Children in England are returning to school this week to a big change that could affect their lives both in and outside the classroom.

This is the week that sees the temporary accommodation notification duty (TAND) introduced, which requires local authorities to schools, GP practices, and health visiting teams when a child is placed into temporary accommodation (TA).

In other words, when a child becomes homeless or moves to TA in a new area, the local council must tell teachers, doctors and health visitors about it.

It might seem like a small thing but it’s the result of years of campaigning - who believe this simple change will have a huge impact on children’s lives.

“I know first-hand the uncertainty and upheaval that comes with not having a place to truly call home,” said Homelessness Minister Florence Eshalomi. “For the thousands of children living in TA, I know how much it can impact their school life, their ability to form lasting relationships and their sense of belonging.

“We’ve made clear that councils have a responsibility to place families in suitable, quality housing and from today, this will be matched with a new duty to inform education and health services when a child is homeless.

“This is a major milestone. Crucially, it means schools, GPs and councils all talking to each other about the vulnerable children in their community – ensuring vital support services are wrapped around them at the earliest opportunity and reducing the number of children falling through the cracks.”

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How will it work?

Campaigners have long called for a notification system to inform GPs and teachers when a child becomes homeless. This measure was confirmed for introduction as part of Labour’s homelessness and child poverty strategies (published at the end of 2025).

The TAND came into force on 1 September as part of the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026, and requires the local authority to contact GP surgeries, health visitors and schools within 14 days of being given permission to do so by the parent or guardian.

Dame Siobhain McDonagh, an MP and chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Households in TA, said the arrival of TAND will “make a real difference” to children’s health and educational attainment.

Shared Health Foundation is a charity supporting families living in emergency housing and is a co-secretariat of the APPG.

It led the charge through the SAFE protocol, launched in 2025 to “foster increased collaboration between local authorities and their support services, when a homeless household is placed in TA”.

The Oldham-based charity said that its consultation with parents consistently showed the hurdles they faced in ensuring their children were able to access education and primary care.

That meant children were more likely to suffer at school or with health issues, and risked falling through the cracks - all because the services meant to help them didn’t know they were homeless.

Since the government announced the plans to implement TAND, the notification duty has been piloted across Greater Manchester in Rochdale, Oldham, Manchester and Salford as well as in Islington in London.

Shared Health Foundation said the pilot showed that significant improvements in support can be achieved when professionals are aware of a child’s housing circumstances.

It found that the duty could be integrated effectively into existing systems and structures with minimal additional burden on services.

Just under £1 million in new burdens funding (money allocated by the government to help local councils pay for new initiatives) has been given to local councils to introduce the scheme over the next three years.

Shared Health Foundation has created a series of webinars and written guidance for professionals to carry out or respond to a notification.

Dr Laura Neilson, CEO of Shared Health Foundation, said: “I am delighted to see this notification be implemented. Education and health services want to support families living in TA but have not known who the children are. That changes today!

“I am grateful for colleagues in government and the civil service for their hard work and for the minister in championing this legislation. This is a key intervention to reduce the impact of homelessness on children, shine a light on them, and I believe it will save lives.”

Is TAND just a starting point?

Children’s Commissioner, Dame Rachel de Souza said: “This new duty on local authorities is an important step towards making sure schools and health services know when a child moves into TA, so they can put the right support in place.

“It is vital this duty is backed by a unique ID for every child, to help services join up information and ensure children do not lose access to the support they need whenever their circumstances change.”

In April 2025, a Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee report into TA recommended that ‘consistent identifiers’ be used to help make it simpler to share data on children for the purposes of welfare:

“As the Government seeks to establish ‘consistent identifiers’ for children through its Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, it should ensure that these can be used as a formalised notification system, so that a child’s school and GP are alerted when they move into TA.”

This is the same unique ID that the Children’s Commissioner is calling for - however, while the government hasn’t rejected the idea, it hasn’t brought it into force.

Instead it has responded by making such a platform possible in the future through the latest legislation:

“A consistent identifier can help improve information sharing, but all barriers to poor information sharing must be addressed.

“We have taken swift action to lay provision in the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill to introduce a single unique identifier (SUI) nationally.”

NHS numbers are the current proposed solution; a trial has been running in Wigan since April 2025.

However some, such as privacy campaigner Digital Defend Me, have questioned whether such a scheme could be a precursor to a universal identifier were it to continue into adulthood.

There’s also the element of consent - the current TAND system will see teachers and doctors notified only if the parent or guardian gives consent for the alert to be made.

The family will be asked to agree to the notification when they present as homeless, giving them the right to choose whether their status is shared.

This means the scheme is opt-in, and while the benefits of circumstances being known when trying to access education and healthcare are many, some may still choose not to allow the council to notify the relevant bodies.

Another thing to note is that the TAND scheme applies only applies to families placed in TA going forwards, and will not be retrospective.

That means the thousands of children currently in TA, but unknown to their teachers or doctors, will not have their status updated.

How homelessness affects children

As Big Issue has reported at length on this Substack, there are a record number of children growing up in TA in England.

Those numbers once more: 86,460 households with children are in TA as of March 2026 with 177,530 homeless kids across the country, up 5.2% in the space of a year.

A total of 104 children died with TA indicated as a contributing factor to their vulnerability, ill-health, or death between April 2019 and March 2025. Of these children, 76 were under the age of one.

Research from the Children’s Commissioner found just 11% of children who moved home 10 times while at school achieved five GCSEs, including English and maths, compared to 65% of children who had one home address.

In total, 43,180 households are living in out-of-area TA placements in England.

That can see children moved to a new school or face higher transport costs or face longer commutes that can see them paying more, more likely to be late or even miss school entirely.

When Big Issue visited a family living in TA in Oldham in December 2024, we heard how they were spending £50 a week on bus fares to get their children to and from school.

“He’s doing his mock GCSEs and he’s walked out of a few of his exams or leaving them blank and not filling them in,” Tara Norcott told us.

“The school said to me, ‘We can tell just in his behaviour and attitude when you’ve moved because he’ll settle and he’ll start being more relaxed then you move and he just goes to pot again.”

The government’s guidance noted that living in TA can impact mental health and wellbeing and/or physical health. This is especially the case when combined with poor housing conditions, such as damp and mould, excess cold, overcrowding, safety issues and housing insecurity.

Changing addresses, particularly if sudden or frequent, can disrupt health visiting support and assessment of need, access to routine and specialist health services, and receipt of NHS appointment invites and waiting list positions.

The Shared Health Foundation has published best practice guidance and accompanying videos for local housing authorities, educational establishments, GP practices and health visiting services.

Big Issue’s visit back in 2024 also uncovered the difference teachers can make, with Norcott praising the impact of individual educators on her own children.

“The headteacher fed one of our boys by paying for free school meals out of his own pocket. He said, ‘At least I know he’s getting one hot meal every single day’,” said Norcott.

“When we asked both councils for a food parcel, they said no. The headteacher actually went to a food bank himself and got us six bags of shopping. They know the kids personally, they’ve got a connection to them so they actually genuinely do care.”

We’ve also seen how doctors can raise the alarm over horror housing conditions.

Our reporting on Dareen Nuru’s case in 2024 – when the child was hospitalised six times before even turning one due to the conditions of her property – revealed an NHS health assessment warning of “serious concerns” for children living in the “small, confined space”.

Now, with the new notification system, it will no longer be left to chance whether a teacher or health professional is aware when a child enters TA.

It’s a small change that will hopefully see fewer children fall through the cracks until the number of kids growing up in TA can be reduced long-term.

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Until earlier this month, Alicia Samuels’ six-year-old son Aeon had never known a permanent home.

