Starmer reassures and worries on homelessness

Posted: July 28, 2025 | Author: | Filed under: Bed and breakfast, Homelessness, Temporary accommodation | Leave a comment

Originally 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 .

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A year of progress for Labour still leaves major gaps to be filled

Posted: July 4, 2025 | Author: | Filed under: Fire safety, Homelessness, Leasehold, Planning, Private renting, Social housing, Welfare reform | Leave a comment

Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.

A year into the Labour government how should we assess its record on housing?

It’s not hard to find reasons to celebrate, from the spending review announcement of £39 billion for the Affordable Homes Programme to the creation of a National Housing Bank within Homes England armed with an extra £16 billion in financial transactions capital.

Social rent is the priority after years when it was under threat of extinction and will account for 60 per cent of the renamed Social and Affordable Homes Programme (SAHP).

Social landlords have got what they asked for on rents and the long-term plan for social and affordable housing sets out how they must improve their existing homes, professionalise their staff and give tenants more access to information. 

The prospect of new financial flexibilities for local authorities and restrictions on the Right to Buy offer council housing its best opportunity in years to escape the straitjacket imposed by central government. 

But there are still many gaps to be filled when Labour sets out its wider plans in a long-term housing strategy and publishes its homelessness strategy. 

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Labour’s plan for ‘a decade of renewal’

Posted: July 2, 2025 | Author: | Filed under: Affordable housing, Council housing, Rents, Right to buy, Social housing | Leave a comment

Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.

The spending review may have given us the headlines but a flurry of announcements on Wednesday fills in much of the detail about what the government is calling ‘a decade of renewal for social and affordable housing’.

On new homes, a key question was how the £39 billion will be spent over the next 10 years and, in particular, what the trade-off will be between maximising total output of affordable homes and giving greater priority to social rent. 

That got an answer in an overnight press release: a renamed Social and Affordable Homes Programme (SAHP) is forecast to deliver 300,000 homes over the ten years (30,000 a year), of which at least 180,000 (18,000 a year or 60 per cent) will be for social rent. 

To put this in perspective, the current AHP was originally meant to produce 180,000 affordable homes over the five years from 2021 to 2026 (36,000 a year) but rising construction costs cut that to between 110,000 and 130,000 (22,000 to 26,000 a year. Of those, just 40,000 (8,000 a year) are forecast to be for social rent.

Importantly, strategic partnerships will be able to bid for funds over the lifetime of the programme, which should give at least some protection from the risk of cuts if a government more hostile to housing wins the next election.

Another trade-off is the split between London, where higher land prices and construction costs mean more grant per home is needed, and the rest of the country. 

Under the current AHP, the Greater London Authority (GLA) got £4.1 billion (36 per cent) and Homes England £7.4 billion (64 per cent) of the grant available. 

Under SAHP, the GLA’s share will be cut to 30 per cent or up to £11.7 billion. It’s hard to reconcile that with the fact that more than half of the 126,000 homeless households stuck in temporary accommodation waiting for a social home are from London. 

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Does the spending review live up to the hype?

Posted: June 12, 2025 | Author: | Filed under: Affordable housing, Fire safety, Homelessness, Housebuilding, Rents, Social housing | Tags: | Leave a comment

Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.

This spending review represents a good start on housing – but it must only be a start. 

Highlights of the package delivered by chancellor Rachael Reeves on Wednesday included £39 billion over 10 years for the Affordable Homes Programme (AHP) and a 10-year rent settlement of CPI plus 1 per cent for social landlords.

Then add a consultation on the return of rent convergence, £1 billon extra for cladding remediation and equal access to government funds, £2.5 billon in low-interest loans plus for social landlords. 

Stir and combine with £950 million for councils to increase the supply of temporary accommodation, £10 billion in financial transactions to boost private investment and more to come for infrastructure and land remediation in Cambridge and the new towns, and this looks like great work by deputy prime minister Angela Rayner and the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG).

But does the spending review really justify the headlines and is it really as ‘transformative’ as some in the sector are making out?

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What’s at stake in the spending review?

