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 »Autumn Statement brings good news (for now) on LHA
Posted: November 23, 2023 Filed under: Affordable housing, Local housing allowance, Permitted development, Temporary accommodation | Tags: Autumn Statement Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
The good news in Jeremy Hunt’s speech is that the government has finally listened to all the arguments about soaring rents, evictions and homelessness and Local Housing Allowance (LHA) rates will be linked to private rents again from next April.
The bad news buried in the background documents to his Autumn Statement is that rates will be frozen again for the four years after that, recreating the shortfalls between housing benefit and rents for tenants and generating all the costs of homelessness that led to the lifting of the freeze in the first place.
It’s not much of a way to run a benefits system or a housing system but it is entirely in keeping with an Autumn Statement characterised by even more smoke and mirrors than a usual Budget.
That’s amply demonstrated by the most headline-grabbing measure: the cut in National Insurance will not actually mean a tax cut for households hit by a continued freeze in the thresholds for income tax, although it does at least benefit workers (who pay NI and income tax) rather than landlords and shareholders (who only pay income tax).
And the cuts in NI and business tax are made possible in the first place by more sleight of hand: as the accompanying report from the Office for Budget Responsibility reveals, they only add up thanks to unfeasibly large cuts in public services and a freeze (aka significant real terms cut) in capital spending after the next election.
Needless to say that leaves next to no room for investment in new social homes or the decarbonisation of the existing stock even though the real value of both continues to be squeezed by inflation.
Instead, beneath the surface of the statement, there are signs of a desperate search for policies that are not affected by the squeeze on public spending.
Read the rest of this entry »Warehousing poverty
Posted: February 6, 2020 Filed under: Permitted development, Poverty, Temporary accommodation | Tags: Panorama 2 CommentsMonday night’s Panorama provided a shocking window on the world of temporary accommodation and permitted development – but it also made me think back to an influential think-tank report from a decade ago.
The programme centred on Templefields House, a converted office block in Harlow run by property company Caridon. It provides temporary accommodation for local authorities across the South East but, according to the programme, also has a contract with an ex-offender re-housing charity.
There is no public transport and it’s 40 minutes’ walk from the town centre and, according to residents, the building is also rife with crime, anti-social behaviour and drugs and the police have been called out 600 times in three years.
The building, the company and another converted block it runs in Harlow, Terminus House, have featured in several previous media investigations of temporary accommodation and permitted development. See here, here and here for more details.
What was new in last night’s Panorama was the level of detail from residents and revelations from an undercover reporter.
10 things about 2019 – part two
Posted: December 31, 2019 Filed under: Decarbonisation, Housebuilding, Permitted development, Temporary accommodation, Welfare reform Leave a commentOriginally published on December 27 on my blog for Inside Housing.
The second part of my look back at 2019 runs from welfare homelessness to decarbonisation via housebuilding and permitted development.
5) ‘The systematic immiseration of millions’
The election result means that universal credit, the benefit cap, the bedroom tax and all the other welfare ‘reforms’ of the last decade are set to continue into the 2020s.
Chancellor Sajid Javid told us in the September spending round that austerity is over but the only hard evidence of this was an extra £40m for discretionary housing payments and previous cuts are still baked in to the system.
The election had delayed a full spending review until 2020 but better news came in November as the Conservative manifesto confirmed an end to the four-year freeze in most working age benefits, including the local housing allowance.
It remains to be seen, though, whether the government will restore the broken link with rents. It’s also worth noting that Esther McVey, the self-styled architect of Blue Collar Conservatism, called for part of housing benefit to be diverted into Help to Buy during her brief tilt at the Tory leadership.
I blogged about the deeper impacts on the housing system in a post from the Housing Studies Association conference in May that highlighted research on the ‘housing trilemma’ facing social landlords between their social mission, business imperatives and the impacts on tenants.
And the same month brought a damning external review from the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty that warned of ‘the systematic immiseration of millions’.
Professor Philip Alston noted ‘a striking and complete disconnect’ between the picture painted by ministers and what he had heard and seen from people across the UK.
