Life in Temporary Accommodation for Neurodivergent Children
Hidden within the appalling statistics on the number of households and children there are in all forms of temporary accommodation, there is an unquantified and, until recently, an unrecognised group of neurodivergent children.
Whilst we know that over 130,000 households, comprising more than 300,000 people including 172,000 children are currently living in temporary accommodation, there is an absence of data to reveal how many of those children live with neurodiversity. A light has now been thrown on this by the Households in Temporary Accommodation All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on which I serve.
It is clear that becoming homeless and being placed in emergency and temporary accommodation is a traumatic experience and particularly so for families with children. The disruption to lives in too many instances means severing local links with family and support networks, made worse by changes of school and primary health care arrangements. That negative experience is amplified with every move from one property to another while seeking a permanent home.
The ‘Life in Temporary Accommodation for neurodivergent children and their families‘ report for the APPG highlights the specific challenges that being in temporary accommodation inflicts on children living with neurodiversity. An added dimension to this is that there is no data to show the prevalence of the problem. Directly addressing this, one of the principal recommendations in the report is that the local authority reporting system for homelessness (H-CLIC) must record children with an Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP). This is followed up with a call for mandatory notification by a local authority when placing that family to the local GP and school.
The chronic lack of affordable and suitable accommodation that has escalated over the last decade across England has resulted in households being placed out of area, often many miles away. The report recommends out of area placements for families be avoided as much as possible, but with an emphasis on not making such placements for families with a child who has an EHCP. It is recognised that this might not always be possible and in such cases there must be a timely transfer of the EHCP to the new local authority.
At present there is an apparent lack of appreciation of the challenges that neurodiversity imposes on children. To address this, it is recommended that in-service training for homelessness staff includes awareness of the condition and the impacts on the life of families.
All of these measures will be positive in relieving the pressures endured by families in temporary accommodation, but to really address the problem we need to see a major increase in the stock of social rented family size homes. The wholly inadequate supply of genuinely affordable good quality homes lies at the root of the problem; the report highlights the issue and my casework in Dagenham and Rainham testifies to this.
Parents interviewed by the researchers in the preparation of the report said that living in temporary accommodation felt ‘like torture’ for their neurodivergent children and for them as carers. I hope that we can substantially mitigate that by implementing the recommended reforms to the statutory homelessness guidance that the report calls for. It’s not the full answer, but it would be a very positive start.
Margaret Mullane is the Labour Member of Parliament for Dagenham and Rainham, first elected in 2024.
