Waltham Forest: Evacuated mum fears being moved 170 miles away

A disabled mother who fled an abusive relationship says she has been evicted from her home and could be forced to move more than 175 miles away.

Zara, who does not want to be identified, says she has been told by Waltham Forestry Council that she may have to be moved from north-east London to Stoke-on-Trent or Burnley in northern England.

Together with her four-year-old child, she spent her last nights sharing a small room in a B&B paid for by her friends.

The council said demand for housing both in the borough and across London meant councils “now need to look further afield for suitable properties”.

Zara has been in the care of Waltham Forestry Council after previously fleeing a violent relationship.

However, the council said it was no longer entitled to help after turning down an offer to be housed in Harlow, Essex.

Zara says she was evicted from her accommodation while she was abroad visiting a sick parent.

She said she and her child had nowhere to go.

Zara says she turned down the offer to be housed in Essex because it would leave her isolated from those helping her with her condition and the baby.

“Here, my friends check on me before I go to bed and in the morning,” she says.

“I know if I have a problem, I’m only five minutes away, I can run to me.”

In an email seen by the BBC, a social worker says she and her child could be placed “anywhere in the UK”, despite the family’s support network being in Waltham Forest.

Zara says she has been told it is likely to be Stoke or Burnley.

“(Stoke) is four and a half hours away. There’s nobody there to check on me. How can I be expected to rely on random people?”

Former neighbors and a community group came together to pay for Zara’s accommodation and wrote to the council asking them to house her locally.

The group’s Peter O’Kane says it is not uncommon for people to be placed outside the district, but this case is “particularly shocking because she is disabled and she and the child have been traumatized and she is vulnerable medical view”.

“He’s in a particularly difficult situation if he’s not around people who can suddenly intervene,” he says.

Waltham Forest Council said it has almost 10,000 people on its housing waiting list, with more than 1,000 households in temporary accommodation and that the number of families applying to the housing authority has increased by 50% in the last 12 months.

It said offers of temporary and long-term accommodation were made in accordance with the Housing Act 1996 and the council’s Temporary Housing Allocation Policy and private rented sector supply policy.

“When considering where to place homeless households, accommodation provided in the private rented sector must be affordable within the household’s budget and therefore we consider their income, employment, educational or caring responsibilities, accessibility to facilities and essential medical support and accessibility. of local amenities, services and transport,” added a council spokesman.

It is not the first time Waltham Forest has threatened to move a family to the Staffordshire town.

But in the same year, the appeal court upheld a similar move by a single mother to Walsall, the LDRS said.

At the time, campaigners rallied to protest against councils moving families out of the area – a practice not limited to Waltham Forest.

Research by Nottingham University found that more than 36,000 households in England were placed out of the zone in 2022-23.

Steve Iafrati, assistant professor of social policy at the university, says the numbers moved are growing.

Its research shows that between 2014-15 and 2018-19, London authorities placed around 8,000 households out of the zone a year.

The latest figures it obtained, through Freedom of Information (FOI) requests, suggest the number is now 14,873 – but likely higher as eight boroughs did not respond.

All 26 neighborhoods that responded to the FOI confirmed that they had moved their households 20 miles or more.

Eleven said they had moved their households at least 100 miles, and Barnet, Islington and Harrow said they had moved households 200 miles or more.

The largest number of households moved from the area were from Westminster (1,716), Lambeth (1,560) and Bromley (1,199).

Dr Iafrati, who interviewed 15 households about their experiences as part of the research, says: “Suddenly they are being moved, sometimes over 300 miles away.

“For some, that means never seeing their loved ones again.

“This is not a choice. None of these people wanted to move out of the area.”

Dr. Iafrati believes that the growing problem can be attributed to the historical lack of a national housing strategy.

A mother who knows what it’s like to be moved miles away is Anyolina Diaz.

The 40-year-old was renting a house privately with her husband, mother and four children in Bromley, south-east London, and says they were evicted when the landlord had to carry out repairs.

She could not rent another house privately because the costs were too high, around £2,200 a month.

When she approached her local council, they placed her and her family in Dartford, Kent, for six months before they were moved to Ashford.

She says they had “no other option”.

Her husband, who works as a delivery driver, has to commute the 45 miles (72km) back to Orpington, near Bromley, for work.

It means he gets home so late that he doesn’t have much time with his family.

Ms. Diaz says she has had to give up her cleaning and hairdressing jobs because she has no support network to help her care for her children.

She says it’s also been “really hard” for her children, who travel 35 minutes to new schools, to adjust.

“They say, ‘Mom, why are you separating us from my church brothers and my friends?’

She says getting a dentist in her new area has been “impossible”, so she has to spend around £30 on a train ticket to take the children to appointments.

But what bothers her most is the isolation for her 72-year-old mother.

In south London, the family had close links with the Spanish-speaking community, but now they have no local friends.

“I cry more for her,” she says.