As for the chief architect of it all, the year finished with the decade summed up in four words: Sir Iain Duncan Smith.
Beyond the good news on new homes
Posted: November 14, 2019 Filed under: Fire safety, Housebuilding, Temporary accommodation, Uncategorized | Tags: John Healey, Robert Jenrick Leave a commentOriginally posted on my blog for Inside Housing on November 14.
There was good news and bad news for the government in a new housing statistics out this week that illustrate the scale of the issues it still needs to address.
The good news is that housebuilding in England is up again: there were 241,000 net additional dwellings in 2018/19, an increase of 9% in the last 12 months and 93% in the last six years.
Net additional dwellings make up the government’s preferred measure of housing output and add together new build completions, conversions and change of use less demolitions.
That total is not just higher than at the previous peak of output before the financial crisis and credit crunch – it is also the highest total recorded since the government started collecting the data in this way in 1991/92.
Significantly, for the first time total net additions are higher than the 240,000 a year target that the last Labour government set in the wake of Kate Barker’s landmark review of housing supply in 2004
True, the big increase over the last six years also reflects just how low output had sunk in the wake of the credit crunch, and true a housing market downturn and recession in the building industry could yet derail progress.
However, with more recent council tax data indicating that annual output may now be over 250,000, the government’s target of 300,000 new homes a year by the mid-2020s no longer looks completely outlandish.
Indeed, a separate report from the Home Builders Federation (HBF) estimates that planning permissions were issued for 380,000 new homes in England in the year to June.
Housing secretary Robert Jenrick was quick to welcome the figures and make a campaigning point for the general election:
One more bit of good news is that the bulk of the net additions came from new build completions (213,660) rather than conversions of questionable quality (14,107 were delivered via permitted development, which was only a slight increase on 2017/18).
However, focussing purely on how many new homes were delivered does not tell us much about how the government is doing on other housing issues.
How ‘temporary’ became permanent
Posted: August 21, 2019 Filed under: Homelessness, Local government, Temporary accommodation, Welfare reform Leave a commentOriginally published on August 21 on my blog for Inside Housing.
Today’s report by the Children’s Commissioner on families in temporary accommodation is a shocking indictment of a system that has become institutionalised into permanence.
If you judge it by the types of building involved – the shipping containers and converted office blocks that make most of this morning’s press coverage – and you have the physical manifestation of what are almost the opposite of ‘homes’.
For all the effort put into finding ‘meanwhile’ sites for containers and despite the fact that some schemes are well designed and that many other forms of temporary accommodation are much worse, just look at the headlines for what the media makes of it.
Children’s Commissioner for England Anne Longfield speaks of containers that are ‘blisteringly hot in summer and freezing in the winter months’ and of ‘homes’ in office blocks converted under permitted development that are barely bigger than a parking space.
The rise and rise of short-term letting
Posted: April 4, 2019 Filed under: Permitted development, Private renting, Temporary accommodation | Tags: Airbnb Leave a commentOriginally published on April 4 as a blog for Inside Housing.
What do you think have been the two fastest-growing forms of housing over the last decade?
The trends since the financial crisis of falling home ownership, declining social renting and surging private renting have only recently shown signs of going into reverse and we’ve also seen the blurring of social and ‘affordable’ housing.
But you would struggle to fit two of the biggest changes highlighted in the 2019 edition of the UK Housing Review (launched on Thursday) into those three traditional categories.
First up is temporary accommodation. The latest stats show there that 82,000 homeless families were living in it in England in the year to June 2018, an increase of 71 per cent since 2011. Of these, 57,000 were in London.
Second is short-term lets through sites like Airbnb. There are no reliable stats on this but the latest data suggests there are now over 77,000 Airbnb listings in London, of which 43,000 are entire homes and 34,000 rooms or shared rooms.
It’s tempting to join the dots between those numbers and see a direct connection between these two forms of short-term letting, especially in London – the more permanent homes that are converted into short-term holiday lets on Airbnb the more temporary accommodation is likely to be needed. Neither of them is necessarily that short term or temporary.
Jules Birch 