Are large numbers of children in Britain being killed by black mould in their homes? That seems to be the assertion made by Amnesty International in a short film featuring Olivia Colman. Colman plays a lapsed lawyer whose career is reignited by the injustice suffered by a neighbour whose baby dies. The local council housing department fails to move the child and their family from a property where the wall is scabbed with damp and mould. At the end of the trailer, Colman turns to the camera and tells us ‘this is real life’. We are told ‘there are so many kids like this,’ before words are flashed up on the screen telling us: ‘In the UK access to safe housing, healthcare and an adequate standard of living is deteriorating. Human rights in the UK are under threat.’

It is true that the death of one child, two-year-old Awaab Ishak in December 2020, was attributed by a coroner’s report to the mould in his family’s social housing flat in Rochdale. There are no published statistics of child deaths from black mould, but overall infant mortality (deaths under the age of one) have been on a steep downward curve for most of the past 40 years – falling from 12.0 per 100,000 in 1980 to 3.7 per 100,000 in 2021. The decline has, however, levelled off since 2014.

Is access to healthcare for children falling? There has been no official change in entitlement to free healthcare under the NHS although waiting times for treatment have grown over the past few years. In January this year 70.3 patients in A&E were seen within 4 hours, down from 97.6 per cent in 2008. The numbers of patients on waiting lists for consultant-led elective care has grown from a low of 2.35 million in 2008 to 7.6 million in December 2023 – a sharp rise over the past four years attributable to delays in treatment following the pandemic and, more recently, strikes by doctors and nurses. The statistics do not distinguish between child and adults patients.

The Amnesty film claims that ‘At least 34 homeless children have died in temporary accommodation’. This appears to come from a report by the All Party Parliamentary Group on Households in Temporary Accommodation in January 2023, which stated that in 34 out of 6,970 child deaths between 1 April 2019 and 31 March 2022, homelessness and temporary accommodation were recorded by the independent child death overview panel. The report made no comment as to how many of these deaths could be attributed to mould or some other deficiency in the accommodation itself. There are plenty of other possible ways in which temporary accommodation might be blamed, such as social services losing contact with a family because they had moved from one district to another.

Is homelessness increasing, anyway? In the third quarter of 2023, there were 109,000 households in temporary accommodation in England, 69,680 of which were households with children. This is a steep rise over the past year – it was 61,760 in the third quarter of 2022 – but it is still lower than the peak reached in the mid 2000s when there were over 70,000 households with children living in temporary accommodation.

There has, however, been a big change in the type of accommodation in which those families are living. The number of households with children living in hostels has fallen from a peak of 6,450 in 2003 to 3,090 now, and the number of living in bed and breakfast accommodation from a peak of 6,960 in 2002 to 4,680 now. On the other hand there has been a big rise in the number of households living in ‘nightly-paid, privately-managed self-contained accommodation’, up from between 2,000 and 3,000 in the mid 2000s to 18,600. These statistics tell us nothing about the presence of black mould nor any other inadequacies with the accommodation – except that they show that fewer families are living in shared accommodation and more in self-contained accommodation, which on the face of it seems like an improvement.

One factor in the recent rise in households in temporary accommodation which Amnesty International did not mention is the sharp increase in net migration to over 700,000 in 2022. That has put helped put huge pressure on housing stock. The charity has been campaigning for Britain to take in more Syrian refugees as well as helping to keep failed asylum seekers in the country by funding them to stay.

It is difficult to sustain the charge that in the UK ‘access to safe housing, healthcare and an adequate standard of living is deteriorating’. Our human rights don’t seem under threat.