We need a housing system that ends homelessness with homes

When we know what it takes to end homelessness, it’s deeply frustrating that government policy in England has tended to contribute to the problem rather than solve it in recent years. Despite the welcome introduction of the Homelessness Reduction Act, successive cross-government rough-sleeping strategies and three city-region Housing First pilots, homelessness policy has remained far too narrowly focused and siloed.

Critically, national policy has failed to deliver what should be a key ingredient of any homelessness strategy: good-quality, settled homes that people on the lowest incomes can afford.

A lack of grant funding to support the delivery of social rented housing, alongside an increase in new homes being let at often unaffordable affordable rents and existing social homes being lost through the Right to Buy have led to a significant decline in the number of social homes available – a net loss of 177,487 over the past decade.

What’s more, previous government decisions to break the link between private rent levels and housing benefit (Local Housing Allowance) at the same time as reducing social housing investment and wider benefits spending left more people on very low incomes competing for a diminishing pool of rented homes at cheaper rent levels.

At a council level, cuts to budgets have also contributed to the erosion of funding for preventative services such as housing-related support.

“The direct consequence of these policy decisions is growing numbers of people in England without a settled home”

The direct consequence of these policy decisions is growing numbers of people in England without a settled home. Record numbers of households are stuck in temporary accommodation (117,450), a 12% rise on the previous year. This includes over 150,000 children – enough to fill 5,700 classrooms.

Life in the limbo of temporary housing often means people are displaced from their support networks and left in cramped, inadequate accommodation. For many, this accommodation couldn’t be less temporary; more than a fifth of these households with children have been there for five years or more.

The Children’s Commissioner is among those highlighting the damage this is causing to health and well-being, and the costs it is storing up for society as a whole. It’s both ruining lives and driving councils to bankruptcy. Last year alone we spent £2.29bn on temporary accommodation.

There are also increasing numbers of adults with significant vulnerabilities sleeping on our streets for protracted periods of time. For too many, it is impossible to access the settled homes with tailored support that would bring an end to this vicious cycle.

Recently, the National Audit Office noted that the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (now called the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government) was unable to show that government efforts to tackle homelessness have delivered value for money. It also found that the inadequacy of cross-government working contributed to the tragic situation we’re in.

The new government’s commitment to a genuinely cross-government approach to ending homelessness cannot come soon enough. But it is critical that this strategy is underpinned by the government’s long-term plan for housing, and that the latter directly addresses the unmet housing needs of the 1.6 million households on the lowest incomes who would benefit from social housing – including the 242,000 experiencing the worst forms of homelessness right now and those in our society who are most at risk of homelessness.

There is much innovation and good practice from both the UK and further afield to inform the new homelessness strategy and ensure a foundation for breakthrough success.

This includes learning from European countries where a housing-led approach is now the norm to end homelessness and embedded in national policy. This means that the supply of genuinely affordable settled homes – as opposed to temporary or transitional accommodation – is understood to underpin efforts to end all forms of homelessness.

“The new government’s commitment to a genuinely cross-government approach to end homelessness cannot come soon enough. But it is critical that this strategy is underpinned by the government’s long-term plan for housing”

A shift to a housing-led response means all households facing homelessness getting quicker access to settled housing so that stays in temporary accommodation are shorter and its use is reduced. In countries including Finland, Denmark and France, a housing-first approach is also deployed for people facing the most complex forms of disadvantage, because this ends more people’s homelessness than the traditional hostel pathway.

There is also important learning from Scotland and Wales. The Scottish government is committed to implementing a new approach to ending homelessness grounded in prevention, with all public bodies expected, by law, to play their part. Having removed the distinction between priority and non-priority need under homelessness legislation in 2012, Scotland also provides evidence on the case for ensuring almost everyone has the right to support with housing.

Historically, Scotland backed this with a major social housebuilding programme and greater allocations of social housing to homeless households, notwithstanding recent funding reductions and housing shortages. In the past, this delivered a social housing stock substantially larger by population size than England’s.

In Wales, work is underway to align local homelessness need with planning for social housing investment.  

A key barrier to increased social housing supply in England has been the view that, as a nation, we cannot afford it. We know increasing the output of social rented housing will have a substantial upfront cost, but these costs are comprehensively offset both by the economic benefit of enhancing market-led housing supply through construction activity and savings in other areas of public spending – health, education, criminal justice, benefits – for the long term.

We need the government, with Treasury support, to act on this evidence and adopt a new, holistic approach to valuing social housing investment, allowing public funding to flow into social housing delivery alongside an increased contribution from the planning system and, if feasible, institutional investment to meet the target of 90,000 social homes a year.

While investing in new social rented homes provides a sustainable solution for the long term, the new housing plan should also include short-term fixes. Examples include targeted empty-homes investment that brings properties back into use for homeless households and rethinking allocations policies to ensure all councils and housing associations play their part in giving people facing homelessness fair access to social housing.

A review is also needed of the role Local Housing Allowance can and should play to prevent homelessness in a reformed housing system, with consideration of the impact of the overall benefit cap and bedroom tax as part of this.

A long-term housing strategy that properly addresses low-income housing need alongside wider housing demand will provide the foundation on which an effective national strategy to end homelessness can be built. This will be essential to avoid repeating the policy mistakes of past decades and create a legacy on homelessness of which the present government can be proud.

Matt Downie, chief executive, Crisis