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It’s an icy cold December morning outside a Travelodge in Enfield, north London, when we first meet Nedret Batir.
She’s wearing a T-shirt, but seems oblivious to the temperature – only consumed with her obvious and immediate distress.
Everything she owns, along with her two daughters’ possessions, are packed up into suitcases in the corridor of the hotel.
She has just been evicted from her room and is now officially homeless.
There are dark circles under her eyes, and she looks pale, as she calls the council’s housing department.
She tells them she doesn’t know where she’ll sleep tonight, along with her girls, aged 11 and seven.
The man on the phone reassures her that they are looking for alternative accommodation and that she will have to wait.
But the panic is written all over her face. The clock is ticking.
“But I don’t have no place to leave my luggage,” she says, “because I have to go and pick up my children from school”.
The caseworker simply replies: “Yeah, that’s not my concern.”
‘Social cleansing’
Hers is a tale of desperation that has become normalised in England – but with a difference.
She has fallen victim to an out-of-area policy in place in this borough, and apparently across others in the capital, that moves families hours away from everything they know.
If two offers of accommodation are rejected, families are being told they are making themselves “intentionally homeless”.
And that is exactly what has happened to Nedret.
She has rejected a rental property in Hartlepool, five hours away from London. As a result, they have told her that they will be ending their duty to house her.
“I can’t take it anymore,” she tells me sobbing, “I don’t know what to do.”
She says she cannot tear her children away from where their father lives, where they go to school, and where she has support.
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