This story was commissioned as part of the Bureau's Local Reporting Fund — a grant that supports the reporting of untold stories across the UK. Hanan Bihi reports from Wandsworth in London.

Sirad* still blames herself for calling the police on her son.

He was quite a handful as a young boy, and when he was 14 and broke a window she felt unable to cope. “I couldn’t control his behaviour, and I was hoping a police intervention would make him a little scared and he would fix up.” But she was wrong.

The police sent a report to her local council, Wandsworth, and her son was added to the antisocial behaviour register. Then, she says, the council got in touch again, this time in its role as her landlord: either she could sign a new tenancy agreement that would put her entire family at risk of eviction if her son got in further trouble, or she could ban her son from her home. Under the terms of the new agreement her son would not even be allowed to visit.

Sirad had her seven other children to think of. Three were still in school. She told her son to leave.

Figures obtained by the Bureau through freedom of information requests reveal that between 2010 and 2018, 14 households with a young offender in Wandsworth were asked to sign similar agreements, which guarantee the eviction of the entire family if the terms are breached.

The letters argue that the tenancy agreement has been broken and so the council can demand repossession of the property. They threaten court proceedings if families do not agree to the new terms.

Wandsworth borough council is not alone in issuing these conditional eviction notices. Croydon, Waltham Forest and Hammersmith and Fulham councils also issued four such letters between them.

But data obtained by the Bureau Local suggests Wandsworth council has sent out significantly more — and there is suspicion that the policy is disproportionately affecting ethnic minority families. More than half of Wandsworth’s conditional eviction notices were given to such families. Only three recipients were identified as white.