Belinda's story

'Every day for the past four years, I had to carry my son down the stairs. He is a tall person for his age and he can’t hold himself well, so I had to hold him very tightly.'

For Belinda, getting out the door every morning with her young son was a quiet act of perseverance, requiring strength, planning and patience.

Despite her best efforts to engage with the local authority, Belinda had struggled to get herself and Lawrence the social home which they were entitled to. She had been met with barrier after barrier, repeatedly bounced between different agencies. As a result, they were living in a single small room, on the first floor of a house, crammed together with all their belongings.

'We shared the house with five other people, not including us. My son has conditions which mean he has low immunity, so I couldn’t take him around the house. Also, he’s disabled so couldn’t use the staircase.
'He needs a lot of equipment to help with daily life and I had to keep everything inside the room which was already very small. We were struggling with giving him a bath because I had to be careful of infection. So I had to do everything literally in the room.'

A man sat behind a computer in a Shelter office, speaking to a woman

Every day, Belinda would do her best to wash her son in their room, pick out their clothes, carry her son’s wheelchair and things for the day down the stairs, then go back up and carry her son out of the house. This routine had been grinding on for four years.

It is increasingly common for families with additional needs to be living in unsuitable properties. Over the past decade social housing building has been at its lowest levels since the 1940s.

With over a million people on the waiting list for social homes, skyrocketing private rents and landlords often unwilling to install accessibility adaptations in their properties, families like Belinda and her son are forced to live in dangerous conditions.

Then one day, while carrying her son's wheelchair down the stairs, Belinda slipped and fell.

'My ankle was very, very hurt. I couldn't walk up the staircase and had to crawl. The pain was a lot and I couldn't stand on it.

'After the fall, we had a social worker and she introduced us to Karen at Shelter…she came to the place and she saw how it was. I felt like I had somebody to listen to me for the first time…That was the first time I actually thought I could get some help.'

This content is from our 2024/25 impact report. It covers our work between April 2024 and March 2025, and all information is accurate as of this period.