If anyone should know the answers it’s the mums who come to the Magpie Project, a drop-in playgroup-cum-support service, and the volunteers who run it.

Twice a week, in a community centre off Romford Road, an ungentrified high street in Forest Gate, east London, it is a haven for mums with children under five who are homeless, in temporary or emergency accommodation, or insecure housing.

Everywhere young children are happily squealing and running about. A tangle of prams forms near the door. Play-Doh is resting on a table, waiting to be played with. Mums are chatting.

At first glance this scene could be any playgroup in the country. A few details, however, jump out: a young mum is sizing up two winter coats for her two-year-old and a volunteer passes out packs of nappies.

The coats were probably donated by other local mums – once the project’s volunteers find out a specific item is needed, they put a call out to an informal network of Newham mums. The nappies are offered to counter a specific problem.

“We found that mums were taking so long between nappy changes trying to eke out the nappies,” Jane Williams

“We found that mums were taking so long between nappy changes trying to eke out the nappies, that we were seeing really, really, sore, sore, sore bums,” explains Jane Williams, who founded the Magpie Project.

Many of the mums here have no recourse to public funds, due to their immigration status.

Placed in emergency accommodation by social services under the council’s ‘Section 17’ duties towards their children, they subsist on £37 a week.

In Newham this is often given in vouchers for the supermarket Iceland – which, devastatingly for mums of small children, locally does not stock nappies or formula. Mums are left to rely on food banks and help from friends; some even use powdered milk or custard instead of formula.

Ms Williams, a governor of a nearby children’s centre, started the Magpie Project after noticing so few of the mums in temporary accommodation locally were accessing their services. They weren’t able to engage with the children’s centre because their most basic needs weren’t being met, Ms Williams says. Among these needs, she says, are “having somewhere to cook, being able to keep themselves and their children clean, feeling safe, and also just having the information or being mentally and emotionally well enough to be able to get through the door at this children’s centre”.

The Magpie Project started as a seven-week pilot with the support of the children’s centre, but was so successful it decided to carry on – although it only has funding to run until April. Staffed by volunteers (an ex-head teacher, a midwife on maternity leave, a health visitor, an artist), the project runs twice a week in a space donated by a local charity. Ms Williams is the only paid staff member, with three days a week covered by a grant from the Stratford Development Partnership. A solicitor from the London Black Women’s Project provides legal help and someone from Shelter provides housing advice.

“The model was, if these mums just have somewhere to go, have a cup of tea, get their lunch, if they can’t get here on the bus [then] we pay their bus fare, and then their children just have somewhere clean and safe and spacious to play,” says Ms Williams.

“These are extreme circumstances, and trying to carry on any kind of parenting is almost impossible.”

Around 25 mums and children turn up to every session. “We’re getting about three new mums every time we open the doors – so that’s a little hectic,” Ms Williams says. Since the project began in June 2017, only eight of those mums have been rehoused – all outside the borough.

Many are stuck for protracted periods in unsuitable housing. “Especially mums who are not housed by housing but are housed by social services, are housed into these hotels that are truly horrifying.” says Ms Williams.

Many are homeless due to domestic abuse and “they’re already traumatised, and they’re already brutalised, and then they’re in this place where it’s noisy all night, there’s aggressive begging in the corridors, it’s filthy, there are drug addicts, there are people with mental health problems, there are people just out of prison – if you’ve got a small child, it’s absolutely terrifying”.

“These are extreme circumstances, and trying to carry on any kind of parenting in that situation is almost impossible.”

Even basics like potty training are a challenge, leading to toddlers being kept in nappies longer than they need to be. “[In] a lot of these places it’s three fire doors between you and the nearest toilet – you don’t know whether it’s going to be accessible, you don’t know whether it’s going to be clean. It’s so difficult,” Ms Williams says.

“And nutrition – we’re finding a lot of difficulties with mums feeding babies because they don’t have access to anywhere to cook. So all of the advice of freshly cooked vegetables is very, very difficult. And mums are in the situation where they either queue to use the cooker for about four hours, with their child with them, or they get a takeaway.

“I think the main thing that we’re trying to combat is the guilt and the stress when everything inside you as a mother is telling you that you have to do all of these things for your child, but you are thwarted in being able to do them by your circumstances.”

The Magpie Project focuses on families with under fives because they are particularly vulnerable and it is a crucial age for child development. Ms Williams points out that it’s impossible to know how many are homeless at this young age because the official statistics don’t track age and can’t differentiate between a newborn and a teenager.

“Once a child reaches five, they are being looked for by schools, by regulatory bodies. Under five, people are not looking for your child. So it’s so easy for a child to get lost in the system,” she explains.