A new BBC documentary about homelessness in the UK shows that very little has changed since Ken Loach's 60s drama, Cathy Come Home.
Ray Brooks and Carol White in Ken Loach's 1966 drama Cathy Come Home
A grown man bursts into tears as he takes his child's pictures down from a bedroom wall, a woman literally pulls her hair out at the thought of not knowing where her family will sleep that night, and a teenage girl heats a tin of baked beans on a radiator so she can eat a hot meal.
These are some of the arresting moments we filmed for a new documentary about homeless families called Evicted. The intention of the programme was to look at what had changed in the 40 years since the subject of homelessness was so vividly brought to life in the BBC drama Cathy Come Home. Unfortunately, the answer is, remarkably little.
As we were following the lives of families who had found themselves evicted, more and more scenarios presented themselves which resembled what had happened in Ken Loach's film four decades ago. Naturally, some aspects have changed - the physical conditions in which homeless people live have undoubtedly improved. For example, people don't have to cope with quite so many rats running around. But, sadly, there are still some clear parallels.
In some respects, what happened to one family we followed was actually worse than in Cathy Come Home. In the 1966 film, Cathy's husband Reg couldn't work after an accident and the family were evicted for non-payment of rent. In 2006, Paul and Michelle from Nottingham were evicted from their home because, without their knowledge, their housing benefit office got them into rent arrears. One day, they returned home with their children to find their locks had been changed.
Paul had just been made redundant after earning the minimum wage as a landscape gardener for, ironically, a housing association, so he and Michelle - and Chloe aged eight and Melissa aged four - had to rely on the council for temporary accommodation. They were given no option but to move to a B&B more than ten miles away. The four of them were given two beds in a room with no cooking facilities other than a kettle.
The other family who feature in Evicted ended up living in a caravan because they couldn't find anywhere else. The family of four in Cathy Come Home did just the same, but in our film there are six of them - Lee, Lianne and children, aged 13, 11, six and three. The family was made homeless when their landlord decided to sell the home they rented. Lee had given up work as a bus driver so he could care for Lianne - who was suffering from post-natal depression - and their children. Their homelessness aggravated Lianne's condition, leading her to pull her hair out, literally.
Like Cathy's family, they went into a homeless hostel. Here the children found hypodermic needles on the shared bathroom floor. The family then moved into the house of a woman they had met in the hostel, which resulted in nine people crammed into a two-bedroom house in Minehead, Somerset. But then the housing association that owned the property found out they were staying there and ordered them to leave - or both families would find themselves homeless.
In the space of two years, Lee and Lianne's family lived in a total of seven houses and hostels - but not one of them was a place the family could call home.
Both families in Evicted spent time in bed and breakfasts, where they had to share bathrooms and toilets with other families, and had no cooking facilities of their own. In this experience of temporary accommodation with communal facilities, they again matched Cathy's family in the 60s.
But I feel the most important theme in both programmes is the effect of homelessness on children. In Cathy Come Home, the family was split up for several months - Cathy lived with the children in a hostel and Reg had to find somewhere else. At the end, in a terribly emotional scene, Cathy's children were forcibly taken from her as social services workers swooped on them sitting on a bench at a railway station.
In Evicted, Lee and Lianne were constantly living with the fear of social services taking their children away. The fear was all-pervasive, seeping into the children's consciousnesses - in one very moving scene 4-year-old Connor speculates with his brother and sister on exactly how social services will take them away. And the children showed how vital a home could be, whooping with delight at the prospect of being somewhere permanent.
Despite the fact that on June 30 this year, 130,470 children were homeless, children of homeless families are just classed as 'dependents'. No one speaks directly for them. There is a paucity of social housing in general and new build flats tend to be for single people or couples, not families. And on the private market, there are lots of landlords who simply won't have children in their properties. There are adverts still stating 'no pets, no children'.
On top of that, many landlords say they don't want to take Department of Social Security claimants because the housing benefits offices are so unreliable. Paul and Michelle's family who are featured in the documentary found themselves having to find private rented accommodation when their local council found that they had made themselves 'intentionally homeless' after their housing benefit office had messed up their payments.
If people are found to be 'intentionally homeless' then housing departments can effectively wash their hands of them. They're on their own. This is another aspect which chimed with Cathy Come Home - the facelessness and heartlessness of council officials.
There are a number of reasons why so many families still face uncertain futures in temporary accommodation. Since the right to buy council homes was introduced in 1980, 1.7 million homes have been sold off. And the number of social housing units built since the 1960s has dropped every year. In 1975 there were 160,000 homes being built; now there are just 20,000. In that time the population has kept increasing.
Homeless charity Shelter says that there should be at least another 20,000 houses built a year. That's one answer. But is the political will really there? Ruth Kelly has said that Cathy would fare much better now than in the 60s. From what I've witnessed during the making of this documentary, I'm not so sure Cathy's experience would be as different as Ruth Kelly would like to believe.
Brian Woods is the Bafta-winning director of Evicted, which is shown on BBC One at 10.35pm on Wednesday 29 November. The documentary is part of the BBC's No Home week of programming looking at the issue of homelessness.
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