Good morning. I’m Isabella McRae, and this is Survival Guide, the Big Issue’s cost of living newsletter.

Every so often, you read a statistic or a news story that reminds you it can still be horribly tough to be a woman in the workplace. And this was one of them for me: 74,000 women in the UK lose their jobs while pregnant or taking maternity leave each year. 

It’s a sharp rise over the last decade – up by 20,000 since 2016. In this newsletter, we meet Rhiannon, who is among those women. She experienced workplace “bullying” while pregnant and lost her job during her maternity leave. It’s pretty clear we still need change.

Campaign group Pregnant Then Screwed is calling for companies to be held accountable.

Later on in this newsletter, we also meet a refugee who was facing homelessness and now is being helped by an innovative new scheme. It pairs up landlords with refugees like Ibrahim at risk of being on the streets.

If you’ve got a story to share, we want to listen. Get in touch at isabella.mcrae@bigissue.com or share your story here.

Rhiannon's story: 'It has scarred me for life'

Rhiannon was made redundant during her maternity leave last year. She claims workplace “bullying” started as soon as she told her manager she was pregnant.

She urged companies to recognise how “debilitating” pregnancy can be. “I really suffered with morning sickness. Believe me, before I was pregnant, I used to think people were putting it on as well. But it’s difficult to imagine spending an hour of your morning stewing and then going into work.”

The mum of two says she rang her HR department in tears once a week, and she got an occupational health assessment to show that she was suffering with health problems during her pregnancy. She brought her maternity leave forward, using her annual leave, during which she was made redundant.

Rhiannon cut her maternity leave short to secure another job – she was due to be off until March but she went back to work in November last year. With her first child, she had suffered from postpartum depression and she had promised herself she would take more time off and enjoy the newborn stage more.

“I was robbed of that, really,” the 34-year-old from South Wales says.

A new law came into force in April 2024 to extend redundancy protections to pregnant women and those returning from maternity leave. However, the findings from Pregnant Then Screwed suggest there is more work to be done.

“I don’t plan on getting pregnant ever again,” Rhiannon says. “It has scarred me for life.”

Read the full story here.

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This innovative scheme uses spare rooms to house homeless refugees after Home Office backlog blitz

Syrian refugee Ibrahim was one of thousands of people living in asylum hotels who found themselves suddenly homeless in London back in 2023. Now he’s being helped into a stable home thanks to an innovative homelessness prevention programme.

A change in Home Office policy in 2023 changed the way the move-on period – a “grace period” given for newly-recognised refugees to leave Home Office accommodation – was handled while the then-Tory government made an influx of asylum decisions to clear the backlog.

That saw thousands of new refugees turfed out of hotels and other accommodation at less than a month’s notice and forced to immediately apply for council support to avoid homelessness.

Ibrahim, a concrete carpenter from Syria, was among them. Getting nowhere with the council, he turned to frontline organisations and night shelters – but he was still no closer to leaving homelessness behind. 

Housing Justice’s refugee lodgings programme stepped in. The charity teamed up with the Greater London Authority to come up with a solution and settled on a refugee lodgings programme beginning in March 2024.

That involves pairing a refugee facing homelessness with a residential landlord who is willing to offer up their spare room for a six-month placement.

The idea is that the placement gives breathing room to work on longer-term housing solutions as well as employment and training, language or swimming classes or whatever it is that the lodger is looking to do with their lives.

For their part, the resident landlord receives a tax-free income up to £7,500 per year with rent paid through housing benefit as well as a contribution to bills.

Read the full story.