Claire*, 38, had lived in her privately rented home for more than five years when her landlord decided to evict her in 2021. “She wanted to sell the property because the pandemic had financially impacted her, so we had to find somewhere new,” Claire, a single mother of two, tells GLAMOUR.
Struggling to get any help from her local authority or Citizens Advice, Claire decided to leave the property by the date her landlord had given her. But with a limited supply of social housing and a rocky rental market, finding somewhere to live felt impossible. So, with “nowhere to go,” she packed her family's lives into boxes and moved into her sister’s spare room. They stayed there for eight months.
Things were far from easy. “It was just absolutely heartbreaking having to move my children to a different school because it was closer to where we were living in my sister's, and for them to be sharing a bed with me,” she says. “It was impacting on all of our sleep as well, which was therefore impacting on their school, and that was worrying me too. They didn’t have any privacy; I didn’t have any privacy. It was just exhausting.”
Claire works for a dental practice in the North East, and she makes good money. So when landlords continuously refused to let her rent any properties, she deduced that it was because she was a single parent. “I viewed a few houses and had all my references, but there were three different occasions where they ended up giving the property to either a couple, or somebody without children,” she says. “On one occasion, they told me that it was because they didn't really want to rent to a single mother.”
Claire was told she needed a guarantor, but she didn’t have anyone available. However, thanks to her decent salary and a good amount of savings from staying with her sister, Claire could afford to pay six months’ worth of rent upfront. But the landlord refused to accept her as a tenant.
“The letting agent told me that a single mother being able to afford six months’ rent upfront probably looks a bit dodgy…”
“That was the duration of the contract, I could pay the full contract upfront, but they still wouldn't allow me to do it,” she says. “When I asked why, the letting agent told me that a single mother being able to afford six months’ rent upfront probably looks a little bit dodgy, and that might be why they didn’t want to rent to me”. To add insult to injury, Claire was never refunded the £350 administration fee she paid to the letting agents managing her property. “I was in shock,” she says.
Landlords often refuse to let people with small children. Research by the homeless charity Shelter found that one in five (19%) parents have been unable to rent somewhere they wanted in the last five years because they have children. This issue was recently brought to light when NHS nurse Lexi Levens, along with her four children and her husband, were left homeless after they were evicted, and no one would rent to them despite passing affordability checks. She took the case to the Property Ombudsman, which ruled that blanket bans on small children were against its Code of Conduct, banning letting agents from sharing advertisements that don’t allow children.
But this type of discrimination is more common than you’d think. Research by Single Parent Rights found that 26% of single parents reported experiencing discrimination in accessing housing, with 42% being left in unsuitable housing as a result. The vast majority of this was in private rental properties where single parents reported being discriminated against both for their single-parent status and (for some) for their reliance on housing benefits.
This is something Kristina, 42, a single parent living in London, has experienced firsthand. Kristina was living with a friend when she fell pregnant with her child. “There must have been something in the water,” she says, “because my friend also fell pregnant at the same time.” Given the news, her friend, who owned the flat they were living in, decided to sell up and move in with her partner. Sadly, this meant that Kristina, who didn’t have a partner, would need to find somewhere new to live. “I kept looking, but I couldn’t find anywhere because no one would have me because I was pregnant,” she says. “I even tried single rooms, and they said no because I was going to have a baby. It was constant rejections.”
Kristina, a self-employed therapist, attempted to go through the council, but unfortunately, the social worker she was assigned seemed preoccupied. “Nothing got done; it was awful”. She wanted to access the council’s Find Your Own scheme, which gives people financial aid, such as the first month’s rent and deposit, while they find their own property to live in. “I thought, I have six months until I give birth, I have time, I can do this,” she recalls. “But because everything was so delayed, I only had five days until my due date when something was finally done.”
Kristina spent the best part of her pregnancy sofa surfing with friends, eventually settling in a friend’s flat, where she paid rent. But she didn’t have long: “my friend was leaving that flat a month later, so I still needed to find somewhere,” she says. By the time she was giving birth, Kristina had nowhere to go. “I think the stress of this whole situation is what led to me needing an emergency caesarean,” she says. She was able to convince the hospital to let her stay another night so that she wouldn’t be left stranded in the January cold with a newborn baby on a Sunday night. Thankfully, another friend offered her a place to stay. “I’m so grateful, but it was far from ideal,” she says. “I was living out of a suitcase with a newborn who didn’t even have a cot.”
In the first four months of her baby’s life, she responded to 3,000 adverts and got just 10 responses – only two of which were successful. “Eight of them, I got told no because I was a single mum and I was on housing benefits,” says Kristina. Even though No DSS Policies (when an agent refuses to rent to anyone who gets universal credit, housing benefit, disability benefits or tax credits) and no kids policies are banned, it’s rarely enforced.
“The stigma facing single mums is leaving them and their children without one of their basic needs.”
“The only method of redress for people in this situation is taking the landlord or agent to court,” explains Anny Cullum, policy lead at the renters union Acorn. “But this takes a lot of time, effort, resources and mental energy, and landlords know that, by and large, most people don’t have time to do that, so they can get away with it.”
This is precisely why Claire decided not to follow up on the comment made by the letting agent, who said it could seem “dodgy” that a single mother is able to pay rent upfront. “I was just exhausted with the whole situation and just didn't feel the energy or the resources to do it at that point,” she says. “I got to the point where I was just kind of done.”
Cullum says that the government needs to crack down on this behaviour, making sure to enforce the law. “We’d like to see the government taking a hard line on this,” says Anny. “They could, for example, do some mystery shopping and come down harder on landlords and agents that are found to be saying these sorts of things outright and showing them that there is a consequence.” Essentially, she says, the government should be working to seek out landlords found to be discriminating against prospective tenants and showing that there are consequences for their actions. If tenants are able to see that there are consequences, she says, they’ll be more likely to complain.
But even when they aren’t directly discriminated against, landlords are able to financially exclude single mums, who are less likely to have disposable income. “There's nothing stopping agents from asking people to outbid each other and offer more than the asking price,” explains Cullum. “In a similar vein, agents or landlords can ask for several months rent upfront. As a single mother, you’re less likely to have that money, so that’s another kind of direct discrimination.” With the government’s Renters Reform Bill due to go through parliament, Acorn is calling for a cap on how much money people can pay up front and a ban on bidding wars. “This will help to level the playing field a bit more,” she says.
Claire remembers vividly the day she moved into her new home. “It was freezing cold, it was snowing, I was surrounded by all of my things, and I just sat in the middle of the room and cried my eyes out with pure relief,” she says.
But the trauma of her experience hasn’t gone away. Although she’s been in her home for more than a year now, Claire still worries that she’ll end up in the same position again. “I feel very unstable,” she says. “I wouldn’t want to put the kids through that again.”
The sad reality is that, no matter their circumstances, the stigma facing single mothers is leaving them and their children without one of their basic needs. “I've done everything that I possibly could to look after my two children – I was never expecting to be a single mother,” says Claire. “I progressed in my job, I had a little bit more money, but you can never really get away from the connotations and the narrative around being a single mother, no matter how well you're doing.”
Ultimately, this stigma is compounded by a highly competitive private rental sector – one that is failing the people who rely on it.
“It really is a landlord’s market, and they can pick and choose who they want to rent to,” says Cullum. “Really, what we need is fewer people being forced into the private rented sector, which was never designed to house as many people as it is at the moment. We need more long-term, stable solutions for people, such as helping people get on the property ladder and building more social housing, so that we're not all fighting over these really expensive private rents."
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