Tim Gray
Research Associate | Centre of Homelessness
020 0000 0000
tim.gray@example.co.uk
Tim's interview
Tim discusses the key drivers behind the recent surge in demand for temporary accommodation and the immediate Government policy changes needed to address the temporary accommodation crisis. Watch his interview or read the transcript below to find out more.
What are the key drivers behind the recent surge in demand for temporary accommodation?
I think you have to take it in context and look at the long term. So, there's been a long-term decline in in the number of social housing lettings in this in this country, largely because of not enough affordable housing development, social housing development, and a lot of properties being sold off through right to buy.
Two million homes since 1980 have been lost to the social sector because of right to buy and it's very difficult to replace those. What however has covered it up for quite a long time is the big increase in private rental sector accommodation over a long period and what's happened recently is that for various reasons the private sector has begun to decline rather than continue to expand and so you've got this position where there's a lot more homelessness from the private rented sector and it's very difficult for local authorities to mitigate that. On the other hand, it's not actually true that there's been a massive rise in homelessness over the last few years the numbers have gone up a little bit in terms of the number of presentations and homeless duties accepted but what's happened is that more people consistently are moving into temporary accommodation than local authorities are moving out so it's partly because of some more are going in it's also because local authorities have got more difficulty in moving people out either into social rented accommodation or the private rented sector.
What are the immediate Government policy changes needed to address the temporary accommodation crisis?
Fundamentally, what the Government has to do is make sure that there's enough accommodation that's affordable to people who can't afford to rent or buy properties in the market. And there are a lot of those people, inequality has been growing as we've been talking about - the supply of social rented accommodation and private rented sector accommodation is in no way adequate. So what does the Government do if it wants to change that?
Well, building more affordable and social rent housing is great and the Government seems to be serious about trying to do that but there's no way that they're going to be able to build enough accommodation to solve the problem; even if they build one and a half billion homes in total over the next 5 years not that many of those are going to be for social rent or affordable rent and you've got to bear in mind that about two million homes have been lost to social and affordable rent since 1980. So they just can't do it even though in the long term that's what they should try to do. It means that you have to make more of the accommodation that's available now in the stock affordable to people who can't rent in the market. How can you do that? One way might be to increase housing benefit across the board, it's certainly true that in the end of the last Labour Government when local housing allowance levels were at median rents, that was a much more comfortable position in terms of being able to get private rent etc accommodation but it's quite expensive to raise local housing allowance across the board in that way and also you're likely to increase rental market inflation by doing so.
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