The youngster has endured five different temporary accommodation homes in London until he and his mum finally moved into their own home in August.

But even though Samuels has finally got a stable home for her and her son, she’s using her difficult experience to try and make changes to the law that mean others won’t have to go through the same thing.

Their journey has been one that many of the other 177,529 children living in temporary accommodation across England will have experienced.

Samuels tells Big Issue the pair have seen it all, from mould to mice, even fleeing a fire after suspected arson.

It’s a story that moved Alison Hammond to tears when she told the TV presenter of her plight as part of housing charity Shelter’s Christmas advert last year.

Fighting for Aeon’s law

Samuels is now determined to bring real change. She spoke to Big Issue before taking part in community union Acorn’s Day of Action – a series of co-ordinated protests against the rising cost of living across England and Wales.

The 40-year-old has launched a petition to create Aeon’s Law, in her son’s name. Much like the death of Awaab Ishak sparked action to boost standards in social housing, Samuels is hoping her son’s experiences can be a platform to raise the quality of emergency housing, pushing to extend the law that specifies minimum standards of living to temporary accommodation.

“He’s basically had to live in [substandard housing],” Samuels told Big Issue. “So he’s always had to see different places and know that it’s not going to be permanent.

“It’s a big part of his life and, with housing, he hasn’t had the stability that a child needs. He’s had to adapt to every temporary accommodation, moving uncertainty and watching me constantly having to deal with housing issues.

“As his mum I’ve tried really hard to make sure we feel like home but there’s a difference between making somewhere comfortable and knowing it’s actually yours and that you’re never going to have to move again.”

When she speaks to Big Issue, Samuels and Aeon have finally moved into a permanent home and she is “surrounded by bags” and looking for ways to furnish it.

It’s the end of a long journey but has not dimmed her resolve to fight for other households still enduring the temporary accommodation crisis.

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Aeon’s Law aims to continue where Awaab’s law currently ends - pushing the government to bring in minimum safety standards in temporary accommodation for families with children.

Samuels is pushing for mandatory inspections, strict repair deadlines for hazards and an automatic right to emergency rehousing if risks persist.

“I realised what happened to us wasn’t just an individual housing problem,” she said. “There were gaps in the system that were affecting children, and I just wanted to turn our experience into something that could protect other families.

“Aeon’s Law, like my son, has kept me going through this to be honest.”

She has begun a petition to push for the law to be debated in parliament, to push for reform of minimum safety standards in temporary housing to protect children.

A lasting impact on children

The impact of life in temporary accommodation on children’s lives is well documented - at a time when record numbers of kids are affected.

It’s not just the impermanence of TA that can cause distress to children. They can be left without room to play or do homework, or even miss days of school altogether if they’re moved further away and cannot afford public transport costs.

A report from the Children’s Commissioner for England last year showed that the more times a child moved between Reception and Year 11, the worse their GCSE results.

Those whose home postcode never changed were most likely to get five GCSE passes, with around two-thirds of children achieving the grades.

But just half of those with three homes moves over their school career achieved five GCSEs, while 10 moves left only one in 10 children recording the same results.

And that’s before taking into account the quality of temporary accommodation homes.

The English Housing Survey has a small sample size but it found a quarter of households living in temporary or emergency accommodation were in non-decent homes.

One in 10 households were in homes that were considered unsafe as they had a serious hazard and did not pass the decent homes standard, and this potentially doesn’t even take into account B&Bs and hostels, which often have poor living conditions.

Samuels has experienced this herself.

“One accommodation I was in, I lived next to drug dealers / addicts,” she told Big Issue. “So there were always, like, body fluids on the floor outside my home, people knocking on my door to borrow stuff, constant fights - once, someone exposed themselves outside my door to me.

“The last resort was when the place we were staying caught fire as my son and I slept. That’s when I went ballistic.

“I’m not judging anybody’s lifestyle but when it affects us, like almost killing us and not being able to sleep as a young child, it was just really difficult to deal with.”

Using AI to fight back

It’s not just the neighbours that posed a threat to Samuels. Mould and vermin have affected her and her son too.

She told Big Issue of times when there were “faeces everywhere my son’s playing” and how the impact of mould affected both her and her son’s breathing.

“My asthma was getting worse, my anxiety was getting worse, my depression was getting worse, and I felt like I was deteriorating; I had to be medicated, I had to go through therapies,” said Samuels.

“I’ve literally exhausted all of the things that they tell you to do. I’ve been advocating for myself and writing letters - especially with technology and AI able to assist in these ways.

“I’ve now learned how to litigate in person and also know the laws that obviously are there for us, but we as citizens aren’t really as educated as we should be.

“I think the authorities use it in a way where it scares people.”

A digital boost for mothers

Even though she is now, finally, in permanent accommodation, Samuels said she is exploring ways to help women with children boost their digital skills and learn how to write letters to advocate for themselves.

She’s also speaking out on the subject alongside Shelter.

That’s because Samuels knows, as much as local authorities, politicians and homelessness and housing charities, that the current situation is unsustainable both from a human and financial perspective.

New prime minister Andy Burnham said as much when he was named Labour leader, using his first speech to say that thousands of families trapped in temporary accommodation was a huge hurdle to improving lives.

“I think that the prime minister should really listen to the community, the people that are living it,” Samuels said.

“I’d like Andy to make temporary accommodation genuinely temporary. That’s it. And make sure that while families are there, they’re living somewhere safe, suitable, and dignified.

“Ultimately we need much more investment in genuinely affordable and council housing so families aren’t left in temporary accommodation for years. A child should never have to pay the price for a housing system that isn’t working.”

She added: “I don’t want to just talk about what’s wrong anymore. I want to be part of changing it. Not only for me, but for other families who are going through the same thing.”

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Labour unveiled its long-awaited homelessness strategy for England last December, as the country found itself gripped in a temporary accommodation (TA) crisis - and no long-term plan to get out of it.

The strategy outlined how the government would lift thousands of people out of homelessness and find them permanent homes, committing millions to the project.

At the time, Big Issue founder Lord Bird was cautiously optimistic: “While commendable, the record investment piled into the emergency of homelessness last winter barely moved the dial, simply because of the huge number of people still falling into that emergency,” he said.

“It’s essential we turn off the tap if we want to stop this crisis overflowing, so the government is right to turn their focus to prevention.”

The latest homelessness statistics, covering January to March 2026, show that the taps are being turned off - the report showed a 2.1% reduction in households assessed being owed a duty of care.

(This means they’re either at risk of having no place to live, or needing to be helped out of homelessness.)

However as Lee Buss-Blair, director of operations at social housing provider Riverside, highlighted, the numbers of people needing emergency accommodation are still staggering:

“There are 177,530 homeless children living in temporary accommodation (TA), more than the entire populations of North Lincolnshire (171,336) and Kingston Upon Thames (172,692),” he said.

In his first speech as he toasted being named Labour Party leader, Andy Burnham recognised that the huge numbers spent on TA were pushing council budgets to the limit, and pledged to ease the pressure.

He said if the country is “paying for temporary accommodation for thousands of families, how then will we find the money to invest in prevention and improve people’s lives? The truth is we can’t”.

While the inflow into the system is reducing, the question of how to move people from TA to somewhere settled remains - and the data shows the big bottleneck for those trapped in the system.

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The headline numbers

The latest government statistics show that 900 households experience homelessness in England every day.

There were 92,200 households who asked councils for help in the first quarter of this year, which is down 2% from last year.

There was a 1.8% increase in the amount of households (39,200) assessed as being threatened with homelessness and requiring support to prevent it.

