The homeless single mothers forced to move 300 miles from their families

Exclusive: Cramped conditions are so bad that families are using beds to eat dinner on and children are doing homework in the toilet, Shelter has warned

Lily Reynalds and her children spent four weeks living in a Travelodge because of a shortage in social housing (Lily Reynalds)

Almost 10,000 homeless single mothers and their children have been forced to move into “horrendous” temporary housing far away from their families because of a chronic shortage of affordable homes, new figures show.

Analysis of the latest government data, carried out by The Independent, suggests that 9,343 of the 34,070 single mothers living with at least one child in temporary accommodation in England were living outside of their own local authority area between July and September 2022.

One woman who had fled domestic abuse with her son was moved 290 miles from London to Tyne and Wear, taking the pair “away from everything we knew” into what she described as unsafe housing, which she likened to a “hellhole”.