Keir Starmer hit on the metaphor for how he hoped to govern a couple of years ago, when he first vowed to end “sticking plaster politics”. He repeated it endlessly, because it encapsulated so much of what he wanted to say to the country. The nation was beset by festering wounds that the shambolic Conservatives were neglecting to treat, other than slapping on the odd emergency bandage to contain the mess and smell. He offered himself, by contrast, as a precision surgeon who would—even if it might sting at first—rip off the plaster, cauterise the injury and stitch things back together. Before long, life would be better, and even cheaper, as the ceaseless need for Elastoplast and Savlon relented.
A sticking plaster test is particularly apt for England’s homelessness crisis, a gaping gash through society, in which both rough sleeping and recourse to temporary digs continue to soar. This is a malady tangled up with some exceptionally costly bandages. New LSE research has just established that the immediate cost to England’s cash-strapped councils of housing families in “emergency accommodation” rose by 78 per cent, from £411m to £732m, over the single financial year running up to the 2024 election campaign. This covers the hostels, B&Bs and other nightly-paid, insecure lodgings that are the last resort for town halls scrambling to keep families off the street. The total bill for such provision is now up five-fold since 2017. By factoring in wider LSE analysis on the knock-on effects of homelessness—on health, criminal justice and education, plus a wider hit to productivity—the LSE paper tallied a wider cost which is already at £3.1bn.
The bizarre and broken ecology that underlies such numbers was recently mapped in the pages of Prospect by Jack Shaw, a councillor in the deprived London borough of Barking and Dagenham. Money is being diverted from councils to corporate hoteliers: the London borough of Greenwich alone, for example, spent £8.8m with Travelodge in 2023-24, while Derby City Council placed 133 families in the Premier Inn. In this looking-glass world, even the word “temporary” has lost all purchase—one Manchester household had been in stopgap lodgings for nine years; Dartford had housed one individual this way since 2009; one London household placed in “temporary accommodation” in 2000 was still stranded there. Such bureaucratic language-bending might elicit a wry smile, but the human toll is just too serious. The National Child Mortality Database registered the deaths of 80 children in temporary accommodation over 12 months to September. And over the last five years it has catalogued 74 such child deaths in which poor temporary housing has been explicitly identified as a contributing cause. Over-reliance on sticking plasters, then, is not just costly, but deadly.
Nine months into the Starmer administration, it is not too early to ask whether Labour looks likely to bend the curve on any of these frightening graphs. After all, absent early action, the bill for bandages will soon exhaust the resources that councils might have deployed towards a different approach: extrapolating forward, the LSE paper warned that that £732m councils blew on emergency accommodation last year will bulge to £1.2bn by 2026-27. From a starting point where 30 town halls have just had to borrow “exceptional support” from central government to make ends meet, such drift could break many councils—as indeed it could break many of the families cheated out of a permanent home.
There are welcome signs that Whitehall understands the moral imperative to act, but this is—ironically—most evident in its ramping-up of sticking-plaster solutions. Despite the tight fiscal environment, Labour ministers first created, then tripled and then last month doubled again an emergency homelessness fund. This will keep roofs over heads that would otherwise have gone without shelter, and even save lives.
What’s still missing is truly sustained attention on healing those underlying wounds. Starmer can fairly claim to have put in the odd surgical stitch: one important example being the imminent abolition of no-fault evictions, something Michael Gove had long talked about but the Conservatives abjectly failed to do. Starmer would claim, too, that his drive to simplify planning and build 1.5m homes during this parliament will truly tackle the problem at source. “More homes to end homelessness” certainly has a common-sensical plausibility, but in talking to industry voices and charities alike I’ve heard doubts both about whether the houses will ever arrive in the promised numbers. There is even deeper doubt about whether the sort of homes brought into being by deregulation will ever be affordable to the people at the sharp end of the crisis. It’s not only critics who worry: Labour’s two most prominent mayors—Sadiq Khan in London and Andy Burnham in Manchester—both warn that homelessness will get worse before it might start to get better.
What would truly start to clear up the wound would be a firm and specific commitment to a large chunk of those 1.5m houses being social homes. As things stand, as Burnham stresses, council homes are still bleeding away through Right to Buy. Within government, serious council-house building is palpably the ambition of Angela Rayner. But others worry about the cost, preferring to stay close to the building industry, which sniffs more profit in private homes. A hard target for social homes has not been set. This is of a piece with the worrying whisper in Whitehall that the Treasury is not amenable to “invest to save” propositions in connection to tackling homelessness—which leaves the discussion languishing between purely ethical arguments and more sticking-plaster solutions.
There is also a point where the plausible-sounding rhetorical promise to end “sticking-plaster politics” risks being undone by a messy reality, in which wounds often need to be meticulously cleaned and dressed before more serious treatment is even an option. A case in point is the Local Housing Allowance available through Universal Credit to cover private rents. Except it doesn’t cover them anymore. The old automatic link with real housing costs was broken some time ago, and despite a sporadic increase in the dying days of the Conservative government, as things stand private rent rises running at 9 per cent will eat another hole in the allowance next year.
When the poorest families lack the money for rent, it is often only a matter of time before they are in arrears and then homeless. The cost of repegging the system to rents would be less than £1bn in the coming financial year, though it would then creep up towards £2bn over the rest of the parliament—not cheap, but not unmanageable either, if the arrest of those rocketing outlays on emergency housing are factored into the arithmetic.
It may be galling—and even dismissed as a sticking plaster—to increase payments which line the pockets of private landlords, while merely stopping things from getting worse for people in need. And yet until we can break out of the housing system we’re currently stuck with, this is the only way to get a grip on that ruinous bill for emergency shelter.
We’re at a point where we must choose between the flimsy plaster of nightly-paid lets and the sturdy bandage that a higher Local Housing Allowance would provide. It would be nice to get beyond the need for either, but we’re a long way from that. In the meantime, the “politics of adequate dressings” may not sound exciting. It would, however, be a considerable advance on the sticking-plaster politics which the prime minister derides, but is a very long way from banishing.
