Debt Trap Nation - by Katherine Brickell & Mel Nowicki (Paperback)

About the Book

This blistering expose takes the reader inside England's national scandal of homelessness to reveal how government choices have forced single mothers and their families into impossible hardship with hundreds of thousands of children living in temporary accommodation for months, years and sometimes their entire childhood.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

Shocking, timely and terrifying. From ten-fold increases in rat infestations, to housing offered to homeless families with only bare floorboards, or worse, Debt Trap Nation illustrates what people - most usually women with young children - are made to put up with. And how they are milked dry of money first, often by private landlords, so that they have no choice but to accept the worse. It is a picture of a deteriorating state with its safety nets full of holes. At some point we will begin to change all this. That time is yet to come, and Brickell and Nowicki's book explains why sticking plasters and platitudes are not enough.--Danny Dorling, 1971 Professor of Geography, University of Oxford

About the Author

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.