This single mother works full-time, but still needs housing benefit – so landlords refuse to rent to her Limarra Sealy, 25, and her daughter Nevaeh haven’t had a home for six months because landlords keep turning them away

When Limarra Sealy fell pregnant at the age of 16 she vowed she’d be a good mother despite being so young. Enrolling herself into college once her daughter Nevaeh was born, she worked hard to set a good example. When Nevaeh turned two, she moved into her own flat, started her first job, and focused on providing her child with a good future.

“I wanted to make something of myself and prove to Nevaeh that, just because you’re a young mum, it doesn’t mean you can’t be responsible or take care of a child properly,” Limarra told i. “I wanted my daughter to be proud of me.”

With the aid of a Childcare Grant, Limarra was able to study and work part-time at Starbucks, receiving a housing benefit top-up to help pay her rent. The rest, including food and bills, she paid for herself.

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“It was tight some months but I’d always believed that if I worked hard, the rewards would eventually pay off,” she explained. “I was always careful with money but Nevaeh never went without.”

As the years passed and affordable housing became more and more scarce, Limarra realised how lucky she was to have a two-bedroom flat in south east London she could actually afford. Now employed full-time, she benefited from her daughter’s school being within walking distance and was able to drop her off in the morning and pick her up in the afternoon most days.

Read more about affordable housing: Let’s abandon the Generation Rent label – millennials know where the blame for their housing struggles lies

Then, in April 2017, she got some bad news.

“I received an eviction notice out of the blue from my landlord saying I had two months to vacate the property,” she recalled. “It was a ‘no fault’ eviction which meant it wasn’t because I’d been a bad tenant, he just wanted his flat back.”

Limarra was confident she would find somewhere else to live fairly easily. But when she started looking she discovered not only that rent prices had gone up dramatically, but the majority of landlords weren’t willing to accept tenants on any housing benefits.

“I’d been given two months to move out which I thought was plenty of time to find another flat but it wasn’t that simple,” she said. “I scoured the internet daily for properties within my budget but they all said ‘no DSS’. I began calling a few hoping that, if I explained that only a quarter of my rent was covered by housing benefit and that I would be paying most of it myself, they would change their minds.”

Considered a risk

But every landlord or agency Limarra contacted refused to even let her view the properties. As her two-month deadline approached, her anxiety grew.

“In six weeks I must have applied for at least 30 properties but was turned down for every single one,” she explained. “I would tell them I had a full-time job and a regular income but they didn’t care. Because I received housing benefit they saw me as a risk.”

In desperation, she went to her local council and begged them to help.

“They told me to stay put – that if I moved out of the flat I was in it would be seen as me making myself voluntarily homeless and I wouldn’t be entitled to council housing. I explained that I had an eviction notice but they said to wait until the landlord called the baliffs in. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.”

With nowhere else to go, Limarra ignored the subsequent warning notices from her landlord and kept searching for properties to rent, with no luck.

“It was a dreadful time,” she said. “I would lie awake night after night fretting about the future, worrying about where Nevaeh and I were going to live and what I was going to do.”

The strain took its toll and Limarra began suffering anxiety attacks and depression. She was signed off work for three weeks in January 2018 and became suicidal.

Suicidal thoughts

“In April that year I took an overdose,” she said. “I just didn’t know what else to do. I felt like a complete failure, like I’d let my daughter down. I thought she’d be better off without me.

“Luckily I was referred to a mental health team and prescribed anti-depressants which helped, but what I really needed was a home.”

Read more on depression: ‘I was paralysed by my mental illness’: How depression left one woman in a wheelchair, unable to walk, talk, or write

Things didn’t improve however, and in May 2018, Limarra’s landlord was granted a possession order, forcing her to leave the following month. She packed all of her things into a hired van and went straight to the local council.

“They’d told me they would be able to find me temporary accommodation but the only two places available were a flat in Essex and another in Croydon, Surrey,” she said. “If I didn’t accept one I would be taken off the housing list and be out on the street, so I said yes to the one in Croydon. There was no way I could travel from Essex to work each day and Nevaeh wouldn’t have been able to get to school.”

But when she went to see her new home, Limarra was shocked.

“It wasn’t a flat, it was a small double room which wasn’t even big enough to fit a proper-sized double bed in it,” she recalled. “There was a cooker right next to a filthy mattress, a sink beside that, and a small, cupboard-like door which led to a shower room. There wasn’t even enough space to open my suitcase on the floor.”

“Nevaeh was so frightened in the hostel she began wetting the bed” Limarra Sealy

With nothing else available, Limarra had to take it. But then she was dealt another blow. As the cooker was inches away from the bed, social services said it wasn’t safe for Nevaeh to live in so she had to go and stay at her grandmother’s house.

Miserable and missing her daughter terribly, Limarra begged the council to find her something more suitable, but the only thing they could offer her was a hostel in south London.

Some good news

“One good thing did happen though,” she said. “I got a new job working as deputy manager at Nando’s and my wage went up to £1,400 a month. But even then I couldn’t afford a private rental near enough to work and school.

“Over £400 of that was going towards storage each month because I couldn’t bring any of mine and Nevaeh’s things with us and I had to pay £964 a month for the hostel room, sharing a bathroom and kitchen with strangers. I had nothing left to live off.

“Nevaeh was so unsettled and frightened there at night she began wetting the bed.”

The new job came at a price however. Limarra was told that the council would need her P45 before they could reassess how much housing benefit she would now be entitled to on her new wage. She had to wait six weeks with no benefits at all, and ended up £1,600 in debt because she couldn’t afford the rent payments at the hostel together with the cost of travel, food and bills.

“When they did finally get back to me I found out I’d only be getting £24 a week towards the rent which was pitiful,” she said. “I was left with about £10 to live on so I had to move out.”

Limarra went to her mother’s house where she has since been sleeping on a sofa with her daughter since August 2018.

“It’s not ideal as my sisters live there too and there is no spare room for us so my mother now has no living room as we basically live in it,” she said. “It’s cramped and we have none of our things with us but what else can I do?

“People have actually told me I’d be better off if I wasn’t working because at least then I would get full housing benefit and other benefits to enable me to live but I don’t want to give up my job. I like working and it’s wrong that the housing situation is so bad now that people in full-time work with children can’t even find somewhere to live.

“I understand why landlords turn down tenants on housing benefit as they fear they’d be taking a financial risk but it doesn’t help the situation. If I didn’t have a mother to turn to, we’d be out on the street.”

Housing challenge

Councillor Stephanie Cryan, cabinet member for Housing and Modernisation at Southwark Borough Council where Limarra lives, was “recognised nationally as a leading authority in homelessness prevention” but that meeting increasing demand for housing remained one of the local authority’s “biggest challenges”.

Cllr Cryan added: “Between April and November 2017 we received 959 homeless applications compared to 1,647 applications in the same period of 2018.

“We understand how difficult it is for our residents who are struggling with the housing crisis, welfare reform, and austerity and we are doing all we can to help. Council rents are significantly lower than the borough average of £2,000 per month, but we also need a more stable private rental sector which is why we are calling on government to end ‘no fault evictions’ by private landlords. We are also seeing fewer landlords accepting tenants who are in receipt of benefits, including in work benefits.

“We are, of course, aware of this resident’s case, have accepted her as homeless, and are supporting her to find a suitable property.”

According to Shelter, there are currently around 33,000 ‘working homeless’ people in the UK – a number which the homeless charity says has risen 73% since 2013.

“The brutal reality is that being in work no longer guarantees that you can keep a roof over your head,” said Shelter CEO, Polly Neate.