There was better news with the number who are homeless and need support: that amount was down 5% year on year to 44,650 - and crucially, 5.7% fewer households (11,000) of these households included children.

That means that while more people have come forward to ask for protection from their council, and are being given TA to prevent homelessness, it’s placing increasing strain on the system.

This puts more pressure on Burnham to deliver his proposed ramp up of social and council housebuilding, as well as investigating if housing benefit rates are fit to ensure people can afford places to rent.

“For far too long we have relied heavily on costly sticking plaster solutions, with councils spending billions of pounds each year on temporary accommodation that only traps people in a cycle of insecurity,” said Matt Downie, chief executive at Crisis.

“With sky-high rental costs and a chronic shortage of affordable homes, people across the country are being pushed to breaking point. With the right action, we can finally see these figures fall and ensure everyone has access to the vital foundation that is a secure home.”

One of the most pressing issues in recent years around TA is the use of hostels or bed and breakfasts (B&Bs) to house families - while they stop people from being homeless, the living conditions can be poor (and sometimes dangerous), and don’t come with places to cook or wash clothes.

Labour’s pledge to end the use of B&Bs for families has been well-documented, and year on year the number is has reduced 51%.

Housing secretary Angela Rayner said: “For too many people, a safe home still feels out of reach.

“While it’s welcome that more households are being helped into a home and fewer families are living in bed and breakfast accommodation, these figures show there is still a long way to go, with record numbers stuck in temporary accommodation.”

Where do families go after leaving B&Bs?

The Labour government’s pledge to move families out of B&Bs includes mandating that no family should have to live in these facilities for more than six weeks.

Strong progress has been made on this target, with a reduction of 16.7% of families in B&Bs for longer than the legal limit - down to 1,000.

However, the lack of permanent housing - especially in London boroughs - means the pressure on local authorities to move families out of B&Bs means they’re simply placed into other kinds of TA.

Nightly-paid self-contained accommodation has absorbed some of the exodus from B&Bs: in the last year, the amount of households in nightly paid self-contained accommodation has gone up 2.3%, while households in B&B accommodation is down 3% for the same period.

This is something of a double-edged sword - while more people are being moved into self-contained units, giving access to laundry and cooking facilities, these are still short-term (and expensive) options, meaning the feeling of impermanence remains, especially for children.

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This is a situation the House of Commons committee report into ‘Housing Conditions in Temporary Accommodation’ warned could happen in April 2026, when it was announced that the Labour government would seek to end the use of B&Bs as TA:

“We welcome the government’s national target to eliminate the unlawful use of B&Bs by the end of the parliament.

“However, we are concerned that councils may resort to using out-of-area placements or other types of shared accommodation to achieve this target unless safeguards are put in place.

“The government must also go further to phase out practices that see households placed in accommodation that does not meet their needs.”

There’s also the condition of the housing they’re being moved into to consider - while self-contained accommodation offers more facilities than B&Bs and hotels for homeless households, the conditions in which they’re living are often substandard.

In fact, three-quarters (75%) of TA households live in poor conditions, previous Trust for London research has shown, including one in five (21%) with a safety hazard, such as faulty wiring or fire risks, and many showing signs of damp and mould. These conditions led to 104 deaths of children related to living in TA.

Short term TA is not subject to the same laws as temporary housing operated with a lease - Awaab’s Law was brought in to stop families being forced to live in unsafe conditions, but this doesn’t apply to B&Bs and nightly paid accommodation.

Beyond the issue of safety, there’s also the impact on public spending - TA is costing councils billions and pushing many close to bankruptcy.

This is part of the reason why Burnham’s government has pledged to move many out of TA, to realise the ‘prize’ of reduced public spending to keep people out of homelessness.

A House of Commons research briefing on TA in England last year showed the extent of the problem - and the costs have continued to rise since:

“London Councils has revealed that London boroughs were spending almost £5 million a day on providing TA in 2024-25. Costs are influenced by the type of accommodation used: nightly paid, privately managed, self-contained units are now the most common and expensive TA option.”

Analysis from the housing charity Shelter showed that local government spending in 2024-25 topped £1bn for nightly paid accommodation, which was 40% of local authorities’ entire TA spending.

A report from the London School of Economics into the costs of TA for London borough councils highlighted that the lack of good quality, longer-term TA was causing a vicious circle.

“When councils cannot secure long leases they are left with no other option than nightly-paid TA, strengthening the market position of these providers and creating poor value for money and worse outcomes for households,” the report found.

An investigation into TA by current affairs title Prospect in 2024 reported two councils had to book hotels directly or through third-party websites, costing more and taking extra time from stretched council workers:

“This means that councils are paying the same price as members of the public, and that price comparison websites are also profiting from rising homelessness.”

Local availability dictates where people can live - the same investigation found families were being sent two hours away on public transport when hotels became booked up due to popular local events.

As a result of the TA bottleneck, local authorities in England have seen spending on temporary accommodation surge 1,077%, pushing them into financial crisis.

Children getting stuck in the system

While the latest statistics show progress is being made on moving children out of the worst kind of TA, they’re still spending years in this type of accommodation.

Most children are being forced to live between two to five years in TA. That’s 22,060 households, a quarter of all the families in emergency housing, and of those, 36.9% are in nightly paid accommodation.

This also has a much longer-term effect than on day-to-day living - studies show that children who grow up in unstable homes are subject to all kinds of knock-on effects, often ending up homeless themselves.

“A child’s education can be profoundly affected by housing instability,” Sam Pratt, policy and communications lead for the Shared Health Foundation, told Biggest Issue.

“A report by the Children’s Commissioner found that only 10% of children who move more than ten times during their school career achieve more than five GCSEs, and some families living in temporary accommodation may move this frequently within a single year.

“The unstable nature of temporary accommodation means it’s difficult for families to put down roots. From our experience, children are often disengaging from education due to homelessness-related factors.”

This constant movement also affects parents in many negative ways - the lack of sleep, stress of finding a new place to live constantly and trying to juggle work and childcare, especially in a single-parent family.

The new statistics show that the most common employment status of lead applicants for households owed prevention or relief duties is ‘registered unemployed’.

However, studies have shown if applicants are constantly shunted between different areas, especially if moved to another council district, the long commutes, loss of childcare support and disrupted routine can make it hard to hold down a job, which may explain the employment data in the latest homelessness report.

Do you think the latest statistics are acceptable? Andy Burnham has pledged record support to help end homelessness, but there are an historically high number of people in temporary accommodation. Can the tide really be turned?

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Unfamiliar territory

The new homelessness data shows there are 43,180 households owed a TA duty that were living in a different local authority - up 4.1% year on year - and two-thirds of them contain children.

While councils are required to accommodate households in their own district ‘as far as reasonably practicable’, the fact there are over 40,000 still being moved out of their local area highlights the lack of suitable TA available.

London is feeling the brunt of this the most, as 82.1% of all out-of-area displacements are coming from boroughs in the capital. Westminster is at the top of the list, putting 31.8 households per 1,000 out of area, a rise of over 50% in a year.

Laws have been passed to include a temporary accommodation notification duty (TAND), where local housing authorities must now notify a child’s school, health visitor and GP when that child is placed in temporary accommodation, to ensure that the school or medical facility can make the correct adjustments.

This scheme was developed in association with the Shared Health Foundation, and comes into effect on 1 September.

“When schools are informed that a child is experiencing homelessness, they are able to take a compassionate response, and implement practical steps to support homeless students and their families through their homeless journey,” adds Pratt, from of the Shared Health Foundation.

“We have seen examples of schools purchasing washing machines for families to use, offering access to WiFi, and arranging transport vouchers from school budgets to help pupils remain engaged and connected to their education. These relatively simple interventions can have a transformative impact.”

