As mother-of-three Danielle pushes two prams down the street in south London, her only thought is where will they all sleep tonight?
The 21-year-old, whose children are all under the age of five, had a council house in Southwark but had to move out because she faced threats of violence.
“I didn’t know that going to the police would end up with me being homeless,” she says.
Heartbroken and panicking, with nowhere else to go, Danielle is in a park with her three children – two daughters, aged one and four, and her two-year-old son.
“I’m so sorry, I wish this could all be better,” she tells them. Her eldest clutches a plastic toy and asks when they are going home.
“We don’t have a home anymore,” Danielle replies. She can’t hide the truth from her any longer.
Danielle, who has long dark hair and is wearing a puffer jacket, is pacing, her mobile phone pressed to her ear, making a series of desperate phone calls, pleading for help.
“Where am I going to go with the kids,” she asks a housing officer. “I have nowhere to go.”
At this point it’s around 3pm and council offices will soon be closing. As her phone dies, Danielle, now sitting on a bench, her eldest daughter comforting her siblings in their buggies, breaks down in tears.
Her story exemplifies a national housing crisis where currently more than 150,000 children in England are living in temporary accommodation.
It is hard to imagine someone more vulnerable; a 21-year-old, at risk of violence, a care leaver herself, mother-of-three. If she’s fallen through the net, then who is it catching?
Initially, Southwark council paid for her to have temporary accommodation elsewhere.
But things changed when police informed them it was too dangerous for her to come back to the borough.
“To sit there and tell a four-year-old little girl we can’t go home because we don’t have a home, that’s very upsetting as a mum because I brought her into this world to love her, protect her, to give her a home, and me being a mum telling her I can’t do that right now, it breaks my heart, but I know it’s not my fault,” she tells Sky News.
“Last Tuesday, I got a call to say they could no longer fund my accommodation because the police said it’s no longer safe to return back to Southwark, so they don’t owe me a duty of care.”
The council emailed her a letter which implied she was being made homeless for her own protection. The letter instructed her to present herself to another “local authority homeless person unit to seek rehousing outside of Southwark,” it said. “This is on the grounds of personal protection for you and your children.”
The letter, dated 30 September, explained her current accommodation would terminate on 9 October.
But, when Danielle approached another council, they wanted more details from Southwark. In the meantime, her landlord said Southwark had stopped paying, so he evicted her and changed the locks.
“We are just going around in a loop and in the meantime me and my children are homeless, and nobody seems to care,” she told us when we found her on 10 October.
“They are not protecting me or my children, they’ve put us at an even more high risk, but they don’t seem to acknowledge that.”
As we sit on the park bench together, a Southwark housing officer calls confirming that, despite her being on the streets, they would not extend the temporary accommodation. The person on the phone says it was a management decision.
At this point, we call Southwark’s press office and get a very different tone and a sense that the situation isn’t acceptable.
After an anxious wait, by late afternoon Danielle is told she can return to her temporary accommodation.
But while Danielle was on the streets, she took her child for a routine vaccination and was flagged with children’s social services, which adds to her worries.
“I know I am a good mum,” she says. “A doctor might have thought my nails were dirty or I didn’t look like a normal person, but she has to understand, I had nowhere to go that day.
“I had no keys, nowhere to live. I was living out of a black bag in my grandad’s shed. So, what do you expect?”
In a statement, councillor Sarah King from Southwark told us: “This has been a very distressing situation for Danielle and her children, and I hope that she is at least relieved to be in safe accommodation now. We will be working to resolve her housing situation permanently and continue to support her until that happens.”
The council she was applying to told us they believed the issue was now being dealt with by Southwark.
Read more:
Number of children in temporary accommodation hits record high
Temporary housing spending for homeless people soars in London
Housing lawyer Simeon Wilmore told Sky he’s come across this kind of thing “many times” and believes both councils have behaved badly.
“Southwark should have been in contact with the receiving party or receiving local authority and it should be more managed and structured, and she should be at the centre of the decision making,” he said.
“If they have reason to believe she may be eligible for priority needs then the duty of care kicks in. They must accommodate.”
The problem is councils have run out of homes. In Southwark alone 17,700 people are on the borough’s waiting list, nearly treble the figure over five years ago.
On average councils spend 1% of their budget on temporary accommodation, but research by Sky News has found 30 councils spend 10% or more, with several spending over 20% of their overall budgets on homelessness. This is council money going to private landlords.
Adam Hugg, head of housing at the Local Government Association, says the numbers of people needing support “are going through the roof” and the lack of available homes “creates a real challenge”.
He says there is a need for long-term investment to build more council houses as well as reform to housing benefit to make sure more people can be kept in their homes.
Danielle has few home comforts in her temporary flat, which has plain white walls and a TV on the floor. Her wish is for a place she can make her own and paint her daughter’s bedroom walls pink.
She has Halloween decorations on a shelf, while in a corner of the living room there is a long box containing a Christmas tree. On top, there is a child’s yet-to-be-filled-out wish list for Father Christmas, while a pack of red and white baubles and a can of snow spray sit nearby.
“These are all my little Christmas bits I’m going to do with the kids when we eventually have a home,” Danielle says, but she still has no idea when that might be.
“They have told me I’m not going to be here for Christmas,” she says. “So, I don’t know where I’ll be. I just hope it’s not on the street.”
It seems the housing crisis has reached a point where even extreme vulnerability is no guarantee of help.
Councils want more secure longer-term government funding so they can build more homes, but with more children than ever living in temporary accommodation, this is a chronic national problem that will take more than one Christmas to solve.