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 »Three years on from Grenfell, where does the buck stop on fire safety?
Posted: June 12, 2020 Filed under: Fire safety | Tags: Grenfell Tower, HCLG committee 3 CommentsThis Sunday is the third anniversary of the Grenfell Tower fire. There are still 2,000 high-risk residential buildings out there with dangerous cladding.
Let that sink in for a second because it’s easy to let time obscure the scale of the problem if you’ve followed the twists and turns of the cladding saga since 2017 from afar.
Not so easy if you are one of the tens of thousands of people living in thousands of flats in those buildings. In a survey released by the UK Cladding Action Group on Thursday, 23 per cent of residents said they had felt suicidal or a desire to self-harm as a result.
This morning (Friday) the all-party Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee describes the situation as ‘deeply shocking and completely unacceptable’ in a report that lacerates the government’s slow and inadequate response. The committee has a Conservative majority but is doing an increasingly impressive job of holding ministers to account. Read the rest of this entry »
The implications of the leasehold scandal
Posted: March 19, 2019 Filed under: Housebuilding, Housing associations, Leasehold | Tags: HCLG committee Leave a commentOriginally published on March 19 as a blog for Inside Housing.
The leasehold scandal will have far-reaching implications for housing that will be felt well beyond the major housebuilders with whom it began.
A report published by the all-party Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee on Tuesday takes as its starting point the doubling ground rents and onerous contract terms faced by buyers of new homes who it says were treated ‘not as homeowners or customers but as a source of steady profit’.
And it also highlights the issue of leaseholders facing huge bills to remove and replace combustible cladding raised in its work on fire safety.
But this report goes well beyond those recent high-profile problems with leasehold and poses some fundamental questions about a tenure that only exists in England and Wales – and they are ones that will require answers by social landlords as well as private sector housebuilders and freeholders.
Jules Birch 