Outside of London, Manchester is one of the areas with the most out of area displacements, at 4.6 households per 1000, and is now offering free school travel for children in TA - announced in February this year under Burnham’s mayorship.

The idea for this is to break down the barriers that children face when living in unstable living conditions, allowing them to maintain friendships and relationships with teachers and more consistent learning.

However, it doesn’t change the fact that 43,180 households are being given TA outside of their community, and now Burnham is prime minister, there will be a focus on whether he can not only build enough housing, but to do so in a way that stops people being removed from their communities.

The questions to answer

One statistic that was under the spotlight in the latest homelessness data was the number of section 21 evictions, as this is the last report covering the period before the Renters’ Rights Act was made law in May.

Landlord lobby groups have warned in recent years that the new legislation would see an exodus of property owners selling up.

The worry was that thousands of households would be evicted from their rented accommodation, as landlords take advantage of being able to remove people more easily before the law came in, leading to a surge in applications to prevent homelessness to their local councils.

However, only 6,450 households were owed a prevention duty due to a section 21 notice, which is down 3.5% year on year - which Clara Collingwood, of the Renters’ Reform Coalition, said proves that the landlord-lobby warnings were proven to be unfounded.

“[The latest] statistics show yet again that the landlord lobby’s constant scaremongering about renters’ rights doesn’t live up to the reality. All indications are that there are more rented homes in England today, not less. Politicians should listen to renters, not landlord interest groups,” she said.

The next quarterly homelessness statistics release in the coming months, as the effect of the new renter protections come into force, will show whether the new legislation has had an impact.

The data will land at roughly the same time that the autumn budget will be unveiled in October, where more detail is expected from Burnham’s government on how it will fund the pledges to start the large council housebuilding commitments that were made when he became PM.

The other lingering question is how Burnham’s £442m pledge to offer all rough sleepers in England a route off the streets turns out.

With the promise of new accommodation and support to help people off the streets for good, how will the prime minister ensure that people are not shifted into an already saturated temporary accommodation crisis? Time will tell.

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Biggest Issue is stood in The Queens Arms, in Wigan, but there’s no chance of a pint.

The former pub shut its doors back in 2024, and now British drinking establishments are closing at a rate of nearly two per day, according to the British Beer and Pub Association.

That means hundreds of boozers will be left empty - but at a time when the homelessness crisis is in full swing, could former pubs hold an answer to the lack of housing?

That’s what we’re here to find out.

The new landlord at The Queens Arms is The Brick, a local anti-poverty charity and a Big Issue Invest investee. The charity’s CEO Keely Dalfen is showing us around.

• Read more about Big Issue Invest and the work it does to end inequality and poverty

Rather than a round of beer and a packet of pork scratchings, The Brick is serving up 14 beds to act as supported temporary accommodation for men experiencing homelessness.

Walking around the pub, it’s unrecognisable. You can barely see where the bar would have been.

Rather than tables, chairs and a fruit machine, there’s an office and a security room, which is staffed 24/7, downstairs.

There are rooms opposite for appointments, as intensive support is part of the service and each resident gets a two-hour weekly session to help them overcome whatever issues they’re facing.

Dalfen wants to avoid becoming a revolving door of attending professionals, that people feel like this is their home.

“You wouldn’t have a doctor come over [to your house],” she explains to Biggest Issue, adding that the charity’s Brick Works day centre is still used for some appointments when people need a dedicated space.

The converted pub now houses a communal living room, with a TV and an Xbox, and a kitchen with a cook who does breakfast and tea. Dinner is self-catered with refrigerated space for residents to store food.

Out the back, the beer garden has been retooled into a seating area for residents to relax.

Upstairs are a series of dormitories with beds and a small space to store belongings while there are plenty of bathrooms: seven to be exact. Dalfen explains that it was necessary to add more of these to ensure the smoothest possible living conditions, and removing potential points of friction that can cause arguments.

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The impact so far

If there are concerns that housing people who have experienced addiction in a pub could be triggering, that hasn’t been the case since the facility opened a few months ago.

One resident has made so much progress with abstinence from alcohol and is so ready to move on, he has already started buying belongings for his permanent home, Dalfen says.

“He’s writing his letter to the alcohol that he’s been ‘demoned’ with,” she says in relation to the alcohol addiction course the resident is taking.

“He read it to me - well, some of it - the other day. I started crying.

“It’s so emotional, you know. It’s really rewarding seeing them grow from when they first come in.”

Another resident is preparing to move out of the building the day after Big Issue visits. He’s excited.

The Queens Arms opened its doors to its new occupants in April 2026, giving the charity new opportunities to help people.

Previously, The Brick supported people experiencing homelessness at its Brick Works day centre.

Meanwhile, the charity also operated at the Queen’s Hall night shelter, which could see as many 20 people packed into the emergency accommodation, rising to 28 during times of extreme weather.

There were plenty of challenges with this model, Lauren Westwell, The Brick’s independent living mentor, tells Big Issue.

“When we were at the old provision it was quite difficult to manage because they didn’t have that stable accommodation,” she says.

“They were not able to build a routine and obviously there were people who weren’t in the shelter who were coming for support as well.

“Obviously there are a lot of people in the same room, so it can cause tension sometimes.”

Giving people their own space rather than being packed into a shelter has already shown results.

Some residents have even been able to reconnect with families after finding more stability in their lives.

“You’ve actually seen people make a routine of themselves and they’re getting up at a good time, they’re going out, they’re making their own appointments, they’re going to their appointments, they’re engaging with everything they need to do,” says Westwell.

“[That’s a big difference] from a night shelter of beds just split around, where there’s no privacy, only one toilet - and you can’t sleep because people are snoring or people are shouting and arguing.

“They’ve taken pride in this here and you can see it in their faces as well. They’re not being forgotten about, they’re not just being shoved into the bottom of a basement where it’s like someone is saying: ‘we’ve got nowhere else to put you’, or ‘you should be grateful, you’ve got somewhere warm to stay’.”

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A long road

It took almost two years for The Brick to transform The Queens Arms from derelict pub into emergency accommodation.

That was down to a tortuous time through the planning system and social media hysteria over houses of multiple occupancy (HMOs).

If The Queens Arms is a showcase of how to do accommodation differently for people experiencing homelessness, it’s also a clear example of the kind of barriers similar projects may face.

Dalfen first saw the potential in The Queens Arms in the summer of 2024 but a planning application was knocked back in July 2025.

It was rejected over the proposed layout of the temporary accommodation, as well as a number of objections from supported accommodation for over-55s across the road called Saddle Court - which went as far as to document the opposition in the media.

At the same time the current political climate meant that the idea of allowing the pub to be converted into an HMO proved unpopular.

The rise of Reform UK – the party took 24 out of 25 contested seats at Wigan Borough Council in May’s local elections – “spooked” councillors, Dalfen claimed.

The depth of feeling meant the council took the decision to remove permitted development rights - which allowed homes to be changed into HMOs without planning permission - in July last year.

“When it went to the first planning committee, because there’s this real division in society at the moment, everybody was like, ‘it’s going to be full of boat people’, all that horrendous stuff,” she says.

“We were really despondent and thought, “God, what are we going to do next?”

The Brick’s response was a campaign called Love Wins.

They spoke to the residents of Saddle Court, arranging meetings to meet staff and the new neighbours. This helped to ease concerns, break down any misconceptions and build the critical bridges to help move the project forwards.

The charity also launched Mythbuster Mondays, which used social media to explain that their efforts to end homelessness are based around compassion and dignity. They even distributed Love Wins t-shirts.

