For the first 15 years of her life, Chloe-Ellie Britton had a normal childhood. Her mum, a single parent, always made sure she and her brother were fed and clothed and she and Chloe had a close relationship. “She always fought for stuff we wanted,” Chloe said. “I had a horse when I was younger and me and my brother used to do shows in horseriding. I had a normal life - going to the farm every day, just little things. I didn’t even think about drink, I wouldn’t do anything like that.”
But, the day before her fifteenth birthday, the life that Chloe had known came to an abrupt end when her mother died suddenly. “It was the day before my fifteenth birthday. She died on June 8 and I turned 15 on June 9,” Chloe said. A year later, aged just 16, Chloe found herself among one of the youngest residents at Ty Seren, a Taff Housing Association women's hostel in Cardiff.
With her brother living in England, she had found herself at a loss for what to do and where to go. “I didn’t know what to do with myself. I was just lost, like ‘Where do I go from here?’”, she recalls. After being taken on by Ty Seren, Chloe was given a room in the hostel and recalls the first day she arrvived.
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“It was big and scary at first,” Chloe, now 19, said. “I didn’t know this side of Cardiff, so it was like a big blur. They dropped me in and I remember just crying, and crying, and crying. I think I stayed in my room for about two days, I wouldn’t come down for tea. It was big and scary and they were a lot older than me in here.”
Struggling with the loss of her mum, Chloe had turned to alcohol and found herself regularly in trouble with the police. “I went downhill a bit. I went and stayed with my neighbour, drinking and doing things that I shouldn’t be doing,” Chloe said.
She was on a curfew in order to keep her safe, she added. Chloe found herself being picked up by the police regularly, to the point where officers knew her by name. “They were worried about me, and it didn’t make it any easier on the staff at Ty Seren,” she said.
Feeling guilty about the amount of times she was being picked up by police and the effect her behaviour was having on staff at the hostel, Chloe decided she wanted to choose a different path. Jay O'Connor, who was a support worker at Ty Seren when Chloe first arrived, was one of the people who helped Chloe turn her life around.
“Jay said, ‘Chloe, if you want to move on with your life and do anything then you need to be able to go forward. If you want a flat, you can’t be doing these things that you’re doing.’ The police were always coming to get me - it wasn’t fair on anyone,” she said. “I went to college, I got my head down and thought ‘I don’t want to do this anymore.’ It wasn’t how I was brought up.
"It only kicked in two months after I moved in. I kept my head down, I went to college every day. When the girls here were drinking and partying, staying up until 12 o’clock, I thought, ‘I’ve had my time doing that, I’m done with it.’”
For Chloe, her time at Ty Seren marked a turning point. She was able to make friends with other residents, some of whom she remains close to today, and has now gone to college to get her childcare qualification and works in a nursery. After her time with Ty Seren, she was able to move on to a temporary placement for a year and a half.
Her life now is very different from three years ago. She works 40 hours a week at a nursery, a job that she loves. “If one of them comes to me when they’re older and says they’re in a similar situation, I can point them in the right direction because I know what it’s like to go down that bad path and the effect it has on you. It’s not something you want to be proud of. I’m glad I spoke to Jay and stopped as soon as I did,” she said.
While she has now moved on with her life and has a job and a roof over her head, Chloe still remains in contact with staff at Ty Seren and occasionally visits. “I always want to come back here. I always used to say, ‘Jay, can I move back in?’ This is always going to be a place I call home because they’ve done so much for me here.”
Looking back on how her life has changed since she first came to Ty Seren, Chloe says she feels better in herself. “I didn’t think I’d come this far, but I told myself I wouldn’t give up pushing.” She feels that places like Ty Seren are important for other women and girls who find themselves in similar situations to the one she was faced with as a younger teenager.
“Especially because of my age, I was vulnerable. Ty Seren is a safe place for some of the girls, especially those who have come out of care and don’t know what to do. The staff are there 24/7. There’s always someone here.”
Chloe is just one of many women and girls that Ty Seren has helped. The hostel is made up of mainly young female residents aged between 16 and 21, although it will occasionally take in young people who are older, and acts as a step towards independent living.
