Say “homeless” and the first thought for many will be of a “down and out” bedding down in a shop doorway or on a park bench. Those who work in the field—or have experience of living with no fixed abode—are forever battling to explain that rough sleeping is merely the visible roof of the deep cavern of misery that is hidden homelessness.
Foremost among them are all those stuck in temporary accommodation, such as so-called Bed & Breakfasts. The writer Kerry Hudson vividly recalls her childhood experience of stumbling off long-haul National Express coaches and into these halfway houses “for the newly homeless, usually men freshly out of prison remand or mental health facilities. Needless to say, there was no breakfast.” As well as rank insecurity about how long you’d be staying and where you’d be going next, she describes “iron bunk beds, icy to the touch”, cooking facilities in the form of a “a plug-in frying pan” and showers “available communally—if you had a 20p”.
It may not be as dangerous as shivering through the night in a graveyard, but it’s no way to live. Moreover, the two supposed classes of homeless, visible and hidden, are often one and the same people. Those who rough it out on the streets on a bad night will, on better days when they can scrimp a little money together, find their way into a hostel. There is no separate species of “down and outs”.
A new battery of official data covers both rough sleeping and recourse to temporary digs, and transcends the need to choose between them as gauges of homelessness—because both problems are getting worse. Rough sleeping—tallied on one autumn night in each council late last year—has risen for the third year in a row, up by 20 per cent on 2023 and by a staggering 91 per cent on 2021. For anyone who has walked around a British city recently with open eyes, the total number counted—4,667—might seem rather low, but the statisticians concede that the “hidden nature” of street life and variety of discreet sheltering places means they will miss a lot of people. They also confirm that flow in and out of exposure to the elements, estimating there are “2.2 times more people sleeping rough over the month compared to a single night”.
Even so, the broader group living without a permanent home is much, much larger. As of 30th September last year, there were 126,040 households in temporary accommodation, and well over twice that number of people, since their ranks included 164,040 children as well as adults. While the magnitudes involved are far larger than with rough sleeping, the trends are exactly the same. The number of families in temporary accommodation was up 16 per cent on the year, and 31 per cent on the September 2021 figure. And whether you look at the last few years, the last 12 months, or just the last quarter, the rise is sharper for families with children.
The quarter-on-quarter rise is politically significant, too, because it almost exactly covers the first three months of the Starmer government. It is a reminder that Britain’s homelessness crisis is something that Labour now owns. It hardly needs to be said that the party’s admirable “mission” to “shatter the class ceiling” on opportunity will be mission impossible for as long as growing numbers of children are unsure about where they will be sleeping from one month to the next. Often forced to share bathrooms with transient and sometimes troubled strangers, they lack the physical space—let alone the headspace—needed to think about schoolwork. Efforts to “pivot” the NHS from a sickness service to a true health service will likewise get nowhere while so many Britons are living in anxiety- and disease-inducing squalor.
Happily, there is palpable commitment, particularly from the communities secretary and deputy prime minister Angela Rayner, whose background taught her a great deal about hardship, and who has recently ordered that her department channel its scarce uncommitted funds towards the housing emergency. On the rough sleeping part of the problem, in particular, we already know that resolve, careful coordination between services and relatively modest resources can turn things round. It has happened before. The Blair-Brown governments achieved it, leaving office with a rough sleeper count (on a somewhat different methodology) of under 500. More recently, Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham has made a visible difference in his city, and in the new rough sleeper count, the North West was the only region that saw a decrease. Indeed, during the pandemic even the Boris Johnson government virtually halved the numbers with its “Everyone In” initiative. The tragedy is that it was followed by a policy of everyone out.
Less happily, when it comes to broader questions of housing, the government’s approach is selective. It is most comfortable framing the issue as one of quantity, vowing to slash through red tape and greenbelts to get Britain building again. But as I’ve explored in detail for Prospect recently, housing rights advocates and building industry insiders alike have serious worries about the number and location of new homes that can created by deregulation, let alone their prospective fit with the most pressing social needs.
The government is, by contrast, allergic to thinking about housing as a distributional question. And yet, however inconveniently, that is precisely what it is. In January, the English Housing Survey simultaneously registered both record overcrowding in social housing and record “under-occupancy” in owner-occupied homes, that is to say houses with two or more spare bedrooms. There are obvious things to do at both ends of the scale. At the top, the Exchequer could raise revenue—and reward householders who are willing to downsize and free up space for large families who need it more—by fixing the absurdity of council tax. As things stand, it under-taxes big and pricey properties, both by design and because bills remain pegged to valuations made during the 1991 property bust, which ministers of both stripes have lacked the bottle to update. At the bottom, there needs to be serious resourcing for social housing, and more immediately a commitment to a reliable link between the benefits paid to cover housing and the rents that landlords actually charge.
Admittedly, some parts of this agenda will be costly, and others controversial. But then, as I have argued, homelessness is a sprawling and multifaceted problem. In solving it, nothing should be ruled out as unthinkable. What ought to become unthinkable instead is living without a home.