The Brick also did the big thing you need to do to win hearts and minds in Wigan: get the players from local rugby league team Wigan Warriors involved.

“We didn’t talk about that accommodation or the planning or anything, but what we tried to do was try to get people to understand what homelessness is and what we were trying to do,” says Dalfen.

“We were bringing the community together and it was really successful and loads of people got behind it.”

Next steps

The Queens Arms may offer some inspiration to other areas where pubs have closed their doors. Several chains are shuttering bars and restaurants, as the high cost of hospitality and employment costs are changing the economics of operation.

But while the model of repurposing former boozers can work if they are renovated to a high standard, it will not replace the need for thousands of purpose-built social homes, to give more people somewhere to go to after spending time in temporary accommodation.

The Brick’s new facility is also making a difference in other ways - giving hope that placing these projects in communities can show people how they can help one another.

When the residents of Saddle Court came round to The Queens Arms in March to meet residents in March, the collision of worlds demonstrated that power of community.

And that brings hope that, perhaps, the stigma around homelessness can be overcome through shared experiences.

“Some of the residents from [Saddle Court] used to drink here when they were younger, so they were like, ‘I think I played darts here’,” says Dalfen.

“I think they were also looking back to those times and thinking they missed that.

“So we were saying: ‘Now we’ve got that community space again, it’s just a bit different.’”

Do you have an empty pub near you? Would you think it was a good idea to have it help house people experiencing homelessness? Let us know in the comments below, and help shape our future articles.

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Putting modular homes on disused car parks and empty land could save councils, who are wrestling with rapidly rising temporary accommodation (TA) bills, almost £25,000 per household.

That’s the claim from modular housebuilder Places for People (PfP), which has put out a plea to work with councils to redirect money going on B&Bs and hotels towards housing homeless families in cheaper, factory-built homes.

Councils in England are currently spending £2.8 billion a year to house record numbers of households in TA, with spending estimated to hit £4bn by the end of the decade.

PfP wants that money to, instead, be used to house people in purpose-built, modular homes on unused council land, reducing TA costs by approximately £24,500 per household and offering better quality than hotels.

Modular homes are built off-site before being transported to where they’ll stand, which PfP says means they can be built between 30% and 50% quicker, and can last for 60 years.

Larry Gold, CEO for Housing and Communities at PfP, said: “TA has become a national crisis, with hundreds of thousands of families - including 176,000  children - growing up in hotel rooms and B&Bs without the stability or space they need to thrive. 

“There is a clear opportunity and urgent need to do things differently and we want to use our experience to help government and councils end the homelessness and TA crisis.

“By investing in modular housing, we can not only reduce the enormous costs associated with TA but, far more importantly, provide people with the safe, secure homes they deserve.”

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Modular homes differ from traditional housing as they are built off-site before being transported to where they’ll stand.

They can also be used on small or underused plots of land - PfP suggested disused car parks and other vacant council-owned sites, that might otherwise sit idle, as ideal spots.

PfP is currently working with Bristol City Council to deliver a new scheme of 20 two-bedroom modular homes for vulnerable families.

The nearly-complete homes, constructed by PfP’s modular specialist Modularwise, will offer stability for up to two years, alongside tailored support to help residents move into permanent housing.

Mother-of-three Teri Jackson, 38, from Bristol, currently lives in a one-bedroom TA flat with her two sons, aged 20 and 11, while waiting for a permanent social home.

She was placed in emergency accommodation in January 2024 after leaving an “uninhabitable” privately-rented home, and has spent seven months moving between hotels.

Jackson said she once saw a £2,900 invoice intended for the local council for a three-week hotel stay, despite her not even having access to critical facilities.

Jackson said: “There was nowhere I could cook or wash clothes and we ate takeaways every night. It was unhealthy and so expensive.

“For the last seven weeks, I was moved every Monday. I wouldn’t know where we were going until that morning. I had to pack everything on Sunday, wait, then move.

“My son missed school every Monday for seven weeks, and I had to take time off work. At one point we were placed in Bath – a 90-minute round trip to school. It felt like I didn’t exist – I was just surviving for my children.”

Jackson and her sons are currently in a one-bed emergency accommodation flat managed by PfP while they wait to secure a social home.

“When I moved into my current place, it felt amazing because we could cook, wash, and have privacy. But it’s still one bedroom,” said Jackson.

“Both my children have additional needs, and the space just doesn’t work. This modular home will change everything. Just having space – somewhere we can properly live - would mean the world while we wait for a permanent home.”

PfP said the modular home model integrates support services, connecting residents with healthcare, employment and other resources and includes a pathway into more permanent accommodation.

Modular homes around Britain

Places for People is not the only modular homes provider looking to work with councils to address the number of households in TA. Other projects are springing up around the UK to show the potential benefits of modular housing.

In Cambridge, homelessness charity Jimmy’s have 22 modular homes across four sites that are being used as a stepping stone for people sleeping rough.

Big Issue vendor Eamonn Kelly was one such person, battling drug addiction before moving into a modular home at Jimmy’s in 2020.

“It brought me right out of homelessness,” he said of his housing, which helped him beat his addiction and allowed him to start working with Jimmy’s, giving talks about his experiences. “I was on the streets and then Jimmy’s saved my bacon for the last time.”

In Scotland, homelessness charity Social Bite opened its new homeless village in Rutherglen and re-opened its original village near Edinburgh, both using modular Nest Houses.

Speaking to Big Issue earlier this year, Social Bite co-founder Josh Littlejohn said: “We feel we’ve got a fantastic homelessness accommodation model here now that would work in towns and cities all over the country basically.”

Other projects are looking at different forms of modular living: Jasper Thompson has been offering accommodation through renovated shipping containers with his Help Bristol’s Homeless organisation since 2017, which funds the accommodation itself through charitable donations and also offers wraparound support to residents.

While different in structure to the modular housing employed by PfP, Thompson agrees that smaller, less permanent homes can be used to provide a valuable alternative compared to hotels, B&Bs or even the streets.

“It’s a stopgap. It’s not permanent, but it works and it gives people the opportunity to get their life back on track,” said Thompson.

“If you can get someone in there like we do, and give them six to 12 months [of stability] and they get a job, they get further accommodation.

“We’re just helping the council and helping someone get back into society.”

But there are cautionary tales around using shipping containers in this way.

In 2017, Ealing council placed a group of homeless people, including families, in 34 repurposed, ready-to-live-in shipping containers, designated as emergency housing to help with the growing crisis.

However, a report found “they were cramped and had inhospitable temperatures”, leading to them being decommissioned in 2023, with the sites now being assessed for building permanent affordable housing.

Thompson said of the Ealing project: “I actually went to the Ealing Council when they put these units up.

“I think that what they were looking to do and the people that they were trying to house were wrong. The accommodation was wrong. It was too clinical. It would have been perfect for student accommodation, but not to house families.”

Can modular housing work as a solution to the temporary accommodation crisis?

Anna Clarke, director of policy and public affairs at The Housing Forum, a cross-sector membership network of organisations from the public and private sectors, agreed there were already positive examples of councils using modular housing as TA for homeless households.

However, she issues a cautionary note around the funding for these projects.

“My understanding is that the upfront costs of buying the accommodation can be a lot so, although there are big savings to be made, you take quite a few years to recoup those savings,” said Clarke.

It’s something to be wary of - in 2025, Cornwall Council had to sell off over half of the modular SoloHaus housing it bought, due to the high costs of plumbing them in and potentially needing to buy land to store them on.

“The cost associated with building a new site – including design and construction, utilities and access – is, on average, almost £244,000 per SoloHaus unit,” a councillor told Cornwall Live. “This would increase if we had to purchase land. This is not a cost we can sustain.”