All the residents who come through the door are homeless and have nowhere else to go. Like Chloe, the women there are facing difficult situations and have found themselves at the hostel for a variety of complex reasons. “The majority that come here come through relationship breakdowns with families, so mum, dad, or nan might say they can’t have them there any more,” Jay, project manager at Ty Seren, said.
“We have young people who have been trafficked, unaccompanied minors,” Jay explained. “We could find ourselves working with the asylum process or the Home Office. This is something that happens quite regularly, because these people have nowhere to be housed. There’s pressure on foster placements, there’s pressure on children’s homes, there’s pressure everywhere, so they could end up in Ty Seren.”
Due to the complex needs of many residents at the hostel, Ty Seren works with a wide range of different bodies and organisations, including children's services, GPs, and mental health services, to ensure they get the right support. However, the hostel also acts as a space where residents can learn key life skills to prepare them for the road to independence.
“There’s a lot of work done around education, employment, hobbies, and trying to get them engaged in workshops. Ultimately, we want our young people to go out, gain employment, move into a flat and be able to manage,” Jay said. Residents get involved in a ‘Sunday Cooking Club’, for example, where they’re able to budget for a roast dinner and cook it for the entire building. For more stories about inspirational women sign up the Grace weekly newsletter here
A safe place
If places like Ty Seren did not exist, I ask, what would happen to the young women who come to stay at the hostel? “Street homelessness would increase,” Jay said. “Because of the age range we work with, there are issues with child sexual exploitation - that would be very prominent in our minds.
“Safeguarding is a really big issue for us now and we’re dealing with the police day in, day out, and children’s services. I would say we are a safe place for lots of these young women who could end up in very dangerous situations.”
But Ty Seren is not just a space to keep young homeless people safe and prepare them for independent living. It's also a place where they can start to build relationships and overcome what has happened to them prior to walking through the hostel's door.
“What we find most common is that relationships haven’t been built in the way that they should have been built,” Jay said. “We’ve got people coming in here sometimes who have never had that kindness, or somebody to look out for them.
"So, straightaway, they’re kind of off-ish with us - we’re just another cog in that journey that has failed and failed along the way. For us, it’s that place where we start trying those healing behaviours. We’re very aware of everything that has happened to them prior to walking through our door.”
Those who have come through the process of living in the hostel will eventually be moved out into a council flat or a flat with another housing association, where they continue to receive support. Ty Seren is one of four hostels working under one umbrella, meaning that, if a resident is struggling in one hostel, they can be moved to another.
Residents are usually in the hostel for six months, where they are prepared to move on to wait for a council flat. However, some residents stay longer - around nine months to a year - depending on their situation.
The staff at the hostel work through a trauma informed approach. For them, the first port of call is to establish and build relationships with the residents that come through the door. “We see elements of the past come out in different behaviours - screaming at us, shouting at us over something very minor,” Jay said. “We’ll step back and think, ‘Right, somehow this has triggered a trauma.’
Known as PIE (psychologically informed environment), the approach is at the basis of all the work the hostel does, including providing support for staff who deal with people who have had traumatic experiences on a daily basis. “We accept that there’s lots of things in the past and there are a lot of reasons why people’s behaviours present themselves in the way they do,” Jay explained.
“For example, we might have somebody in here who is self-harming, someone who is really aggressive or angry, or someone who is using substances. There’s lots of behaviours that would concern us and our approach to those behaviours is looking at the reasons behind the cause of the behaviours themselves.
“I think this is a massive turning point for the way people work with young women and young vulnerable people in general. We used to have a punitive approach to things. We don’t anymore. We have reflective means and conversations and we find that’s a much better approach to helping the people we’re working with.”
Historically, hostels in Cardiff would operate on a warning system, Jay said, with residents being issued warnings and, if their behaviour did not change, eventually being evicted. However, Jay says this approach did not work, with residents moving onto a different hostel and coming back a few months later.
While Jay says a trauma-informed approach to dealing with residents works better than the old system and is more fulfilling, staff cannot change the reasons behind why young women are coming to the hostels in the first place.
