A woman working for a council-owned organisation helping to alleviate homelessness has been suspended for sleeping rough in a council garage.

Arleen Matthews, 48, has worked for almost a decade for Homes for Haringey – an arms-length management organisation that looks after the council’s housing stock and manages its assessment of homelessness applications. Its website states: “We want to prevent homelessness whenever possible.”

Matthews’s job is to ensure that the council’s housing estates, where there are 16,000 tenants and 4,500 leasehold properties, are properly maintained. She had been living in private rented accommodation with her son, Kishur Williams, 18, but she fell behind with the rent and was evicted.

In desperation and with nowhere else to go she and Kishur started sleeping in a garage on one of the estates she managed. When Homes for Haringey discovered what she was doing, it suspended her and she is facing a disciplinary hearing for sleeping in the garage on Friday. She has received a letter from her employers stating that she has breached health and safety rules by sleeping and storing her belongings in the garage. She has also been accused of misusing a Homes for Haringey property for personal use.

Her appalling living conditions came to light when Matthews and her son presented themselves as homeless to the council’s housing officials.

“We were just using the garage as a stopgap,” she said. “I kept looking for alternative, cheaper accommodation. But every door we knocked on to try to get a place to stay they refused us. They told us that they only wanted tenants who were earning at least £30,000. There’s nothing out there for the helpless.”

In desperation Matthews and her son presented themselves to Haringey council’s homelessness team. “The housing official who interviewed me wanted to know absolutely everything about me. She even asked me: ‘Where do you wee?’ I said ‘I’m not going to answer that’.”

Matthews has a family history of deep vein thrombosis (DVT) and says her health has deteriorated as a result of becoming homeless and being suspended from her job.

“I have had five DVTs in my right leg,” she said. “My mum died of thrombosis at 48. I’m now 48 and I’m under so much stress because of all this that I’m terrified I’m going to die at the same age my mum did. My blood pressure has gone sky high because of everything I’m going through.”

She said her take home pay was £1,352 a month, supplemented by £320 working tax credit and £82.50 child benefit for Kishur because he is still in full-time education. The rent in the place she was evicted from was £1,200 a month, leaving her with little money left for essentials.

“I ran up rent arrears of £5,000,” she said. “I offered to pay off £3,000 but the landlord said I had to pay off everything in one go. I tried to do everything I could to resolve the situation but in the end we were evicted on 1 November and my son and I had nowhere to go. My husband died five years ago but I’m still paying off the cost of the funeral and the other debts he left.”

A few days before she and her son were due to be evicted Matthews spoke to a woman who rented out garages on one of the housing estates Matthews looked after. She asked if she could rent one of the garages and the woman agreed. The rent was £15 a week. She said the woman handed her a key and told her that they could sort out the paperwork later.

“We slept on a sofa and a mattress from our previous accommodation. It was horrible. Water came in when it rained and we found mouse droppings. There was no heating or water.”

Matthews and her son stayed in the garage until the beginning of December. She had a plastic bowl that she carried with her and washed wherever she could.

“All the time we were living in the garage we continued to look for alternative cheap accommodation. It was a terrible experience living there, something I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. We would get up between 5 and 6am to avoid being seen by anyone on the estate.”

“When I went to the council and declared myself homeless I was made to feel so worthless by the member of staff who dealt with me. She forced me to tell her where we were sleeping. A couple of days later I was called in to see my manager and was told I was being suspended because I was sleeping in a council estate garage.

“The whole thing has made me really ill. I have been getting terrible headaches. I came back to work in March of this year, although my doctor felt I wasn’t really fit to work. We have been treated worse than animals.”

Matthews and her son are currently living together in a tiny room in a hostel in Tottenham, which is infested by cockroaches. Matthews is paying £159 a week for this.

“I just don’t know what’s going to happen to us,” she said.

Her son is at college studying sport and accountancy and hopes to pursue these studies at university but says it is a struggle to study because he and his mother are homeless. “I’m so depressed,” he said. “I feel like I’m living in a prison.”

A Homes for Haringey spokesperson said: “All our staff are paid at least the London living wage and our most junior positions offer salaries of £18,324 to £19,374, depending on length of service.

“We at Homes for Haringey know as well as anyone the challenges of the private rental market in London. We will help anyone who comes to us with applying for housing benefit or other financial assistance should they need it – for example, those on lower incomes. We cannot comment on the details of any ongoing internal investigations.”

• This article was amended on 23 December 2016 to clarify some references that suggested Arleen Matthews is a Haringey council employee. She was not directly employed by the council; as stated elsewhere in the article, she works for Homes for Haringey, which is owned by the council.