Clarke added that as modular units are moveable, they can offer councils some flexibility - theoretically at least.

“[However,] what tends to happen is that the need for them doesn’t go away, people become established and settled and the costs of moving units is quite a lot, because you’ve got all the utilities to connect and so on,” she said.

While PfP’s project shows promise, Clarke is sceptical about the quality of modular homes at a bigger scale.

“I think on a small scale, and where the alternative is a hotel room or even a room in a shared house for a single person, they can be really nice,” said Clarke.

“I’d be more wary about them when they’re done at scale because they don’t normally come with all the kind of infrastructure that you would get from permanent housing.

“So there isn’t anywhere for children to play, any school places, any green spaces, all the sort of things that you would hope to put in.”

There’s also the question of the sustainability of the model - in 2023, Ron Beattie, who runs modular house builder Beattie Passive, told Big Issue Magazine that the huge investment in capital expenditure to set up a factory and keep it running means there is great risk when it comes to building at scale, especially when demand drops.

“The challenges are that we have never been able to deliver on large numbers, because the industry has got so many barriers to it, whether it’s planning, logistics, or finance,” says Beattie, whose company provides modular homes in Cardiff.

“So trying to set a company up with a capital expenditure of multi millions and then maintain that where you’ve got this ebb and flow of workflows coming through, it’s really difficult.

“I think the whole model is very, very dangerous. But some people will win, it will happen, it will grow when we can start getting the continuity of work, and the pipeline that needs to be sustainable.”

Despite the warnings, Beattie is still hoping to expand his operation from his current initial factory to “a factory in every city” and believes the environmental credentials of the modular housing sector means the sector could still have a big say in the future of housing in the UK.

The potential remains

Ultimately, a modular home revolution does not take away the need for an increase in permanent social housing.

It is a short-term solution to ease living conditions for those trapped in B&Bs in the current crisis. It doesn’t solve the issue of needing more houses to be built to give people permanent homes, and can only be viewed as part of the solution.

Habitat For Humanity UK has been researching long-term non-residential buildings left empty in England in recent years in a bid to understand opportunities to deliver new council homes, their research finding the potential for over half a million homes.

The charity has teamed up with Social Bite to create a modular community space in the Edinburgh homeless village after finding the homes on the site “more cost effective and great places to live”.

Guy Parker, Habitat For Humanity GB housing advocacy manager, said: “There are assets in every community going unused, from empty offices, pubs and shops, to pockets of land and brownfield sites. There’s no single answer to the housing crisis, but if we only focus on the largest sites, we miss many opportunities.”

He added: “Business as usual, where we dismiss almost every option, is resulting in thousands of families stuck in inappropriate, unhealthy accommodation. Not every building is suitable for conversion, and not every modular design is perfect.

“Many are though and, by putting time into finding the right ones, the government and councils can save public money and create lasting homes.”

New prime minister Andy Burnham has declared his intention to embark on the biggest council house building programme in the post-war period.

Housing charity Shelter has been calling for 90,000 social rent homes to be built every year to match the increase in people suffering with the housing crisis.

Sarah Elliott, chief executive at Shelter, said ministers must “think outside the box” to hit that mark.

“If done right, alternative construction methods can unleash councils to build homes quickly, especially on public land, whilst generating jobs and boosting the local economy,” said Elliott

“The government and councils should explore all options, including using innovative building methods, to ramp up the delivery of social homes, whilst making sure all new housing developments are high quality and well-managed.”

Do you think modular houses are the answer to a rapidly-growing, and hugely expensive, crisis in temporary accommodation? Or does it just paper over the cracks of a much larger problem?

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Prevention has been the buzzword on tackling homelessness for Labour politicians, including Andy Burnham, in recent years.

To support this, in December 2024, Labour announced it was spending £1bn in tackling homelessness across England - which ministers hailed the biggest spending on prevention on record.

This ended up as £633 million initially available under the homelessness prevention grant. There was a £10.9 million top-up in October 2025, and a further top-up of £50 million two months later, bringing the total spent under the grant to £694.17 million.

Housing secretary Angela Rayner spoke of ambitions of “breaking the cycle” on homelessness when she announced the funding.

But it comes as English councils spent a record £2.8 billion on temporary accommodation (TA) last year, pushing budgets to the limit.

So why are local authorities struggling to keep up with the sheer scale of the homelessness crisis and number of households living in TA?

And are they able to do the work needed to prevent people needing TA in the first place?

Biggest Issue decided to find out. We sent freedom of information requests to the top 20 local authorities with the largest number of households in TA in England.

We asked them how they spent their homelessness prevention grant in 2025-26 to understand the challenges in preventing homelessness.

We also spoke in depth to one councillor to explain the findings, who explained why they were in a ‘doom loop’ with housing in their borough.

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What we found

Of the top 20 local authorities with the highest number of households in TA, 13 have responded to Biggest Issue’s requests at the time of writing.

All but one are based in London, with Manchester the sole respondent outside the English capital.

Birmingham, which has the second largest number of households in TA, and Liverpool, the 20^th, have not responded.

Even so, the responses we received show how a combined £162 million in government funding is being spent.

The cash from the grants came with a caveat to councils: they could only spend half of the money on TA.

That was a particularly big problem for London, which accounts for 56% of households in TA in England and where local authorities are spending around £5m a day, according to London Councils.

In total, seven of the 13 local authorities that responded to Biggest Issue’s requests spent more of their homelessness prevention grant on TA than preventing people from becoming homeless in the first place.

In the London borough of Newham – where almost 7,500 households live in TA, the most in a single area in the country – more than £22.5m was received through the homelessness prevention grant.

Over £10.8m of that money went on housing families in TA. That complies with the terms of the grant, spending just over 48% of the funding on emergency housing.

But when £7m in staffing costs are taken into account, just £4.6m (20%) went on prevention.

Some London boroughs told us even less was being spent on prevention.

Redbridge, Haringey and Hackney told Biggest Issue they spent less than 20% of the fund on prevention, and Tower Hamlets said just 8% of its £11.6m grant allocation went on prevention, amounting to £934,801.

Mixed results

Some London boroughs did manage to spend more than half the allocation on preventing homelessness.

Hackney Council told Biggest Issue that £6.4m of its £12m allocation went on prevention or homelessness relief duties.

Meanwhile, in Croydon, £7.3m went on prevention, the council said, compared to £6.5m on TA.

It was outside London where the highest proportion of spending went on prevention, perhaps speaking to a difference in demand outside the capital.

In total, 58% of Manchester’s £10.5m fund went on prevention, the city council said.

Commenting on the findings, Big Issue founder Lord John Bird said: “Prevention has become Westminster’s favourite buzzword, a way for this Labour government to distinguish its approach from the one that came before.

“But it’s clear the government’s ‘record investment in prevention’ is more cash for firefighting.

“Councils budgets are clearly creaking under their weight of record homelessness duties, and their decision to prioritise resourcing TA is understandable.

“We must invest in the long-term solutions alongside the short-term sticking plasters to make serious progress on reducing homelessness in the UK.

“One thing that is encouraging to see is that Manchester leads the pack in actual spending on prevention.

“Andy Burnham would do well to replicate what’s being done in his former mayoralty at a national level to deliver on his day-one promise of eradicating rough sleeping.”

Lambeth: ‘We are living in a landlord-class world’

We spoke to a councillor in one of the regions with the highest amount of households in TA, to find out how it was trying to pick its way through the housing problem.

Lambeth received £13.6m through the homelessness prevention grant, and sits fourth on the league table of councils with the most households in TA, with 4,425 requiring support.

