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Factory worker Simon, 39, and his family live in a two-bedroom terrace where water pours down the walls, too afraid of eviction to complain.

Grandmother Brenda Young, 70, has just moved with her family from a home so damp it made them ill.

Mary, 54, a wheelchair user, lives in a crumbling flat where she is facing eviction.

Nail technician Stevie Andrew, 30, spent years living with a hole in the roof above her young son’s bedroom.

These are the families at the heart of Britain’s other housing crisis . They are not homeless, but are ripped off daily by exploitative private landlords, paying them good money to live in cramped, dangerous and unhealthy homes – waiting months for repairs that never happen, scrubbing the mould from their children’s toys.

This week, the housing charity Shelter and ComRes reported that one in five adults in the UK experiences mental health problems, such as anxiety, depression and panic attacks, due to housing pressures.

In some of the worst cases, people are having suicidal thoughts.

When we visit the charity’s hub in Manchester, all the families we meet have suffered mental health problems linked to housing. “The whole place was in disrepair and freezing,” Stevie tells us. “But whenever I tried to speak to the landlady about getting things fixed, she’d be verbally abusive and threaten to kick me out.

“The central heating never worked properly and there were problems with the boiler. There was a hole in the roof so bad I thought the ceiling was going to come in. There was rain coming into the room where my son, who was then three, was sleeping. Pigeons had got in and were in the attic. The kitchen units had no handles. The back gate was broken.

“It started to affect my physical and mental health. There was damp and mould from the water coming in and I was getting chest infections. My son was starting to get chesty and even the dog developed lung problems.”

(Image: Kayte Brimacombe)

Theresa May has called a General Election that she wants to be a second referendum on Brexit. North of the border, Nicola Sturgeon wants the vote to be a referendum on an independence referendum. Yet shouldn’t June 8 also be a ballot on the issues that matter to millions of families?

Britain is in the grip of the greatest housing emergency since 1945.

Manchester, where the waiting list for social housing has 30,000 people on it, is in the dubious position of being the country’s ‘homelessness hotspot’, with the highest numbers in the country. In recent days, shocking pictures have emerged of homeless people in the grip of a drug epidemic.

“There’s been a big increase in street homelessness, and people are dying in doorways,” Shelter’s hub manager John Ryan says. “Two people died in a fire in the city. We’ve got hundreds of people sleeping on the streets. It’s worse than the situation was in the 1980s and 1990s.”

Meanwhile, behind the visible spectacle of street homelessness, thousands of families struggle on in properties unfit for human habitation.

Simon, the factory worker with wet walls, has tried scrubbing and redecorating the family home to no avail.

“My wife comes home and cries,” he says. “My daughter has asthma and the GP says the mould is probably making it worse.”

Mary, whose life was changed by a car accident when she was a child, says she has nowhere to go because landlords increasingly refuse to take tenants on disability benefits.

“The whole situation has made me really ill,” she says. “My time at the flat has been a nightmare – the shower, my water supply, the electrics. I’ve been left in the dark for days and I didn’t have a fridge freezer for 10 months.

“I can’t use my wheelchair at home because there is a step from the bedroom to the hallway and kitchen, so I’m stuck in the living room.”

Despite the bleak picture, Shelter can help. With the support of John Ryan’s team, Brenda and her family have just been re-housed from a home that had black mould in the bathroom, and damp so bad that fur was growing on the family’s toys and shoes.

“Getting advice and support early can ease the pressure and stop things spiralling out of control,” John says. “We urge anyone with housing problems to get help as soon as possible.”

Meanwhile, in just two weeks time, residents of the city of Manchester – and other places gaining new ‘Metro Mayors’ – have a unique opportunity for change.

Making decisions about housing is one of the powers being returned to communities via the mayoral election.

“We have a real opportunity in Greater Manchester, to rewrite some of the rules and make lasting changes,” John says. “To fix the private rented sector, to make landlords accountable and give tenants and their families more security.”

That choice isn’t just Manchester’s. Five weeks later, the whole country has a choice to make. We can make the General Election about the right to decent housing too.

*For help go to shelter.org.uk/advice