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Councils struggle to find homes for 40% of people since introduction of Homelessness Reduction Act
Nearly 40% of people who approached their council to secure housing since the introduction of the Homelessness Reduction Act (HRA) ended up in a worse or similar position, a new report by Crisis has found.
Based on 984 surveys and 89 in-depth interviews, the report found that 373 individuals (38%) who approached their councils for help since the introduction of the HRA in 2017 either remained without housing or saw themselves moving from being housed to sleeping rough or sofa-surfing.
Of those who said that their housing situation did not improve, 66% were single and 45% were single men.
Introduced in 2017, the HRA put a new duty on local authorities to help prevent homelessness and aimed to provide more support to single people, for whom councils do not legally have a duty to provide housing.
Under the HRA, councils are required to develop personalised housing plans (PHPs) to help those who are homeless or at risk of homelessness. Of the respondents, only 40% were able to identify whether a PHP had been created for them.
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The research found that the most common form of support offered by councils under the HRA was information on accessing the private rented sector, with 281 respondents (68%) being offered this.
A number of respondents said this was the only support they were offered, which at its most basic consisted of a list of potential landlords for them to contact.
Crisis said more must be done to ensure that the HRA can reach its full potential and is calling on the government to urgently invest in housing benefit so that it covers the cheapest third of rents.
It is also asking the government to commit to building 90,000 social rent homes each year for the next 15 years.
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Jon Sparkes, chief executive of Crisis, said: “It’s deeply distressing that, across England, councils are being forced to leave the people they are trying to help on the streets or drifting from sofa to sofa – all because they cannot find somewhere safe and affordable for them to live.
“The HRA has made some good progress in preventing people from becoming homeless, but it’s worrying to see that it’s being constrained by a chronic lack of housing and cuts to housing benefit.
“The HRA can be at the heart of ending homelessness for good, as this report shows, but this is only possible if councils are properly resourced and have the tools they need to help people leave homelessness behind for good.”
A Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government spokesperson said: “Everyone should have somewhere safe to live, and to support those most in need we have removed the borrowing cap, freeing up councils to double housing delivery to around 10,000 new social homes a year by 2021/22.
“We’ve also made £9 billion available through the Affordable Homes Programme to March 2022 to deliver approximately 250,000 new affordable homes of a wide range of tenures, helping more families find a place to call home.”
Cllr Darren Rodwell, executive member for housing and planning at London Councils, said: “This research lays bare the unsustainable pressures on hard-pressed homelessness services.
“The situation is particularly severe in London, where we face the worst homelessness crisis in the country. London boroughs are committed to supporting homeless Londoners as best we can and making a success of the HRA, but this can’t be done on the cheap and we urgently need more resources for our frontline work.
“The government must use the budget to boost funding for local homelessness services. We’re also calling on ministers to support the measures desperately needed to prevent homelessness occurring in the first place – including restoring housing benefit to levels that will improve affordability and giving councils the powers we need to build social housing at significant scale.”
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