Oldham mum located miles away from home had to fork out for taxis to get her son to school

An Oldham mum had to fork out £40 a day on Ubers to get her son to school after being moved into temporary accommodation miles away from her home.

The 27-year-old, who has been named ‘Leyla’ to protect her identity, was left facing homelessness when her landlord decided to up her rent by almost £400 a month – from £600 to just under a thousand. At an already challenging time in her life, when she was relocated to Harpurhey with her four-year-old son, she was faced with another big complication.

Her son’s school, once down the road, was suddenly a two-hour walk away. And the convoluted journey on public transport – two trams and a bus – could take up to an hour and a half.

“I didn’t know the area. I’d never really been out of Oldham until then,” Leyla told the M.E.N. “And I was kind of panicking because I’d always had family around before and suddenly it was just me and my son.”

Though she tried to get her son to school on buses and trams – already costing her upwards of £9 a day – she struggled to get him in on time for the school bell.

Leyla said: “The school started noticing he was late a lot. They knew what our situation was, but they were still calling me in for meetings. That’s why I ended up getting Ubers, so I could get him there on time.”

Local Authorities don’t have to provide free transport for kids in temporary accommodation unless they are moved more than two miles away from their placement, and there isn’t a suitable school nearby. But in Greater Manchester, it’s almost impossible to be more than two miles from a school.

It means homeless parents who are already struggling with money are often straddled with unexpected costs, or risk trying to move their child to a new school without knowing how long they might stay in one location. The impact on Leyla was stark.

“I was paying £40 a day in Ubers running up and down to school,” she told the M.E.N. “It got really bad. I was only getting Universal Credit at the time and all of it was going on Ubers.

“I was left with nothing because there were no cooking facilities. You couldn’t buy shopping because there was nowhere to store it. There weren’t even kettles in the rooms. There was just one microwave in reception shared by loads of people – there’d be a huge queue. So I was reliant on takeaways, microwave meals and Ubers. It just burned through my money.”

The 27-year-old says she can ‘barely remember’ that time of her life.

“It feels like I was just stuck on one, long, never-ending day that entire time,” she said.

In the end, the Oldham mum made the impossible decision to send her son to live with his aunties and grandma, who still lived in Oldham, closer to the boy’s school. For almost a year, she barely saw him.

She said: “My son used to call it ‘The Saturday House’ because that’s the only time I used to see him. It was not a good time for him.

“I’m not saying he’s bad now but before that he was a little angel, and I feel like this has all messed with his head with all the to and from. He’s really emotional when you talk to him about it.

“He plays up a bit when he doesn’t want to go to bed, and he’ll start crying and saying ‘nobody wants me, I stay here, I go there’. Sometimes it also feels like he knows a lot more than he should at that age.”

The Oldham mum lived in Harpurhey for four months before being moved to another hotel in Denshaw for five months, followed by five other temporary housing units in the course of two years. At one stage, she moved her son into a new school in the hopes this would be easier to get to – and because the old school issued her with an attendance fine.

“They brought me in for a meeting and to be honest I lost my head a bit,” she said. “I was just annoyed at the situation. They knew what I was going through but they didn’t really care. I think they were just more concerned about what the school’s reputation was looking like.”

The move tore her son away from many long-term friendships, and makes Leyla worry he’ll feel unsafe and uprooted – it’s made her feel ‘heartbroken’ to witness.

She is still in temporary accommodation. Her son, now six, still spends most of his time living with her family closer to his school, though she now sees him more as she works a catering job not far from his new primary.

Leyla says parents in temporary accommodation urgently need more support from local authorities or the government to get their kids into school.
“We’re being moved multiple times to unfamiliar areas, often far away from our children’s schools,” she said. “It’s completely unmanageable to take kids on long public transport journeys every day.

The government is supposed to make sure children have access to education, but then they offer no support for transport. It’s unsustainable.”

Councillor Elaine Taylor, Deputy Leader and Cabinet Member for Neighbourhoods, said: “I empathise with this person’s situation and appreciate how difficult residing in temporary accommodation out of borough must be for her and her family.

“Placing residents out of borough is an absolute last resort. We will prioritise a move to bring families back in borough at the earliest opportunity. Unfortunately, we have a very high demand in Oldham for temporary accommodation and demand sometimes outweighs supply of accommodation in the borough.

“Residents residing in temporary accommodation have a dedicated move on support officer who offer advice, support and assistance with regards to their own individual circumstances, this can include income maximisation and assisting with accessing training, employment and education. We will continue to offer this person all the support we are able to.”

This Oldham mum is not alone. This spring, 5,412 households were homeless in temporary accommodation across Greater Manchester, many of them were families with kids.