The local authority broke down its spending further, listing £6.3m for “payments to landlords”, and a further £2.8m described as ‘incentives’, which Lambeth Council told Biggest Issue are “a generous non-refundable cash incentive” offered to landlords who agree to rent to a household at the local housing allowance rate.

“It’s pretty startling that basically half the money from the homelessness prevention grant was paid to private landlords,” Councillor Martin Abrams, the leader of Lambeth Council, told Biggest Issue.

“That is indicative of the [situation]. I’ve gone beyond calling it a housing crisis in Lambeth. It’s a housing emergency because of the situation that many, many families are living in.”

The Green Party took control of Lambeth Council in May 2026, with Streatham Hill East councillor Abrams taking on the role of leader.

He’s been a councillor in the borough for four years, so he was not blind to the scale of the homelessness situation the council is facing.

The grant Lambeth Council receives is only a small part of the funding for its overall bill for people in TA.

The total is around £100 million per year, councillor Abrams told Biggest Issue, and shows the strain on council budgets, with local authorities across London and other parts of England having to draw on reserves to keep up with the costs.

Creaking councils

The huge cost of housing people in TA is making it harder to focus on prevention, with the growing gap between council spending and government reimbursement worsening each year.

The Local Government Association (LGA) recently said council expenditure on TA increased by a record 1,077 per cent in real terms between 2011-12 and 2024-25.

Councils struggle to recover what they pay out to landlords for TA because local housing allowance rates for reimbursement are locked at 2011 levels – despite the huge rise in rent costs since then.

Councillor Eamonn O’Brien, chair of the LGA, said: “TA is a huge leak in council budgets that needs to be patched quickly and, at its heart, transform the lives of families and children across the country.”

Lambeth councillor Abrams told Biggest Issue that paying money to private landlords, often for former council homes sold through the Right to Buy scheme was trapping local authorities in a “doom loop”.

Last year Big Issue investigated the scale of these so-called yo-yo homes, finding more than 100 examples of homes built by councils being sold off and costing local authorities millions of pounds.

“The temporary housing issue is exacerbating the housing emergency because you are basically creating the demand for more private landlords,” Abrams added.

“Often some of these private landlords are renting out former council properties back to the council, which is bonkers.

“I mean, what world are we living in where private speculators and landlords are able to snap up former decent council housing at a cut-price and then rent it back to the council at exorbitant cost?

“We are living in a landlord-class world at the moment.”

Abrams’ sentiment is echoed by the new prime minister. As he was announced as Labour leader, Andy Burnham made it clear that reducing the amount given to private landlords was key to preventing homelessness:

“If the sell-off of council homes leaves the country chasing rents in the private rented sector through the benefits system and paying for TA for thousands of families as they have to do here in London and across the country, how then will we find the money to invest in prevention and improve people’s lives?” Burnham said in his speech.

“The truth is: we can’t.”

What it means

Long-term, the answer to preventing people from becoming homeless is undoubtedly building social homes.

Burnham has pledged the “biggest council house building programme since the post-war period”, but how he plans to do that – and deliver the state-backed housebuilder many believe is required to do it – is unclear.

The Labour government is currently amending the Right to Buy scheme in England. It has already been abolished in Scotland and Wales.

Abrams would like to see Burnham and housing secretary Angela Rayner – who once bought a home through the scheme – go further and kill off the Thatcherite initiative.

What are Labour’s amends to the Right to Buy scheme?

Ministers have announced tenants will have to live in a home for 10 years, up from three, to buy their home and discounts under the scheme are set to be tightened.

The initial discount for tenants will be just 5%, increasing by 1% per year lived in the property.

There will be a 35-year exemption on new build social properties being sold under Right to Buy in a bid to give councils more confidence to build new homes.

“If he was serious about tackling the housing crisis, the first thing he would have said is he’s going to end Margaret Thatcher’s Right to Buy,” Abrams said.

“You need to go to the root cause of the housing emergency and one of the biggest issues over the last four decades has been the Right to Buy.

“That [scheme] has absolutely decimated local authorities’ council housing stock. They have not been replaced like for like and that has meant there is nowhere near enough supply for the demand that councils are facing.”

The empty home solution

The other move Abrams believes would help bolster homelessness prevention is on bringing empty homes back into use.

Lambeth Council currently has more than 700 empty council properties on its books which need renovating before they can be let out to homeless families.

“Local authorities often are very keen on redevelopment rather than refurbishment and retrofitting,” said Abrams.

“There’s been a big policy of estate regeneration across London, not just Lambeth, which has meant many of these estates have just been left in a state of managed decline with increasing numbers of empty properties.

“I’ve instructed officers here to give me a full list of when those properties will be put back into public use and we can start getting people off the TA list and actually living in council properties.”

Big Issue has been among those calling for a Westminster government strategy on empty homes.

Our founder Lord John Bird has been submitting amendments to the government’s Social Housing Bill in a bid to establish a government-backed loan scheme to help councils purchase or lease empty properties and make them fit for habitation.

Abrams said “radical” policies are needed.

“I think there should be a policy that if you’ve got an overseas owner that’s bought a property and left it empty for more than a year then the state can basically claim it back,” he suggested.

“We can’t tiptoe around the edges anymore when you’ve got a homelessness crisis, a housing emergency, and local authorities basically spending billions and billions and billions to private landlords every year.

“That money should be being spent on building houses rather than lying in the pockets of individuals.”

Burnham has set out his ambition to move towards prevention and lead a council house revolution.

Biggest Issue’s research shows the scale of the task he faces to turn around the current housing emergency, and make preventing homelessness the default response instead of a much-repeated buzzword.

We want to hear your views: should the state be able to reclaim a home that's sat empty for over a year? Is scrapping the Right to Buy scheme the right call? Let us know in the comments below.

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This week, we’re looking at one of the reasons why families find themselves in temporary accommodation: the sky-high cost of private renting,

Since 2022, Big Issue has been tracking private rents monthly - with the latest data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showing private rentals are at an all-time high, we’ve decided to look at what we’ve learned in that time.

We spoke to Liam Geraghty - Big Issue deputy editor - who has been writing this piece for over four years, combining the latest ONS numbers with commentary from think tanks, housing charities, and policy institutes.

“Our explainer on private rents has been one of the most consistently read pieces on bigissue.com in recent years,” he told Biggest Issue.

“We started doing it as a response to the cost of living crisis, when rents surged alongside other household bills.”

While the monthly updates are useful to track the exact numbers behind the surge in rental prices, the article is an important reminder that every rise is another step towards homelessness for some families.

With a new prime minister installed at Number 10 promising to end rough sleeping, and the headline numbers highlighting dizzying costs for renters, what can the past tell us about where the private renting sector is going?

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So what’s happening with rent?

In short: more people are private renting than ever before, and rents have been mostly running above inflation since 2022.

Private rental inflation peaked at 9.1% in March 2024, while wider inflation was 2.5% on average across 2024.

A year later, rents grew by 7.7%, above wage and inflation growth.

“Private renters are more likely to spend more than 30% of their income on housing - widely considered the maximum affordable ratio - than social renters or owner occupiers. In London, renters are paying around 46% on average,” said Liam.

A recent report from the Resolution Foundation found that 12.9m people were living in private rented accommodation, up from 5.2m households in 2001.

“It’s not unusual for the private rented sector to have high rent-to-income ratios. That’s been the case for the last two decades.

“But the number of renting households has doubled over that period. That means more households are facing a higher proportion of their income going on rent.”

Liam added: “Throw in the rise in energy bills and it felt like tenants were feeling the pinch more than ever before.”

Renting on the rise

The numbers behind the rise in rent are important here.

