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Good afternoon and welcome to this week’s Home Front.
Did you know that Britain currently has one the worst record of all developed economies when it comes to homelessness?
You don’t have to look far to see the evidence. Not only does an embarrassment of statistics offer proof, but people living in tents on our high streets and in parks and car parks is a giant red flag.
In London, the most recent rough sleeping statistics (via the Combined Homelessness and Information Network, Chain) reveal the number of people living on the streets has risen by 26 per cent over the past year.
In total, there were 4,612 people rough sleeping in London alone between October to December 2024. This is an increase of 5 per cent on the same period last year.
Of these, 1,872 people were intermittently rough sleeping – 16 per cent higher than October to December 2023. More than 700 people were thought to be continually living on the streets, 26 per cent higher than 2024.
Across Britain, I’ve seen people sleeping in tents on high streets and near train stations. I’ve received emails from concerned homelessness support workers who say things have “never been so bad”. This winter, as temperatures have plummeted, people have died. A man passed away in the cold in Skegness at the start of January and another was found dead in Liverpool. Before Christmas, another man died on the street in Manchester.
But homelessness doesn’t only present itself as rough sleeping.
At 74, I got evicted - I was homeless, and terrified
Read MoreSo, when I say that Britain has the worst homelessness record of all OECD economies (that’s the 38 countries which make up the intra-governmental Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), I’m also referring to the people who have been made homeless and are being forced to live in emergency temporary accommodation such as hostels, B&Bs, hotels and even converted shipping containers and office blocks. Many of them are families with children.
According to the Government’s own data, by the middle of last year 123,000 homeless households were living in temporary accommodation. This is an increase of 16.3 per cent from June 2023. The number of households that contained families with children increased by 15.1 percent to 78,420.
Three years ago, I reported data which showed, for the first time, that children were dying unexpectedly in temporary accommodation. This year data showed that temporary accommodation has contributed to the deaths of at least 74 children in England in the past five years.
The figures are obtained by the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on temporary accommodation via the NHS-funded National Child Mortality Database. They also revealed that 58 of those children were babies under the age of one.
This sort of homelessness has often been referred to as “hidden homelessness”. That’s a misnomer. Your child may well be in school with a child who lives in temporary accommodation, particularly if you live in a city. I’ve also met local government staff who are living this way, as well as cleaners and hospitality workers.
Across the OECD (a group which includes countries like Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey and the US), in nearly all countries less than 1 per cent of the population is reported to be experiencing homelessness. This represents more than two million people.
But here in the UK, 1.32 per cent of our population is experiencing homelessness.
There is only one country which reports a higher figure. That’s New Zealand (2.17 per cent), and this can be explained by the fact that their definition of homelessness is broader than ours and captures more people. It includes not just rough sleeping or temporary accommodation but also people “living in uninhabitable accommodation”.
If the UK’s definition of homelessness expanded to “uninhabitable accommodation” where there are instances of damp, mould or structural safety issues, there is, I think, no doubt that we would top the league. Here, more than 25 households per every 10,000 are either sleeping rough or living in temporary accommodation.
As the OECD notes, since 2022, following the pandemic, most countries where homelessness data is recorded have reported an increase in the number of people who are experiencing homelessness. The UK, along with the US, Ireland and the Netherlands, has seen a particularly steep rise.
Britain is a wealthy country. It is also compared to America, France and Germany, a relatively small country, geographically speaking. So, why is our homelessness problem so bad?
The answer is surprisingly straightforward. So straightforward, in fact, that you’d be forgiven for wondering why our politicians let things get so bad.
We haven’t built enough homes. Specifically, affordable social homes. This brilliant data – compiled by James Gleeson, the Housing Research and Analysis Manager at the Greater London Authority (GLA) – compares housebuilding and population across the OECD. It shows that the UK has built fewer new homes (dwellings) than other countries. This is why the Yimby (Yes In My Back Yard) are so pleased that Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves want to build, build, build.
England has far fewer dwellings relative to its population than other developed nations we typically consider peers, with 434 homes per 1,000 inhabitants, significantly fewer than France (590), Italy (587) and the OECD average of 487.
British politicians during the coalition era failed to take advantage of ultra-low interest rates to build affordable homes. Instead, they sat back while investors took advantage of those rates to buy up homes and inflate prices.
As a 2023 report from the Home Builders Federation (HBF) shows, this relative shortage of affordable homebuilding has led to a situation where house prices in the UK have been growing faster than incomes. The affordability disparity here is greater than when compared to the EU benchmark.
Through the 2010s, in other European nations incomes kept pace much better with house prices, such as Belgium and France. In some countries including Finland, house prices have actually fallen slightly in proportion to income, making both renting and buying more affordable.
The UK's homelessness crisis - mapped
Read MoreWe’re in a place where no OECD country should be. A place where people, including children, are dying, where private renters fear rent hikes and have resigned themselves to never owning a home and a place where homelessness is fast becoming a permanent feature of modern life.
Labour’s Renters’ Rights Bill will become law later this year. It will go a long way towards stabilising the private rental market and, hopefully, stemming the flow of evicted households into temporary accommodation. However, it will still allow landlords to evict tenants who fall behind on their rent.
Unless a significant number of the 1.5 million homes Labour has pledged to build over the next five years are genuinely affordable, our population of people who are being forced into homelessness will continue to grow.
Speaking of the Government’s building drive, last week Rachel Reeves announced proposals to connect Oxford and Cambridge in a bid to add up to £78bn to the UK economy by 2035.
The Chancellor said she hopes that connecting Britain’s two major university cities could create “Europe’s Silicon Valley”.
Developing the “Oxford-Cambridge corridor” will need to involve building new housing as well as transport links.
Labour is expected to announce the locations of its new towns soon, and all signs suggest some are going to be in this part of the country.
Let’s hope they don’t forget about the North of England, either.
Ask me anything
This week’s question is from a reader who wants to know whether there is “a fear in Whitehall of coming across as London/south England-centric when talking about the housing crisis?”
As I wrote in my book TENANTS, I am reliably informed that former prime minister David Cameron and his chancellor George Osborne did not like the term “housing crisis”. As such, it was barely uttered in Whitehall during the 2010s.
However, things are very different now and there is a broad acknowledgement among civil servants and ministers alike that there is a housing crisis and that it is a national problem. That’s why there’s so much talk of new towns and why regional mayors have been involved in policymaking from the get-go with the new Government.
Whether the policies solve the problem, though, remains to be seen.
This question was submitted as part of a live Reddit special Ask Me Anything that I took part in last week. See all of my responses here.
Send in your questions to: @Victoria_Spratt, on X, formerly Twitter, @vicky.spratt on Instagram or via email [email protected].
Vicky’s pick
Last week, I went to Naples and visited the archaeological ruins of Pompeii for the first time. Since then, I’ve been watching the BBC documentary series The New Dig about a new excavation at Pompeii which is uncovering almost a third of the city for the first time since it was covered in ash by Mount Vesuvius.
Like us, the people of Ancient Rome were obsessed with housing and, in particular, it’s incredible to see how they lived and decorated their homes.
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