Smart thinking on homelessness

Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.

Within the next few months the government will set out what it intends to do about homelessness and how it will pay for it.

A new report argues that the prospect of the homelessness strategy and spending review present it with ‘a vital opportunity to shift away from reactive measures towards a more proactive and preventative model’.

A smarter approach to homelessness, published by the Institute for Government and Centre for Homelessness Impact, makes clear that the current system is achieving the exact opposite.  

Rather than providing permanent homes, the system keeps families with young children in temporary accommodation at a cost that can easily be £30,000 a year or more, with social costs even higher than that thanks to the knock-on effects on education and health.

But even as they try to book temporary accommodation, councils can find themselves out-bid by companies acting for other parts of government for accommodation for asylum seekers and prison leavers.

Despite evidence that prevention costs many times less, cash-strapped local authorities are forced to ‘retreat to short-term reactive responses in fulfilment of their immediate legal obligations, despite their often exorbitant cost’, often raiding prevention budgets to pay for it.

Structural barriers, most obviously a lack of social housing, block progress while the system creates ‘perverse incentives’ that ‘actively encourage inefficiencies and poor outcomes’.

As the latest homelessness statistics show, the number of homeless families and children in temporary accommodation was still rising in the fourth quarter of 2024.

The numbers of bed and breakfast did at least show a second consecutive monthly fall, but the numbers in nightly-paid accommodation are still rising along and there are eight times as many out of area placements as when Labour was last in government.