Mum of two forced to pay more than £1,000 in hotel costs because of rodent-infested home

Beverley Wood and her two teens have spent the last week in a caravan. But it’s no Easter getaway – just a temporary escape from the “absolute terror” of their rodent-infested home in Oldham.

The mum of two says she has spent more than £1,400 – almost all of her monthly income – on moving from one AirBnB to the next this month. Her two children, who are diagnosed with autism and find changes in their environment challenging, are "at their limit", she says.

But Beverley feels she has no choice. In almost two years of reporting her housing issues, the 45-year-old claims her housing association, Onward Homes, has done “nothing” to sort out what she suspects is a writhing rodent nest beneath the housing estate.

With money running out, Beverley – who works as a part-time teaching assistant – says the family will soon “have no option left” but to move back into their rat and mouse-infested home.

“We still don’t have a home,” she said. “I feel like I’m getting to the point where I’m running out of options. No one will help us.”

The trouble in her house, where she’s lived for five years, started when a smell started developing under the floorboards that was “so bad” it made her eldest “vomit” – and turned out to be a dead rat. Onward Homes refused to deal with the problem, according to Beverley, who was forced to pay out of pocket to move into a hotel.

“I was told on that occasion that the smell would go when the flesh had rotted off the bones of whatever died,” she said. And that was just the beginning.

“Then we started hearing scratching behind the walls,” the mum of two said. “Which is terrifying for children who’ve got additional needs. Scratching behind the mantlepiece. Scratching in the bedrooms.”

Beverley started finding mice and rats, dead and alive, all around the house.

Beverley has a connective tissue disorder and fibromyalgia, which causes her pain all over her body and means she cannot work full-time. Despite the physical challenge, she has spent hours – and more than £300 – trying to plug all the holes in her home with filler and glue guns to stop the mice and rats entering.

Repeated reports to Onward Homes, shown to the LDRS, have only resulted in a small number of traps being laid out in Beverley’s kitchen. But she has received no offers of compensation and has been denied temporary accommodation except for one two-day stay in a hotel last year, during which time she said “nothing happened – no one went to inspect the house”.

That’s despite the clear impact these living conditions are having on her children. Beverley showed the LDRS letters from social services and her daughter, Atlantis’ (15) school writing letters to plead with the housing association to take action or relocate the family.

“This family are now at crisis point and I am worried about what might happen,” the pastoral manager at her school wrote. Beverley also described how the frequent moves and dirty environment are causing emotional harm to her kids, causing autistic meltdowns, bedwetting and even occasions of self-harm.

And they’re not alone. Her neighbour Shauna Greenhalgh is also struggling to cope with the mice and rats. Both suspect it’s affecting the whole street.

“I’ve had mice run across my feet,” said Shauna. “I’ve had it where I’ve been cleaning up the girls’ room and they’ve jumped out of clothes boxes or toy boxes. I found a dead one in one of my girls’ beds.

“You can hear them in the walls. Downstairs in the living room you can literally feel the floors vibrating with things underneath your feet.”

Her three children – five-year-old Sophia, four-year-old Millie-Rae and baby Emmie-Rose – are too “petrified” to sleep in their own beds at night and they often end up bundled up in one room together.

She described how Sophie will get so upset she starts hyperventilating. “She’s five and she’s having panic attacks,” Shauna said.

“And I don’t sleep. I get paranoid that something’s crawling all over me. And I worry about the girls, so I’ll be up and down constantly making sure there’s no mice on the beds.”

Shauna, a single mum, has to clean constantly to keep the droppings away from her 22-month-old, and is constantly having to replace furniture and clothes ruined by gnawing.

The two neighbours believe there is a mouse or rat nest located under Shauna’s home and garden. At the end of last year, Onward Homes were called out to fix a sinkhole in Shauna’s garden, but within a month it had returned.

When approached for comment, a spokesperson for Onward said: “We recognise that this has been distressing for Ms Wood and Ms Greenhalgh and we are working to put things right.”

The spokesperson for the company, which manages more than 35,000 homes in the North West, claimed someone had visited Beverley’s home to investigate last month and installed “preventative measures to stop pests from accessing her home”.

They also said: “We have arranged a visit to Ms Greenhalgh’s home next week to investigate the issues raised and identify what works need to be carried out. We will complete any required works as soon as possible.

“We will contact both Ms Wood and Ms Greenhalgh to understand if they need any extra support from us during this time.”

Yet Beverley refutes that a proper “investigation” has taken place, with officers only briefly visiting her kitchen and laying rat poison out in her attic. Shauna claimed she had not been notified that an investigation was taking place next week.

Beverley contacted the council and her local MP on their behalf, who have informed us they are arranging a meeting with Onward Homes. A council spokesperson said they “sympathised fully with the family involved” and would be “raising this issue with the housing association” to sort the issue “as soon as possible”.

But after almost two years of struggling, the two mums feel like they’re at the end of their tether.

“It’s been traumatic for the kids,” Beverley said. “It’s not what we deserve. I just want to have a safe home.”