Posted: June 3, 2025 | Author: | Filed under: Affordable housing, Decarbonisation, Help to Buy, Homelessness, Housebuilding, Housing benefit, Rents | Tags: | Leave a comment

Originally 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.

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Smart thinking on homelessness

Posted: May 20, 2025 | Author: | Filed under: Homelessness, Wales | Leave a comment

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.

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An unequal struggle for housing

Posted: May 1, 2025 | Author: | Filed under: Home ownership, Inequality, Social housing, Tax | Leave a comment

Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.

Housing seems such a natural engine of inequality that it’s easy to forget that the opposite was once true.

For most of the 20th century housing was the force that made society more equal. Council housing and rent control improved standards, made homes more affordable and tackled exploitation of tenants by private landlords. 

Owner-occupation expanded -perhaps 10 per cent of the population owned their own home in 1914 but that proportion expanded to a third by 1939, half by the start of the 1970s and two-thirds by the mid-1980s – while the proportion of homes rented from a private landlords fell from almost 90 per cent in 1918 to less than 10 per cent by the early 1990s. 

And then things went into reverse. A fascinating chapter by Susan Smith in this year’s UK Housing Review explores how this happened and what can be done about it. 

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Short-term fixes and long-term solutions to the temporary accommodation crisis

Posted: April 3, 2025 | Author: | Filed under: Bed and breakfast, Temporary accommodation | Tags: | Leave a comment

Originally 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.

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Spring Statement glow could soon fade

Posted: March 27, 2025 | Author: | Filed under: Affordable housing, Housebuilding, Welfare reform | Tags: | Leave a comment

Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.

Just for a change, housing looks like one of the winners from the Spring Statement – but is everything quite what it seems?

On housebuilding overall, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) gave Rachel Reeves a big boost as it delivered a positive verdict on the planning reforms introduced by the government in the Autumn. 

The chancellor boasted in her speech that measures such as the new National Planning Policy Framework, the release of ‘grey belt’ land and the restoration of mandatory housing targets would permanently boost GDP by 0.2 per cent by 2029/30 and 0.4 per cent within ten years. 

She said: ‘That is the biggest positive growth impact that the OBR have ever reflected in their forecast, for a policy with no fiscal cost.’

Just as good for the chancellor was the watchdog’s forecast on housing numbers: ‘The OBR have concluded that our reforms will lead to housebuilding reaching a 40-year high of 305,000 a year by the end of the forecast period,’ she said. ‘And changes to the National Planning Policy Framework alone will help build over 1.3 million homes in the UK over the next five years, taking us within touching distance of delivering our manifesto promise to build 1.5 million homes in England in this parliament.’ 

The chancellor phrased that carefully but the Treasury press release was more gung-ho as it boasted that this would be ‘bringing the UK one step closer to its Plan for Change mission to build 1.5 million homes’.

That really would be good news, since almost nobody believes the target can be met, but read that paragraph again and you may spot a problem with it.

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What does ‘the biggest boost in a generation’ really mean?

Posted: March 19, 2025 | Author: | Filed under: Affordable housing, Social housing | Leave a comment

Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.

What’s not to like about the prospect of ‘the biggest boost to social and affordable housing in a generation’?

The promise often repeated by Angela Rayner is the best evidence yet that the Labour government’s ambitions for housing are about more than just its headline pledge of 1.5 million new homes in this parliament.

‘The biggest boost’ certainly sounds impressive, generational even, but (unless I’ve missed it) I have not seen an explanation of what it actually means. The answer – inevitably – is that it depends.

Does the deputy prime minister mean the biggest boost in investment or the biggest boost in the number of social and affordable homes? They are not quite the same thing – and there are other questions that flow from that.

In a similar vein, how does this relate to Labour’s broader target of 1.5 million additional homes over this parliament? 

The government has sometimes given the impression that if the target be met (a very big if) then a big increase in affordable housing will inevitably flow from that via Section 106.

But all the evidence suggests that this is the wrong way around and that it can only hope to come close to 1.5 million homes if a significant proportion of them are affordable. 

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