Overview

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. Author royalties will be donated to the charity Surviving Economic Abuse.

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9781788218641

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Reviews

An eye-opening and fascinating read from the very start. Debt is a subject not spoken about enough and this book reveals who’s really to blame. Everybody should read this book. -- Kwajo Tweneboa, campaigner, activist and author of Our Country in Crisis Debt Trap Nation is a chilling and eye-opening expose on how the British state keeps some of the most vulnerable women in society trapped in a cycle of debt, homelessness and domestic violence. With clarity and compassion, this book gives voice to those living at the sharpest edge of austerity, and makes an irrefutable case for change. -- Grace Blakeley, author of Vulture Capitalism Essential. A must-read. -- Vicky Spratt, i Paper’s Housing Correspondent and author of Tenants An urgent, illuminating book that lays bare just how deeply and devastatingly successive governments have let down those in need of a safe, secure place to live. The life-changing consequences for single mothers and children are harrowing; the cost of ignoring the stories and research uncovered by Debt Trap Nation is beyond measure. -- Dan Hewitt, ITV News Investigations Editor Debt Trap Nation is a shocking account of England’s hidden debt scandal, told through the eyes of families at the sharp end of a country in crisis. -- Darren McGarvey, author of Poverty Safari 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 An eviscerating study of the UK’s failing welfare state and the systematic abandonment of vulnerable families to homelessness, squalor, ill-health and despair. Debt Trap Nation offers irrefutable evidence of why state investment in safe and affordable social housing is the only practicable solution to a deepening social crisis. -- Imogen Tyler, Professor of Sociology, Lancaster University, and Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences This wonderful book vividly captures the lived reality of poverty in the UK. It exposes the callousness and ignorance (not to mention misogyny) that all too often drives societal responses to the plight of single mothers and their children. A major achievement of the book is that it identifies crucial and feasible steps that could be taken to transform the lives of those affected as well as society itself. -- Philip Alston, former UN Human Rights Council Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, and John Norton Pomeroy Professor of Law, New York University The book serves as a beacon of hope by showing how reimagining policy could deliver economic justice. In this way it represents a compelling call to action. -- Nicola Sharp-Jeffs OBE, founder of Surviving Economic Abuse A moving book with incisive analysis about structures and systems of indebtedness that subjugate the poor to lives of radical uncertainty. Especially important is Brickell and Nowicki’s argument that such debt extends beyond homelessness, turning housing itself into a trap. For all those concerned with understanding and dismantling racial capitalism, this book is a must-read. -- Ananya Roy, Professor of Urban Planning, Social Welfare and Geography, University of California Los Angeles Brickell and Nowicki powerfully capture the brutal everyday realities faced by a growing number of women and children caught in the violent grip of debt traps. Their cogent analysis is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the inner workings of contemporary capitalism. -- Susanne Soederberg, Canada Research Chair in Just and Inclusive Cities, Queen’s University Equal parts sobering analysis and searing portrait, Debt Trap Nation brings readers face to face with the realities of family homelessness in England today while dissecting the systematic policy choices that produce it. -- David Madden, Associate Professor in Sociology, London School of Economics Incisive and clear, Debt Trap Nation shows how the interlinked crises of debt and homelessness are impacting the lives and wellbeing of single mothers and their children. This is an urgent call to action to end an increasingly punitive welfare system. -- Alva Gotby, author of Feeling at Home

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 Bricknell and Nowicki’s book explains why sticking plasters and platitudes are not enough. -- Danny Dorling, 1971 Professor of Geography, University of Oxford

Author Information

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 Geography at Oxford Brookes University, and Visiting Reader in Urban Geography at King's College London. She is the author of Bringing Home the Housing Crisis: Politics, Precarity and Domicide in Austerity London (2023), The Growing Trend of Living Small: A Critical Approach to Shrinking Domesticities (2023) and Reconstructing the American Dream: Inside the Tiny House Nation (2025).

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