Homelessness and Temporary Accommodation

Helen Hayes Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd December 2020 Westminster Hall

[Helen Hayes (Dulwich and West Norwood) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Edward. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck) on securing this important debate, her passionate speech and all the work that she does on this issue.

The work done by local authorities and voluntary sector organisations with additional funding under the Everybody In campaign at the start of the pandemic shows that homelessness is not inevitable, and that when there is the political will to end it great progress can be made. It is regrettable that the support shown at the start of the pandemic has not been sustained, and that many of those who had temporary respite are now back on the streets at a time when the weather is at its harshest and coronavirus is still circulating in the community.

I pay tribute to Crisis and the Robes Project. They work in my constituency, and will be working hard to bring people in from the cold again over the Christmas period, but I want to focus on the hidden homelessness crisis of temporary accommodation. The figures are stark. The numbers of households in temporary accommodation have been rising steadily since 2011, with 98,300 households in temporary accommodation in June this year, including 127,240 children. Those families are often in the worst accommodation available, with no stability or security, while councils pay over the odds to exploitative landlords.

The situation is a direct result of the dysfunctionality of the housing market, particularly but not exclusively in London, and the Government’s refusal to accept the reality of the gap between what the local housing allowance pays and what landlords actually charge. My constituency covers part of Lambeth and part of Southwark; I have figures from Southwark, but the situation is no different in Lambeth. The local housing allowance shared accommodation rate is £515.10 a month, but the median rent for a single room is £700—a gap of £184.90 a month.

For a one-bedroom flat, the LHA pays £1,146.86 a month compared with a median rent of £1,350—a gap of £203.14. For a three-bedroom home, the gap between what the LHA pays and median rent rises to £479.59. How does the Minister expect a family on a low income to find that additional rent? That is a very real, practical concern facing thousands of my constituents. The Government’s housing support policies simply ignore the reality of a housing market with spiralling rents.

There is much more to say, including on the dysfunctionality of our Dickensian immigration system, which traps people with no recourse to public funds for years at a time, while providing no timescale, certainty or closure on their applications. This Government, and Tory Governments for the past decade, have utterly failed to address our housing crisis, but it must be addressed. We need to build council homes and social housing at speed, but in the short term the Government must fix the affordability crisis and reform private renting to give security and stability to tenants, and stop so many people having to endure the misery of temporary accommodation.