By Janani Paramsothy, Associate Director – Social Housing
This is the first of a series of social housing focus articles addressing the big issues facing social landlords, residents and communities today. This article focuses on the topic of temporary accommodation in England.
Temporary accommodation is not fit for purpose.
There is nowhere the housing crisis is felt more acutely in the country than in the hardship of temporary accommodation, and yet the impetus for change here has been slower to arrive. There is broad acknowledgement that insufficient affordable housing is driving the current overreliance on a model only ever intended for very short periods of time, and many in the sector are working to resolve this. However, the resulting effects in the meantime have largely been left to continue by decision makers and service providers.
The time for change is long overdue. This is highlighted by this sobering report from the Housing, Communities & Local Government Select Committee, the headlines of which are summarised below, and compounded by the well-documented financial difficulties of many local authorities.
What is temporary housing?
Essentially what it says on the tin, and not officially a tenure in itself, temporary Accommodation (TA) was intended to house those who had become homeless until they could find more permanent lodgings. Local authorities have a statutory duty to provide this for certain groups of individuals, including those with dependent children. This can essentially take any form – from local authorities renting private homes to paying for rooms hotels and bed and breakfasts (B&Bs).
Why has it been unsuccessful?
Unlike what it says on the tin, TA has evolved to become a long-term housing solution for hundreds of thousands of people, with over 123,000 households living in it at last count in June 2024. This is the highest in Europe according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development1. Additionally, as of March 2024, some 16,790 families had been in their TA for over five years. TA is not regulated or overseen robustly and this has caused a perfect storm of:
1. Rising costs in the billions of pounds
Local authorities spent £2.29bn on TA in 2023/2024 while London Boroughs alone spend a combined total of £4m per day on provision. A significant proportion of this is not recoverable from the welfare budget leaving many local authorities facing serious budgetary problems. Regardless of which budget the money comes out of, it remains a significant strain on the public purse.
2. Poor quality
The Children’s Commissioner found in 2020 that temporary accommodation was simply unsuitable for families, a finding reinforced forcefully by the recent select committee report into the issue. Indeed, the issues would suggest it is unsuitable for anyone, let alone children.
Quality concerns span serious hazards, severe overcrowding (older children having to share beds with parents, no space for babies and toddlers to learn how to walk or crawl) and extremely poor or inadequate facilities from hygiene facilities to cooking to availability of the internet.
The Select Committee report draws attention to an alarming statistic the TA having been a contributing factor in the deaths of at least 74 children, of whom 58 were under the age of one. It may not be acceptable to constrain the supply of much needed TA, but in light of this news, it may be considered unacceptable that any property is being accepted regardless of its very severe impact on those it is housing.
3. Safeguarding concerns
Prolonged periods in B&Bs unlawfully exposes children and vulnerable adults to safeguarding risks. This includes sharing communal facilities with strangers, including those with a history of domestic abuse, as well as sharing the space with individuals who have left prison without a pathway to a stable home.
4. Geographically misplaced
Rising demand has led to out of area placements which has a host of negative outcomes as families are removed from their support systems and service providers. The report finds examples of placing local authorities failing to notify the host authority where they are sending residents to. Schools, GPs and other public bodies are also not joined up with the housing situation leading to gaps in provision and oversight.
How can we fix this
The Select Committee makes a number of eminently sensible recommendations including:
- Introducing a requirement for local authorities to inspect housing before it is first used as TA and whenever new residents are placed in the property.
- Introducing a duty to notify between local authorities and a formalised notification system to support information sharing with other public bodies.
- Extending Awaab’s law on timely remediation of damp and mould to this sector.
- Consult on capping the distance families can be moved out of area into TA.
- Develop central oversight and strategy of a heavily decentralised area, bringing this forward in the Government’s homelessness strategy, which the Committee calls for by July of this year.
- Introduce funding and support for local authorities to acquire their own TA.
- Rethink the model for homelessness prevention grant, which is currently ringfenced for prevention, taking away the current urgent need to spend more.
- Evaluate the link between welfare reforms and homelessness particularly regarding the freeze of local housing allowance which has pushed the private rental sector out of reach for many.
While this should form the base of action, there is scope and need to go further to provide a long term, sustainable and financially viable solution. The difficulties experienced with public finances and political will to spend has become abundantly clear and therefore the starting position must be an emergency injection of funds to relieve the public purse at a time where it is not able to continuously provide more. A core part of that must be ethically driven private investment.
Small steps have started to be taken – for example, Lloyds Bank announced in 2024 that it would buy quality housing itself and work in partnership with housing associations and local authorities to lower the costs of providing TA. An initial pilot scheme began in Cambridge in August. It also made a £200m financing commitment to enable smaller housing providers to increase TA provision themselves.
While this is welcome news, the scale of the emergency requires more substantive and faster action. There is a real opportunity for social impact focussed investors and lenders to drive real change in a part of the sector that needs it sorely.
The resident voice and their experience of the system has also been overlooked in the face of the significant problems of cost and quality – but the resident experience isn’t a ‘nice to have’ once core funding has been resolved, it is part and parcel of it. That is what tragedies like Grenfell and the passing of Awaab Isaac have repeatedly taught us. The Government and local authorities should explore how to extend relevant elements of consumer regulation which has recently been extended to social tenants to those living in temporary accommodation.
With deep expertise of bringing together the local authority and policy landscape, innovative financing solutions to drive change in social housing, and promoting the resident voice, the team at Newbridge is ideally placed to work towards a long term, sustainable and financially viable set of solutions to reduce and ultimately eliminate temporary accommodation.
We look forward to working with key stakeholders in the coming months to meet the challenge of TA from a resident centred perspective, whilst ensuring new models appropriately calibrate the risks and provide the support that the communities affected require.
Get in touch with us at Janani.paramsothy@newbridge.co.uk if you have any evidence or insights to contribute to this or want to be kept informed about the conclusions of this work.
