Family stuck in hotel emergency accommodation for four months

A family is waiting in the sparsely furnished but festively decked reception hall of a hotel.

But they’re not here for a quick pre-Christmas getaway.

For the past few days, this has been home.

After facing homelessness, the family of three is sharing one cramped room as they try to pull their lives back together.

The 24/7 Hotel in Oldham attracts a steady flow of customers.

At £50 a night, it’s an affordable expense for construction workers on short-term contracts, or guests looking for cheap one-day stays.

But by far the hotel’s biggest client in the past few years has been Oldham Council.

In the last year, the local authority has paid the business almost £1.5m to put up some of the most vulnerable people in the community – families and individuals facing homelessness.

The problem is: people keep getting stuck there.

Amina and her partner and children were one of the families who got stuck.

They shared one double room between the five of them and were at the hotel for more than four months.

“We had a hard life at the hotel,” said Amina, whose name has been changed for her protection.

The mum-of-three met Charlotte Hall in a new temporary accommodation home just three days after the family was finally moved – after they’d accepted a council home they were then told ‘wasn’t ready’.

The living room was almost completely bare, but Amina was aglow with relief.

Amina and her husband had to flee Iraq under fear of their lives.

After eight years of living in Serco accommodation while they waited for the Home Office to process their claim, they received their right to remain and were thrown out of their home with less than two month’s notice.

The family weren’t allowed to work while they waited – so had no savings to put down a deposit.

With two boys aged nine and seven, and a one-year-old baby daughter to care for, the family had no option but to appeal to the council for help.

They were placed at 24/7 Hotel.

“It was so small for all of us,” she said.

“Mornings were the most difficult, because the boys had to get ready for school, when the little one should have been sleeping.

"But it’s really difficult to do that quietly in one room, so that would wake up the little one and she would cry and cry.

"It was challenging. Every morning was stress.”

The hotel doesn’t allow kids from the temporary accommodation section to use the communal areas – so they have nowhere to blow off steam.

And with nothing but a kettle – no microwaves, fridges, or toasters are permitted in the rooms – cooking posed another challenge.

While there was a kitchen they could use in another building on Tamworth Street, Amina explained, this was a ten minute walk away, across one of Oldham’s busiest junctions on Manchester Road.

“It was so hard with the little ones, we barely made it,” Amina said.

“Sometimes we would go to a friend’s house to cook with them, other times we would just have to go out and buy.”

Then it started leaking through their ceiling.

Videos of the leak show water pouring from a crack over her son’s bed into a mop bucket.

When Amina tried to raise the issue with the service desk, she was told fixing it would be ‘too expensive’.

When she later tried again, she claims the receptionist told her that ‘since she wasn’t even paying to stay here, she had no right to complain’.

Amina said: “The leak started coming through the light fitting.

"Then we got really scared, because you should never mix water and electricity.

"We were too scared to turn the lights on.

“When it happened, I was also in a lot of pain from my endometriosis.

"So I just sat down and cried for two hours.

"For this situation our family was in.”

The family was finally moved into a new room after Amina’s husband made a complaint, a week after the leak first started.

Charlotte visited the hotel to see what it was like.

The £50 room on the top floor was basic but clean.

Some of the lights didn’t work and there were only four sockets, three of which were taken up by hotel equipment.

But on the hotel’s lowest floor, there was a completely different atmosphere.

The sound of toddlers crying and a man yelling frustratedly down the phone permeated into the hallway from behind different doors.

The hallway ended in a window coated in a layer of dirt.

“Did you get lost?” the receptionist asked, pointing at a CCTV screen during check-out.

The council carry out inspections on all the properties they use as temporary accommodation.

But with rising numbers of families at risk of homelessness, and no social housing because of years of Right-to-Buy and underinvestment, local authorities are in desperate need of temporary accommodation options.

And with nowhere to move families to, they end up staying for months in places that should be used for days.

Dr Laura Neilson, CEO of the Shared Health Foundation, a not-for-profit that works with destitute families to improve health outcomes, said: “The council is under extreme pressure to secure accommodation for families.

"However, placing children in hotels without kitchens for prolonged periods is unacceptable.

“We have worked with families who have been living in the 24/7 Hotel for over six months, with limited support and no suitable spaces for children to play, develop, or thrive.

“Families are forced to live in a single room, often sharing beds, with only an en-suite bathroom offering any privacy.

"We have seen cases where children have been injured or made ill due to substandard conditions, a lack of basic facilities, and the physical and emotional toll of long-term hotel living.”

Dr Neilson added: “The only party that benefits from this arrangement is the landlord or hotel owner.

"Meanwhile, families continue to suffer, and councils are being financially drained to pay for accommodation that is wholly unsuitable.”

The impact of unsuitable accommodation on families is increasingly well-known.

Earlier this year, a Healthwatch report in Leicester found that families in temporary accommodation often lacked access to basic amenities, had worse health outcomes, were extremely isolated from surrounding communities, and were more likely to experience food insecurity.

Homeless charity Shelter has previously called for an end to temporary accommodation entirely, claiming it ’trapped people in Dickensian conditions’.

Local MP Jim McMahon came to meet Amina and her family, and later said: “Families facing homelessness deserve safe, suitable accommodation and a system that treats them with humanity, not neglect.

"The situation as I see it is a scandal with landlords making a killing off the backs of the most vulnerable.

“It can be easy to look at the housing crisis through numbers, and they are stark with over 600 children in temporary accommodation, but behind every number is a child whose life, education and health are deeply impacted.”

The hotel was contacted for comment but did not respond.

Coun Elaine Taylor, Oldham Council’s Deputy Leader and Cabinet Member for Neighbourhoods, said: “As a local authority, we have regular contact with the hotel management team, and our council officers are regularly based in the hotel itself to support the residents living there.

“We regularly make welfare calls to families in temporary accommodation and we have been doing that in the run up to Christmas.

“The hotel is not a dedicated homelessness hostel or temporary accommodation facility, and as such it is only ever intended to be a short-term, emergency solution.

"Regular inspections do take place, and the hotel is clean and provides basic, en-suite accommodation for residents.

“Cooking facilities are not provided within rooms, as this is not part of the hotel’s operational model.

"However, the hotel has worked with the Council above and beyond what would usually be expected of a commercial hotel.

"This includes providing access to laundry facilities, engaging positively with the Council’s safe sleeping policy by supplying cots for infants to reduce unsafe co-sleeping, and allowing residents access to their fridges to safely store items such as medication and baby formula.

“Over the past 12 months, we have worked hard to significantly reduce the number of households placed in hotel accommodation.

"At the peak of the housing crisis in September 2024, over 223 households were residing in hotels.

"By the end of November, this figure had reduced to just 23 families.”

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