Andrea’s story

Andrea is a 44-year-old single woman originally from Latin America with no dependents. She moved to the UK in early 2018 in hopes of finding a job and becoming financially stable.

Before arriving in the UK, Andrea lived in Spain, where she was registered as disabled due to multiple long-term health conditions including asthma, arthritis, epilepsy, anxiety and depression.

She decided not to transfer her disability status from Spain to the UK because she wanted to find part-time work once she moved. After arriving in London, Andrea got a job working part-time for a cleaning company servicing the healthcare sector, one of the biggest employers of the area.

Andrea was drawn to South London, which has attracted a large wave of Spanish and Portuguese-speaking immigrants. Being new to the UK and in part-time employment, Andrea managed to find her first accommodation in the area through a sub-let.

When we first met Andrea, she was living in single room in a shared flat, for which she was paying £850 a month. She used to pay for rent through Universal Credit, which she accessed because she had been off-sick since April 2018, when she injured herself at work while cleaning pools at a hospital.

Even though she was glad for the financial assistance, her housing conditions were extremely bad, and they made her feel sick. Her room and house were humid, constantly flooding and had mould growing on the walls and in the carpet.

Unsurprisingly, this made Andrea’s asthma worse and led to severe asthma attacks at night. Talking to Andrea and others revealed that precarious employment and lack of good quality, affordable housing, are key reasons for the ill health of low-income communities.

In addition, unstable housing causes major negative impacts specifically on mental health because of the stress that moving, and the constant worry about affording rent or managing living conditions, produces.

In August 2019, Andrea was still waiting to be re-housed. This time, the council made a formal assessment of her accommodation. Upon investigating, they advised her to stop paying rent because the house was in such bad condition.

Andrea followed the council’s advice and was able to save some money by not paying for a month of rent, which had a positive impact on her anxiety, depression and finances because of the stress it relieved.

This allowed her to look for and find a new private accommodation in September 2019 and pay for the deposit and the first month of rent. Unfortunately, the money that Andrea was able to save in August by skipping a rent payment was not enough to cover all of her September expenses (see table).

In the following months, Andrea had to ask several family members and friends for loans totalling £1830. On top of this, Andrea’s Universal Credit was impacted by the scheduled repayments for the budgeting advance she asked for in July 2019. And, she still had to pay for private rent because the council had not yet found a social housing placement for her.

Every day, Andrea juggled multiple sources of income and credit that varied from month to month. After a while, Andrea began feeling unsupported by the council, who made little effort to cross language barriers and sent her to visit the same houses multiple times, each time concluding that she was not eligible for those particular houses.

Andrea found the situation very frustrating, overwhelming and financially difficult, which exacerbated her health conditions.

Fig. 4