Dr Beatrice Taylor has written a great blog titled: London’s permanent accommodation crisis for the CASA / Arup City Modelling Lab.
Opening extract:
You might have seen the headlines in the past few weeks, about the crisis in council finances linked to the rising costs of providing temporary accommodation. In the UK local authorities have a “prevention duty”, a statutory obligation to mitigate people becoming homeless. Historically, the typical state intervention would be to find suitable social housing in the local area. However, increasingly local authorities don’t have enough social housing available, and are instead placing people in accommodation the council leases from the private sector. This accommodation can range from privately rented flats, to hotels or hostels. In 2024, over 80,000 people in the UK were assessed as being owed a prevention duty, leading to some areas spending over 20% of their total council budget on securing temporary accommodation; aggravating the finances of councils already on the brink of bankruptcy.
Aside from the financial cost, the type of shelter provided as temporary accommodation has been heavily criticised. Firstly, it is often not temporary, with people stuck in this accommodation limbo for years. Secondly, the accommodation is often not suitable for habitation, with notable examples lacking space, cooking facilities, or even windows making the news. This is perhaps particularly disturbing considering that in 2024, 25% of households owed a relief duty were families with children.
The most obvious solution to the temporary accommodation crisis would be if there was suitable social housing available. More social housing would allow for temporary accommodation to just be a stop gap (as originally intended) before permanent accommodation is found. The housing crisis in the UK is a complex problem, and the rise in people requiring temporary accommodation is both a symptom of how broken the housing system is, and also a factor in escalating the crisis. In response to the current housing crisis, the UK government has set ambitious targets of building 1.5 million homes over it’s term in office, which includes 81,000 residential units being built per year in London. There are no stipulations about how many of these should be social housing. Far smarter people than me have written again and again about how the construction of new social housing (and crucially the ending of right to buy) is needed to fix the crisis. This got me wondering, in the midst of this crisis in temporary accommodation, what, if anything, councils have been doing to address the lack of social housing. Here I’m going to look specifically at the situation in London — I’m a bit biased towards researching London as not only is it the city I live and work in, but also there’s heaps of public data available for it
In the full article Bea goes on to breaks down:
- What has happened to all the state owned housing
- The results from analysing the planning application
- Where London is finding the space for developments
- What we discover from comparing local authorities
- The impact of prioritising quality over quantity
- What more can be learned from the data