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 »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 »Temporary accommodation, permanent shame
Posted: December 1, 2023 Filed under: Bed and breakfast, Homelessness, Temporary accommodation Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
Everywhere you look in the latest homelessness statistics, the scale of the crisis facing homeless families and local councils alike stares back at you.
The total number of homeless households in temporary accommodation (which can mean anything but) went past the record highs of the mid-2000s earlier this year and rose to another record of 105,750 in the 12 months to the end of June.
That’s up 1.2 per cent on the previous three months ago and 10.5 per cent on last year. The total included 68,070 families with 138,930 children (another record).
These figures are stark enough at a national level but in the worst-affected local authority, Newham, 50.2 out of every 1,000 households in Newham were in temporary accommodation.
But drill down further and the really shocking increases are in the numbers stuck at the most miserable end of the TA crisis in bed and breakfast hotels.
Read the rest of this entry »State of the housing nation
Posted: March 28, 2023 Filed under: Affordable housing, Bed and breakfast, Local housing allowance, Social housing | Tags: UK Housing Review Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
So where next? The publication of the UK Housing Review this week is a chance to take stock and ask where the housing system may be heading.
The sense is one of considerable flux, for home ownership as the housing market downturn continues, for private renting as the momentum behind increased regulation grows and for social housing as landlords face competing demands for scarce resources.
The paralysis of policy signalled by a Budget that mostly ignored housing could be just a temporary lull ahead of a UK general election.
As ever, the review puts all that into context. For starters, John Perry’s chapter on housing expenditure shows where total government support (in grants, loans and guarantees) for housing is going. The balance between the private market (59 per cent) and affordable housing (41 per cent) may not be quite as skewed as it was in the heyday of Help to Buy but it is still tilted in one direction.
The good news is that public spending on affordable homes has risen in real terms since the dark days of the coalition government. Investment under three Affordable Homes Programmes is set to peak this year – but the looming cliff edge is an indication of the big decisions that lie ahead:
Current spending plans (as in the Budget) rely on eye-watering (and unrealistic) austerity after the next election so that they comply with the chancellor’s fiscal rules. Key decisions lie ahead in the spending review after the next election regardless of who wins.
What is getting built is also skewed. There were 59,175 affordable housing completions in England in 2021/22, the highest for 11 years. However, more than 20,000 of those were for affordable home ownership and 28,000 for affordable rent, leaving just 7,528 for social rent (plus another 3,080 for similar London Affordable Rent).
Contrast that with Scotland, which managed 9,757 affordable completions in 2021/22 including almost as many social rent homes (7,306) despite having a population about a tenth of England’s.
Read the rest of this entry »The state of the (housing) nation
Posted: November 1, 2022 Filed under: Bed and breakfast, Decarbonisation, Homelessness, Housing market, Levelling up, Private renting, Social housing Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
The UK Housing Review Autumn Briefing Paper is published this week and as usual provides an invaluable guide to the state of the housing nation. Here are five graphs that illustrate key points about five different parts of the housing system:
Shifting rules on rents
What everyone wants to know, of course, is what will come in place of that purple line on the right but the graph is a reminder that so-called long-term deals on social housing rents can quickly disappear. The four-year rent reduction at the end of the 2020s that ended the previous one is now set to be succeeded by an annual increase significantly below the 11.1 per cent implied by the CPI plus 1 formula.
The decision is finely balanced between cost of living considerations and housing investment, with the existence of housing benefit making it much more complex than it was in the famous case of Clay Cross 50 years ago.
The Briefing Paper quotes estimates by Savills that a 5 per cent cap on rents in England (the government’s favoured option) would cost councils £500 million and housing associations up to £1 billion. One association says that even a 7 per cent cap would mean a 21 per cent reduction in new build and there are also major concerns about the impact on investment in existing stock and on supported housing.
A cap would help tenants not on housing benefit but the major beneficiary would be the Department for Work and Pensions unless its savings are reinvested in housing.
That point was really brought home to me when I interviewed the Welsh housing minister recently. She was only too aware that the more she restricts next year’s rent increase, as might be her instinct, the more savings will go straight back to Westminster, with zero chance of them coming back to Wales.
Read the rest of this entry »Wake-up call
Posted: December 15, 2016 Filed under: Bed and breakfast, Homelessness, Temporary accommodation Leave a commentOriginally published on December 15 on my blog for Inside Housing
If 2016 proves to be the year that the government finally woke up to the homelessness crisis, official figures released on Thursday show its true scale.
The latest statistics from the Department for Communities and Local Government show 14,930 households were accepted as homeless in the June to September quarter. The good news is that this is down 1% on the previous three months. The bad news is that it’s up 2% on 2015 and 45% on 2010.
Remember this is only the most visible part of the crisis – the families who are accepted as homeless and in priority need by local authorities – and that it is just the start of a wait for permanent accommodation.
That wait goes on for those already accepted as homeless. The figures also show that 74,630 households, including 117,520 children, were in temporary accommodation at the end of September. That’s up 9% on 2015 and 45% on 2010.
And the increases are greatest in the worst and least permanent forms of temporary accommodation. There were 6,680 households in bed and breakfasts, including 3,390 families with children: up 13% on 2015 and more than five times the figure in 2010.
Most shockingly of all, there were 1,300 families with children who had been in bed and breakfasts for more than the six-week legal limit. That’s up 24% on the same quarter in 2015 and is an incredible 13 times higher than in the quarter before the election of the coalition government in 2010.
Jules Birch 