Thomson Reuters Foundation on Thursday. We’re committed to building the homes this country needs.”

September 20, 2019

2 comments

  1. If Shelter did what most people think they do, housing people rather than trying to score points by destroying the private rental sector, then there would be no issue. But they don’t; Polly Neate and the other directors with their bloated salaries and pensions have only one agenda that being the destruction of the PRS.

  2. Jesus wept! What planet do Shelter live on? If you are only a month away from eviction then you must already be in trouble.
    If Shelter are so concerned with the state of the rental market, then maybe they should be doing it themselves?

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