Why Labour Housing Group’s invest to save approach is needed to resolve the temporary accommodation crisis
A safe, stable, and decent home is a foundational building block for life. Home is our space away from the rest of the world where we can relax and feel secure. However, in England, 140,000 children head into 2024 living not in a ‘home’ at all, but instead living in temporary accommodation (TA).
To put it in context that’s the equivalent of over 4,600 classes of children, or 220 entire primary schools. Or the entire population of Watford! The numbers are huge, and they are only going up (this figure was a 14 per cent increase on the previous year). Behind every number is a child and a family. Some will stay there a few days but more often stays in TA last months and even years. Almost certainly their TA will be overcrowded and all too often it will be of poor quality.
The reality of this situation is often children having to share beds with siblings or parents and babies with no safe sleeping space at all. Young children with no safe place to play, and older children with nowhere to do their homework. Children are getting to school tired and late having travelled long distances to their schools (having often been placed out of area). Parents losing their jobs because the length of commute to work is now impossible. Stressed-out parents struggling to feed their children decent meals without any suitable cooking facilities. Families are living in limbo and moving frequently, with constant uncertainty and insecurity.
TA is a broad term and can include B&Bs, hostels, hotels, private rented houses or flats, and council or housing association properties. TA has an important role to play in emergencies: providing short-term housing until settled accommodation can be secured. However, this is where things have come seriously unstuck. A chronic shortage of new social housing under successive governments, rapidly rising private rents, a local housing allowance that has failed to consistently keep pace with inflation, all coupled with a cost of living crisis, means more and more households are finding themselves forced into homelessness and ending up in TA.
The reasons for ending up in TA are the same reasons that people find themselves stuck there for increasingly long periods – there is nowhere affordable or suitable to move people onto. Data from Shelter in 2022 revealed two-thirds of families living in TA have been there for more than 12 months, and this rises to more than four-fifths in London. Some families have been living in TA for more than 10 years. Ten years – this means some children have only ever lived in temporary accommodation never knowing or having the security of a fixed home.
This is no longer a temporary housing solution; it is becoming an unofficial tenure in itself.
Whilst very difficult for the families affected, TA is also very challenging for local authorities. As we see more and more councils teetering on the brink of Section 114 notices, recent figures released by DLUHC show that from April 2022-March 2023 £1.74 billion was spent by councils on temporary accommodation. In some cases, councils are using between one fifth and one half of their total available financial resources on it. This is unsustainable but it doesn’t have to be this way.
In summer 2023 Labour Housing Group set up a working group to look at the issue of families in TA. After consulting with the wider housing and homelessness sector, the group has now produced a working paper with a framework of essential actions for the next Labour government. With the situation growing worse by the day, the premise of the framework is to ensure that TA is a priority for the first 100 days of a new administration.
Solving this crisis and releasing people from the grips of TA will require a long-term ‘invest to save’ approach.
There will be an online launch for Labour Housing Group’s policy paper on temporary accommodation on Tuesday the 27th of February at 10am. Register for that here.
Read a summary of the report here, and click here for the full report.
Hannah Keilloh is an experienced Policy and Practice Officer at the Chartered Institute of Housing, specialising in homelessness, domestic abuse, and planning.