When Sallie* found herself homeless last November, she was desperate. Her ex-partner had turned abusive. She took her two children and ran.

She couldn’t afford to rent anywhere near her older son’s school and her younger’s nursery and was turned away from the local domestic violence refuge. “It was really difficult, I didn’t know what to do. I walked into a police station and they referred me to the council,” she said.

It was here that a new piece of legislation should have helped her. The Homelessness Reduction Act 2017, which came into force in England in April last year, puts the onus on councils to rescue people from homelessness, and prevent them from falling through the gaps in the first place. The government has called it “the most ambitious reform to homelessness legislation in decades” and said it would help halve rough sleeping numbers by 2022.

But an investigation by the Bureau, which heard from more than 70 people across the country, has found wide-spread concerns that it is nothing more than a box-ticking exercise and that people are being denied support, told they are not really homeless and offered “ridiculous” solutions. Interviews with lawyers, charity workers and homeless people built a picture of inadequately funded councils able in some cases to do little more than hand out leaflets.

Polly Neate, the chief executive of Shelter, said: “All evidence suggests [the act] is massively falling short.” Paul Noblet, of Centrepoint, echoed her concerns, adding: “Before the act even came into force, Centrepoint warned that councils were under-resourced to meet their duties.”

In Sallie’s case, she was told last November that under the new act the council had eight weeks to get her somewhere safe to stay for at least six months. While it was working on that, the council arranged for her and her two boys to move into a two-room space in an emergency hostel.

“I was told by the council worker that my case was so straightforward … that he was hoping to have a decision by Christmas,” she told the Bureau. Put that way, the hostel seemed bearable, even though the rooms were sparse and the neighbours included loud, angry and violent men and women.

Eight weeks later, and Sallie and her children had heard nothing. By then, it was the middle of winter. The radiator didn’t work, and Sallie started leaving the oven on low with the door open overnight to try to warm the room, snuggling in her youngest son’s bunk-bed to share heat. The sodden roof leaked constantly in the corridor that led to the communal bathroom. “I was shocked, they knew that we were fleeing domestic violence and this is where they placed us,” Sallie said.