Debt Trap Nation: Family Homelessness in a Failing State

Across England, one of the wealthiest yet most unequal nations in the world, families are being trapped in debt and homelessness. In this blistering expose, Katherine Brickell and Mel Nowicki take the reader inside this national scandal. Hundreds of thousands of children are living in ＂prison-like＂ hotel rooms and other deadly temporary accommodation for months, years and sometimes their entire childhood.

Debt Trap Nation offers an intimate and politically energised account of a failing state in technicolour. The decimation of social housing, an out-of-control private-rented sector, austerity, welfare cuts and a cost-of-living crisis has deepened poverty and fed a debt trap that consumes families and is now driving local authorities to bankruptcy. Mothers and their children have not fallen into this trap, they have been pulled into it. The personal and sobering stories recounted here reveal how government choices have forced these mothers and survivors of domestic abuse into impossible hardship.

The book urges the reader to rail against state-cultivated and politically convenient stigma that equates debt and homelessness with personal moral failure. It is time to flip the script. It is not women who are failing, women are being failed.

Katherine Brickell is Professor of Urban Studies at King’s College London. In recognition of research excellence, she was conferred the Gill Memorial Award by the Royal Geographical Society (2014) and the Philip Leverhulme Prize (2016). The Times Higher Education ＂Research Project of the Year: Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences＂ (2020) was awarded to the ＂Blood Bricks＂ project she led. Her book Home SOS won the Royal Geographical Society’s Social and Cultural Geography Research Group Prize (2022).

Mel Nowicki is Reader in Urban and Social Geography at Oxford Brookes University. She is co-lead of the Oxford Brookes Sustainable and Resilient Futures Research Network.