Ikea UK teams with Shelter to highlight temporary accommodation reality at four of its stores

Ikea UK and its national charity partner, Shelter, are displaying the reality people experiencing homelessness face through their Real Life Roomsets initiative.

This is in place at four Ikea stores – Hammersmith, Birmingham, Warrington and Bristol – near cities experiencing some of the highest homelessness levels in the UK.

The pair are calling for 90,000 social homes to be built by 2030 to help address the housing emergency.

Real Life Roomsets show cramped, grotty spaces that an increasing number of people who are experiencing homelessness are forced to experience when living in temporary accommodation.

In the UK, when qualifying families have no permanent home, local councils provide temporary accommodation. It could be emergency hostels, B&B, one room bedsits or cramped apartments.

But with a shortage in social housing in the UK, families can find themselves living in such accommodation for years.

One example from the aforementioned campaign features Sam, whose story is told at the Ikea store in Hammersmith, London.

After a relationship breakdown, Sam and her three children found themselves homeless and placed in a hostel that wasn’t appropriate.

After seven weeks of living alone in her car while her children stayed with a friend, Sam was eventually placed in temporary accommodation, but it was out of her area and too far away from her children’s schools so they had to move to live with their dad.

She was assaulted on two occasions while living in her temporary accommodation. It had black mould, and due to a hole in her front door where the letter box should have been, there was an overriding smell of cannabis constantly throughout the flat.

The stress of the situation meant that Sam had to take leave from work, and she worries what the long-term impact will be of her not being able to care for her children during this time.

Peter Jelkeby, Country Retail Manager and Chief Sustainability Officer, Ikea UK & Ireland, says: “The focus on building ‘affordable’ homes rather than social housing is a distraction from finding a real solution to the housing emergency, which currently relies on the unsuitable provision of temporary accommodation where families are being forced to live in uninhabitable and unacceptable conditions.”