“The majority of reasons are relationship breakdowns. We are supposed to be a low needs hostel, meaning that we shouldn’t be getting people through our projects who are high need or complex. But, due to housing and other wider societal issues, we are getting a lot of people in care, people who are 16, 17. Ideally, we wouldn’t have those people here, but there’s nowhere else for them to go.”
'Treading water'
When the Welsh Government published its draft budget for 2023/24 in December last year, a number of charities and organisations expressed their disappointment that funding for the Housing Support Grant had not been increased. The grant, which came into being in 2019, supports activity to prevent people from becoming homeless, stabilises their housing situation, or helps potentially homeless people to find and keep accommodation.
“Recently, the funding for support in Cardiff has remained the same and hasn’t gone up, even though the pressures have increased,” Jay said. “I think, often, the work that we do here isn’t recognised in the same way because we don’t fall into a specific part - we’re not NHS, we’re not council, we’re not a health service.”
“It doesn’t get the attention that we would like it to get,” Jay said of the work the support staff at the hostel does. He continued: “We’re not care workers - we don’t go into people’s homes, we don’t do manual handling. We’re support workers working with vulnerable people who have got layer upon layer of things that go on.”
For Jay, recognition would best come in the form of increased funding so support workers can continue their work. Cymorth Cymru, the umbrella body for providers of homelessness, housing, and support services in Wales, recently announced their disappointment with the Welsh Government's 2023/24 budget and the fact that the Housing Support Grant has been maintained at £166m.
“We were incredibly disappointed that the Housing Support Grant has not been increased,” a post on the organisation’s website read. It continued: “Our view is the Housing Support Grant must receive an increase of at least 10% to enable services to continue at current capacity if there are any funding consequentials arising from the Spring Statement.”
Cymorth director Katie Dalton said: “We are incredibly disappointed that the Welsh Government has not increased the Housing Support Grant in its final budget for 2023/24. Over the past few months we have provided significant evidence of the funding crisis facing homelessness and housing support services, including the shortfall between current wages and the new National Living Wage, never mind the Real Living Wage.
“Services are under unprecedented pressure and the lack of additional funding means that some may be unable to continue delivering services, potentially leaving people experiencing or at risk of homeless without vital support. Should there be any additional funding from the UK Government's Spring Statement, we urge Welsh Ministers to ensure that the Housing Support Grant is prioritised.”
Jay continued: “I guess if you look at the statistics of the increase in street homelessness, increase in mental health issues, the increase in substance misuse, sexual exploitation. All of these things are going up. For example, we would probably do one safeguarding referral, maybe two, a month - we’re doing eight, nine. All of these pressures have quadrupled and we were already treading water at the previous level.”
A Welsh Government spokesperson said: “We recognise the immense pressures facing frontline housing support services and the importance of the work they provide. We have therefore maintained the increase to the Housing Support Grant budget so that it remains at £166.763m despite the extraordinarily difficult budgetary position we currently face.”
The Homeless Prevention Budget will increase by £15m for the 2023/24 budget, which, the Welsh Government said, is an additional £10m more than previously planned and takes investment in homelessness and housing support services to over £207m.
Despite the call for more funding, Jay says that the work that he and other staff at the hostel do is rewarding. “For me, personally, it’s a healing process that these people need to go through and we want to have all that in place prior to them moving on. You can’t just have somebody who’s suffering from post traumatic stress disorder moving into a council flat in Cardiff and think that everything is fixed,” he said.
However, there are also residents who don’t have such a positive outcome that Jay says staff remember. “Sometimes they will stick in your head longer and longer. You speak to support workers in Cardiff and they will have one of those people in their head, who they’d love to go back and try with again.”
Jay says he still sees people who came through Ty Seren’s door years ago when they were 16 on the streets of Cardiff and will still speak to the support staff who worked with them. “They’re out of our remit now, and I would like to get those people back.”
But seeing people, such as Chloe, who are able to move on from the hostel to start a new life is a rewarding experience. “Watching Chloe grow is incredibly rewarding,” Jay said, adding that Chloe had sent letters to staff at the hostel when she left to thank them for the support they provided her. “I will remember Chloe for the rest of my life.”
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