Mother in homeless hostel denied visitors for a week after C-section, charity says

‘Excessive’: Charity criticises Hackney Council’s restrictions on visitors to hostels for homeless people

Hackney Council is facing calls to relax its strict rules on hostel guests after one woman was reportedly denied any family visiting her for a week after undergoing an emergency C-section.

The local authority currently subjects people to strict vetting before they can be let into temporary accommodation.

The council says this is to protect people living in its 900 hostel units, particularly the “roughly 10 per cent” who have fled domestic violence.

But the homelessness charity Shelter argues the “excessive” policy is causing avoidable harm to residents “already facing a traumatic and difficult situation”.

At a council meeting on Tuesday (10 March), Stanley Harvey, service manager at Shelter, shared testimonies the charity had gathered to show how restrictions were isolating children and families.

These included one woman who said she could not get support from her family or partner in her hostel after an emergency C-section.

Another resident told the charity she had given up work because they could not arrange for childcare in their hostel.

Mr Harvey described a “climate of fear” where residents were hesitant to raise the issue with management.

His colleague Simone Strachen said families she had spoken had likened their situations to “prisons”.

Shelter had singled out Hackney Council over the policy in a report, which pressed the local authority to bring its policy more in line with other boroughs.

The charity highlighted Camden Council’s approach of offering separate hostels for single adults and families.

The council has stood firm on the policy, which it deems a “complex balancing act”.

However, Hackney Council’s assistant director of benefits and homelessness prevention, Lee Georgiou, admitted that the council needed to get more oversight to see where the rules were being enforced “really strictly”.

He said Hackney Council was “not an outlier” compared to other boroughs and said the policy allowed at least one designated visitor for essential support for up to three months.

The council said it could not follow Camden Council’s approach because it needed to ensure safeguarding in its 26 mixed-use hostels.

The local authority said grievances over staff conduct were “rare” and investigated fairly when raised.

Councillors from both Labour and Green party groups said the testimonies echoed what they had heard from residents, and challenged the council over safety risks arising from the current policy.

Cllr Zoë Garbett AM. Photograph: supplied

Cllr Zoë Garbett (Green party) raised the case of a social care worker who was “blocked” from coming to support a resident, though adding that this case was being escalated by the council.

Ms Strachen, meanwhile, pointed out safeguarding professionals were being stopped from carrying out assessments on children, while hostel residents were themselves not required to have DBS [Disclosure and Barring Service] checks. “You don’t know who’s living in the properties anyway,” she said.

Speaking to the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS), Cllr Clare Joseph (Labour party) said: “It’s a bigger safeguarding risk if a woman has to leave her children upstairs in a room to go and do washing downstairs because she can’t carry all the children and the washing load on her own.”

She said the issue of visitor access had come up frequently in her eight years as a councillor.

Cllr Clare Joseph. Photograph: Hackney Labour party

At the meeting, Cllr Joseph said: “It’s quite rare for Shelter to do a report on visitation policy specifically in our borough. That in itself should give us pause for thought.”

Alex Clarke, director of housing strategy and homelessness, said the council needed to focus on getting more families out of temporary accommodation, which was “the worst place for a child to grow up”.

He added that granting approval for visits “should not be a convoluted, long-winded process”.

The local authority rebuffed Shelter’s suggestion that it should carry out DBS assessments for personal guests, arguing that this was not in its legal remit and would lump residents with an “unethical” £18 charge per check.

The council added that childcare visits without prior approval posed a “severe” safeguarding risk.

Speaking to the LDRS after the meeting, Cllr Joseph speculated that the policy was open to legal challenge under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, and the Equality Act.

In 2021, Shelter called on Hackney Council to improve conditions for people temporary accommodation, including offering all resident Wi-Fi access and functional laundry facilities.