Local authorities must do more to consider safeguarding risks when housing children in temporary accommodation, says the Children’s Commissioner as she warns of 'Dickensian' levels of poverty.
In a new report, entitled Growing up in a low-income family: Children’s experiences, the commissioner recommends that the Homelessness Code of Guidance should be updated to ensure greater protection for children in temporary accommodation.
Acknowledging the ‘dramatic increase’ in temporary accommodation use last year, the report highlights that local authorities must not place children ‘alongside other single adults’ due to safeguarding risks.
Expressing concern about the lack of ‘privacy and space’ in ‘‘B&B style’ accommodation’, the commissioner recommended that children or families should not be placed in such accommodation for longer than six weeks, including those ‘owned or managed by a local housing authority’.
‘The office is clear: it is wholly inappropriate for children to be placed in temporary accommodation where families have to share facilities with other adults’, says the report.
The report also warns that some children are growing up in an 'almost-Dickensian level of poverty' and advises that Government guidance should require local authorities to alert the host authority when making an out-of-area placement, as well as ‘notifying relevant agencies, including schools, and GPs when a child is placed in temporary accommodation’.
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