Starmer reassures and worries on homelessness
Posted: July 28, 2025 Filed under: Bed and breakfast, Homelessness, Temporary accommodation Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
If you’re looking for a chink of light ahead of the promised government strategy on homelessness, the number of homeless households living in bed and breakfasts (B&Bs) is down for the third quarter in succession.
But it’s only a chink since government figures for the end of March saw the total number of homeless households (131,140) and children (169,050) in temporary accommodation rise to new records.
At the most expensive and temporary end of the spectrum, there were 3,870 families with children in B&Bs, down 28 per cent since Labour took power in July 2024. Of those, 2,300 had been there for longer than the six-week legal limit, a decline of 39 per cent.
However, those falls were more than matched by an increase in the use of nightly paid, privately managed accommodation. This is also expensive and temporary but self-contained so that families do not have to share a bathroom and kitchen.
This sub-sector took off after 2013 when the coalition government tried in vain to cut use of B&Bs and private landlords and management companies realised they could charge more on a nightly basis than for longer-term leases.
Over the next seven years, the number of homeless households in nightly paid accommodation doubled and since 2020 it has almost doubled again to 46,710. Since Labour came to power the number of families with children in non-B&B nightly paid accommodation has increased by 27 per cent to 32,160.
Of those, more than half (17,810) had been there for more than a year and 14 per cent (4,640) for more than five years.
By contrast, there were just under 25,990 households in private sector leased accommodation, roughly the same as in 2013 despite a doubling in the total numbers in temporary accommodation overall.
Trends like these highlight what’s at stake in the homelessness strategy both for homeless families stuck in temporary accommodation and for local authorities creaking under the strain of paying for it .
Read the rest of this entry »What’s at stake in the spending review?
Posted: June 3, 2025 Filed under: Affordable housing, Decarbonisation, Help to Buy, Homelessness, Housebuilding, Housing benefit, Rents | Tags: spending review Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
With a week to go until the most consequential spending review for ten years, the Treasury is facing desperate last-ditch lobbying from departments that have yet to agree their settlement.
Last week’s public intervention by chief constables warning that the government will fail to meet its pledges on crime unless they get more cash is sign enough of that.
So too the leaked memo from deputy prime minister Angela Rayner setting out options for higher taxes that was inevitably followed by more leaks about her spending priorities.
As of this week, the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) was said to be one of the departments yet to agree a settlement, alongside the Home Office, with the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero just finalising one..
By contrast with previous spending reviews, housing starts with the advantage of having a politically powerful secretary of state in charge – and Angela Rayner has repeatedly promised ‘the biggest boost to social and affordable housing in a generation’.
But the ‘biggest boost’ can mean many different things, some of them genuine, some of them not remotely up to the challenge of the moment.
Read the rest of this entry »Smart thinking on homelessness
Posted: May 20, 2025 Filed under: Homelessness, Wales Leave a commentOriginally 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.
Read the rest of this entry »Short-term fixes and long-term solutions to the temporary accommodation crisis
Posted: April 3, 2025 Filed under: Bed and breakfast, Temporary accommodation | Tags: HCLG committee Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
If anyone needs any reminding, two new reports reveal the depth and breadth of the crisis in temporary accommodation in England.
On Thursday the all-party Housing, Communities and Local Government (HCLG) Committee published the results of its inquiry into the ‘utterly shameful’ situation in a report that spells out the consequences for 164,000 children’s health, wellbeing, safety and education.
The report reveals safeguarding risks including families with children ending up in the same temporary accommodation as strangers with a history of domestic violence or recently released prisoners.
It highlights the huge costs of temporary accommodation (£2.3 billion and rising) and the consequences for local authorities but also raises serious questions about whether the legal framework and code of guidance are fit for purpose.
And it raises issues ranging from the increasingly theoretical six-week legal limit families with children to be placed in bed and breakfasts(B&Bs) to use of multi-occupancy hostels that have the same shared kitchens and bathrooms but do not count as B&Bs to inadequate procedures for out-of-area placements.
To focus on just one of the knock-on effects, last week the Children’s Commissioner published research revealing a direct link between lack of a permanent home and a child’s performance at school. The more times a child moves home while at school the worse they do in their GCSEs.
Read the rest of this entry »A scandal that calls for permanent solutions
Posted: January 24, 2025 Filed under: Bed and breakfast, Homelessness, Temporary accommodation Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
Think of all the elements of the grim inheritance bequeathed to this government by the last one and perhaps the grimmest is the almost 160,000 children living, and sometimes dying, in temporary accommodation.
Homelessness minister Rushanara Ali called it ‘an absolute scandal’ in the Commons on Monday and ‘devastating’ at a Housing, Communities and Local Government (HCLG) Committee hearing on Tuesday.
One committee member spoke of meeting a constituent before Christmas who had been in ‘temporary’ accommodation for 14 years, so the entire period of Conservative-led government between 2010 and 2024.
This morning a report from the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) calls it ‘unacceptable’ and ‘alarming’ that almost 6,000 homeless families with children are in bed and breakfast, the worst form of temporary accommodation that is no longer the last resort the guidance says it should be.
Of those, almost 4,000 have been in B&B beyond the increasingly theoretical six-week legal limit, a figure that is 23 times higher than in 2010.
It is a scandal that comes at a huge cost for local authorities: £3.1 billion a year for homelessness services, including £2.1 billion for temporary accommodation at the latest count.
All this should be enough on its own to condemn the Tory inheritance but it is just part of a broader failure highlighted by the PAC.
Read the rest of this entry »Why Labour must act after shameful Tory record on homelessness
Posted: November 28, 2024 Filed under: Bed and breakfast, Homelessness, Temporary accommodation Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
Another quarter, another new record in the number of homeless people and children living in temporary accommodation.
Take any measure you like and the homelessness statistics published today are beyond grim.
There are now 123,100 households in temporary accommodation including 78,420 families with 159,380 children.
All of these numbers are moving in the wrong direction, up around 5 per cent in the last three months and 15 per cent on a year ago – and all of them are the highest ever recorded in statistics that go back 20 years or more.
Within those numbers, there are 5,910 homeless families with children living in bed and breakfasts and – most shameful of all – 3,770 of them have been there beyond the six-week legal limit.
When local authorities are starting to shrug their shoulders as they break the law, pointing out plausibly that they have no other option, it must be a time for this government to act.
Read the rest of this entry »
Jules Birch 