For every child who has slept on a pavement in a country rich enough to prevent it. And for the residents of Central Hill, Cressingham Gardens and Westbury, whose homes were taken while the law looked away. FOREWORD In February 2026, a journalist working for ITV News documented something that had not previously been a feature of English public life: children as young as four years old sleeping on the streets, turned away from council offices that possessed both the legal power and the legal duty to prevent it. The story provoked shock, then anger, then a letter from the government to councils reminding them that the law was unambiguous. The law has always been unambiguous. Section 188 of the Housing Act 1996 is a short provision. It says, in terms that require no interpretation, that where a council has reason to believe an applicant may be homeless, eligible and in priority need, it must secure that accommodation is available. A household with dependent children is automatically in priority need. The threshold is deliberately low. The duty is deliberately immediate. Parliament designed the provision to ensure that no child would sleep on a street whilst a council conducted its inquiries. This book is an account of what has gone wrong and why. It is also an account of what was always wrong: of the families already in temporary accommodation being subjected to intimidatory visits, arbitrary deadlines and threats of distant displacement; of the council homes standing empty on estates in Lambeth whilst the council spent more than one hundred million pounds a year housing people in hotels; of the structural racial and disability disparities that mean it is disproportionately Black families and disabled people who find themselves sleeping rough or coerced out of the minimal shelter the state has provided them. I have written about these themes across a body of work that now spans several years and several books. This one is different. It is not a specialist work addressed to lawyers or academics, though it contains legal analysis sufficient to support either. It is a book addressed to anyone who wants to understand how England arrived at the moment when a four-year-old Afghan child slept on the pavement of a London borough for twelve nights whilst that borough's housing department processed its paperwork. The answer, as this book attempts to show, is not a single failure but a system of compounding failures: statutory duties and human rights breaches.