More than 1 million children in UK sleep on floor or share bed, study finds

More than a million children in Britain sleep on the floor or share a bed with parents or siblings because their families cannot afford the ‘luxury’ of replacing broken window frames and moldy linen, according to the children’s charity . Barnardo’s.

The charity says rising ‘bed poverty’ reflects increasing poverty, with low-income families already struggling with sky-high food or gas bills often also unable to afford a comfortable night’s sleep.

Acute hardship forced families to desperately adopt makeshift sleeping arrangements, said a report published on Friday. An estimated 700,000 children shared beds, while 440,000 children slept on the floor, leaving them tired and anxious and finding it difficult to concentrate at school.

Parents and children were often forced to share a bed, Barnardo’s research showed. Some parents slept on couches or chairs to free up their beds for their children. Other children spent the night on mattresses or blankets on the floor, sometimes without sheets or duvets.

Some of the most notable findings included a three-year-old having to sleep in a baby’s crib, a seventeen-year-old having to sleep in a seven-year-old’s bed, and a parent sleeping on a child’s single mattress. Many families saw replacing broken beds as an unaffordable ‘luxury’. Rising energy bills made even regular washing of bed linen difficult.

More than 336,000 families could not afford to replace or repair beds last year, Barnardo estimates. More than 204,000 families said their children’s bed or bedding was moldy or damp because turning on the heat was too expensive and more than 187,000 said they could not afford to wash or dry bedding.

“People assume that everyone has a bed,” Shelley Nicholson, mother of two, told the Guardian. Last winter, she slept on a couch in her unheated front room, while her daughters shared a double mattress next to her on the bare concrete floor. For many people in poverty like her, she added, having a bed felt like a privilege.

Nicholson, a part-time charity worker, and her daughters live in a housing association property affected by damp and mold, just outside Carlisle, Cumbria. Two of their beds were broken, but she said she couldn’t afford to heat the bedrooms anyway, so last December they slept in the living room every night for three months.

She tried to make the best of it: ‘I thought if we put some Christmas lights in the fireplace we could trick our heads into thinking the fire was on and the room was warm. We had candles and we all asked for big cozy hoodies for Christmas. We tried to make it as cozy as possible.”

There was no hiding the cold or discomfort. “It hurts your back when you lie on a mattress on the floor,” says her daughter Ash, 16, who was recuperating for her GCSE mock exams at the time. “You get little or no sleep, you’re cold, you get to the point where you’ve just had enough.”

Shelley, who has universal credit, loses about a fifth of her income after rent of £1,000 a month due to benefit deductions and especially the bedroom tax. She said replacing the most essential furniture or appliances was cost-prohibitive for her: “It’s not just the beds, it’s the whole spectrum of everything.”

It costs at least £200 to buy a simple new single bed with bedding, and £240 for a double. Barnardo’s has provided Shelley and Ash with new beds this year – one of more than 400 families the charity has helped in this way over the past 12 months. Next winter, Shelley expects to move the beds downstairs; she says she can’t afford to heat the upstairs rooms.

Barnardo’s says up to 70% of poverty grants administered by local staff can be used to provide beds and bedding to families in poverty. The rising poverty was confirmed by hardship charities ButtUKwhich said it handed out £400,000 in bed grants last year, an increase of 7% in the last twelve months.

Meager levels of social security and policies such as the two-child allowance limit are fueling the hardships that are causing poverty, Barnardo’s says. It also wants the government to properly invest in Britain’s threadbare crisis support programmes, which have been devastated by austerity in recent years.

A government spokesperson said: “We know people are struggling with rising prices. That’s why we’re providing a record amount of financial support worth around £3,300 per household and pushing back on inflation to make everyone’s money go further.

“In addition, we are supporting families with food, clothing and other essential costs such as beds through the Household Assistance Fund and have increased benefits and pensions by more than 10%.”