Why Britain is the world’s worst on homelessness
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
When people picture homelessness, they tend to imagine people sleeping rough on the street, tipped into insecurity by substance use problems. Viewed this way, one might imagine the US would rank highest in any international comparison.
Wrong. The main form of homelessness is people living in temporary accommodation, the main driver is an inability to afford housing, and America is not even particularly close to the worst. The UK holds that ignominious title, with an astonishing one in 200 households living in emergency lodging outside the formal housing sector.
There is a certain out of sight, out of mind quality to temporary accommodation, but it accounts for more than 80 per cent of homelessness across the OECD. Hundreds of thousands of people across the developed world live this peripheral and fragile existence, and Britain’s record is dire.
After declining for several years, the number of English households living in temporary accommodation more than doubled between 2010 and 2023 from 48,000 to 112,000, the highest figure since records began. I’m quoting figures for England because it has the most complete data out of the four UK nations, but the others are if anything worse.
Conditions in these buildings are often atrocious. Damp and mould are commonplace, as are insect and animal infestations. The disruption of being moved from place to place causes adults to drop out of work and children out of school. In the past five years alone, the parlous state of temporary accommodation has been cited as a contributing factor in the deaths of 55 children in England.
These arrangements also impose enormous costs on local councils, which last year spent almost £1.8bn on emergency shelter, a figure that has more than doubled in real terms over the past decade.
This nightmare scenario is due to three main factors: woefully inadequate rates of housebuilding, a dwindling social housing sector and the erosion of financial support for those unable to afford market rents.
Relative to population size, the UK builds fewer homes than the vast majority of other developed countries. This has sent private sector rents spiralling, exacerbated by a 25 per cent shrinking of the social housing sector since the 1970s, slowly closing a crucial safety valve.
Losing your home tips people into spirals of despair and destitution, and the inability to afford rent is by far the fastest growing source of new homelessness in England.
There can be a tendency for some on the left to dismiss the importance of new market-rate housing in addressing the supply of affordable homes. Some on the right dismiss the role of subsidised housing. Both are needed.
Paeans to Vienna and Helsinki as paradises of affordability tend to focus on the role of social housing, but both also build much more market-rate housing than London.
For those on the brink of homelessness, social housing is essential protection. But as recent developments in Vienna show, if overall supply fails to keep up with demand, upward pressure on prices and rents makes social housing less viable.
Compounding these issues in the UK has been the repeated freezing of housing benefit. According to an analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the share of private rented homes in England where rents are covered by housing benefit has declined from one in six to one in 20 in just 10 years.
Even policies targeted on alleviating homelessness are derailed by insufficient supply. In 2020, England began a pilot of the so-called “housing first” approach, credited for much of Austria and Finland’s success in reducing homelessness. People who lose their home are immediately provided with a new permanent dwelling under this policy, rather than gradually transitioning from a hostel to sheltered housing to eventual independent living as they prove their readiness.
In the cases where rehousing was possible, the results were glowing. But a report on the pilot noted that “accessing affordable and suitable accommodation continues to be a major challenge”.
The “build more houses” discourse can sometimes feel like the preserve of young professionals and policy wonks, distant from the daily experiences of those on the brink of destitution. This could not be further from the truth. The homelessness crisis is at its heart a crisis of housing supply and affordability, and on both scores Britain fares the worst.
Comments