The latest figures came out on Wednesday (22 July) showing a 3.3% rise in the year up to June with the average UK rent sitting at £1,388 a month.

Rents are rising faster in Wales, up almost 5% in the year up to June to £843 a month on average, Scotland saw a 1.3% rise to £1,012 while the average in England increased by 3.4% to £1,446.

The number of children living in rented homes has tripled in the last 25 years - meaning one in four under-11s are at risk of homelessness if renting becomes unaffordable for families.

“Since the cost of living crisis, private rents were rising beyond inflation and renters received no targeted support,” said Liam.

There are a number of reasons why more people now are living in let houses. Social housing numbers have dwindled, mortgage stress-testing has become more onerous and interest rate rises have made mortgages unaffordable for many.

If rents become unaffordable, then it means people have less money to spend on other things and the economy can start to drag.

While wages have started to rise faster than rent growth in recent months, according to Generation Rent, it only marginally eases the pressure, rather than feeling like paying the rent is comfortable.

Also, as more people are renting at higher prices, they’re less likely to be able to save for a deposit. This transfers the wealth to landlords, causing an equality gap and trapping people further in a cycle of renting.

A 27% rise in four years

So while affordability might be slightly easing, it doesn’t change the fact that renting is more expensive than it ever has been in the UK.

The latest ONS statistics show that the average rent from across the UK is £1,388, where it was just £1,079 in June 2022, when we started tracking the statistics.

That’s a rise of nearly 27% in that time, and even though the rises are slowing, they’re still going up and squeezing those on the lowest incomes harder than most.

While the overall rate of rent price growth in the UK is 3.3%, there’s a lot of variation across different parts of the country as renters react to the spiralling costs.

“Rents are typically higher in London than the rest of the country and they tend to take up a higher proportion of incomes. But rents in the capital are rising at the slowest rate across the UK while more affordable areas are seeing bigger rises,” said Liam.

Advertised rents are generally growing fastest in the sub-£750 regions - Carlisle (9.1%), Kilmarnock (9%) and Halifax (6.5%) are seeing some of the quickest rises, according to Zoopla.

“Places like Yorkshire and the Humber and the north-east of England have typically been cheaper areas to rent but have seen rents rise by the most in recent months,” added Liam.

“Perhaps the most interesting local example across the UK is in Newport in South Wales where rents have boomed in recent years as the city has grown.

“Between 2024 and 2026, asking rents surged by 20% in the Welsh city as it made a name for itself as a popular spot for commuters looking to get to places like Cardiff and Bristol but seeking more affordable housing than those two cities.”

Are prices going to come down?

While prices continue to rise, there are some positive signs for the long term. Costs are still above the latest inflation figures (3.3% private rental sector rises, compared to 2.6% for inflation), but predictions are they should remain stable at 2-3% through the rest of 2026.

If earnings keep outpacing rents, the affordability will ease further, and homes to let are at a seven-year high, according to Property Industry Eye. However, this is driven by a larger number of properties in the purpose-built rental sector, meaning properties in many areas are still scarce.

“The Renters’ Rights Act’s impact remains unknown. The new measures came into force in May and limit rent increases to once a year while tenants have more power to challenge a rise at a tribunal. This could delay the rate at which rents rise,” said Liam.

“The new act has also come with widespread warnings that landlords will quit private renting in their droves.

“There has been anecdotal evidence of some landlords quitting the market but it remains to be seen whether the warnings translate into higher rents across the board.

“Warnings of a landlord exodus miss the point that the home doesn’t crumble to rubble when landlords sell up. It may offer the opportunity for a first-time buyer to get on the market, maybe another landlord may buy it.”

The Renters’ Rights Act is set to shake up the rental market - since its arrival in May this year, it’s seen Section 21 evictions abolished, rent rises limited to one per year and made tenants more secure in their homes.

There’s still more to come there too - with an extension of Awaab’s Law forcing landlords to maintain a level of quality in privately rented homes, and a dedicated ombudsman in the offing giving renters more recourse in case of disputes.

The affordability crisis

But this doesn’t mean that renting has become affordable, and stopping prices spiralling further has been on the agenda. Scotland is set to enforce a rent control system, from 2027 at the earliest, locking the allowed rental increases to a fixed amount above inflation.

There has been speculation that Andy Burnham may consider introducing rent controls as part of his efforts to address the cost of living - we know that he requested the power to enable them during his time as Mayor of Greater Manchester.

The recent Westminster line on rent controls has been that they disincentivise landlords from investing in the sector and this can lead to declining standards and numbers of properties. Critics also argue that rents rise on units that are not controlled.

“Personally, having monitored rents over the last few years, I believe a well-designed system of rent controls might be an option for Burnham in the short-term, particularly with the Renters’ Rights Act bringing in more robust measures to maintain housing standards,” said Liam.

“But, long-term, the answer to bring down private rents is to build more social and council housing as Burnham has pledged to do. How he plans to do that remains to be seen.”

However, there’s a tension here - Local Housing Allowances have been frozen since 2024, meaning just 2% of the houses in the private rental sector are affordable for those on housing benefit.

“Rents have slowed in recent months because we have largely reached saturation points in terms of what tenants can afford and it is the market self-correcting,” added Liam.

“But the reality is that rents are already at a point that tenants cannot afford, particularly as local housing allowance rates do not keep up with the rising cost of rents.

“The average gap between housing benefit and the cheapest third of rents for a two-bedroom home was £403 per month, Crisis and Citizens Advice reported recently.”

However, relinking housing benefits to the bottom 30% of rents by raising local housing allowance rates is expensive. The last time the Conservative government unfroze rates in 2024, it cost £1.2bn in that year alone and that rises as rents increase.

Local housing allowance rates also set how much councils are reimbursed for housing benefit on temporary accommodation properties.

But those rates are currently capped at 2011 levels, leaving councils struggling to make up the shortfall to cover rents in the present day.

Department for Work and Pensions forecasts said the housing benefit bill was expected to be £37.3bn for the 2025-2026 financial year. A significant proportion of that is the taxpayer subsidising private rents.

“To put it into context, the social and affordable housing programme announced last year to build new homes was £39bn for the next decade,” said Liam.

“The real-world effects are that people on low incomes cannot find a rental home they can afford or keep up with the rent in their current home.”

The third sector is also stepping in to provide support and dignity.

“Citizens Advice said they’ve supported more than 6,600 renters to access food banks this year, a nearly 80% increase compared with five years ago,” added Liam.

“So far in 2026, the charity has helped more than 100 private renters a day with housing benefit problems.

“It remains to be seen whether Burnham will raise LHA rates in April next year. He has previously blamed Westminster decision-making for failing to prevent homelessness in Greater Manchester. Now he’s the one calling the shots.”

It’s a big issue for Burnham and local authorities.The offset between housing benefit and the cost of renting is one of the reasons why people are being housed in temporary accommodation - and why it is costing councils a fortune.

In the days before becoming PM, Burnham said that “investing in prevention and improving people’s lives” is not possible while the country is “chasing rents in the private rented sector through the benefits system and paying for temporary accommodation”.

Humans at the heart

While Burnham’s early pledge to end rough sleeping is thoroughly welcomed, it’s equally important that the stock of housing available increases accordingly, to give everyone the chance to have a home they deserve.

“Having a good, secure home is foundational for everyone. It’s one of life’s essentials. Reporting on figures such as how much rents have risen can be dehumanising. It can make you lose sight of the fact that it relates to people and their homes,” said Liam.

“Too often, homes are looked on as investments or financial playthings. Rental inflation to some can be a positive sign for a property portfolio. For others, it’s a worry about how they may struggle to find extra cash this month.

“It’s vital to remember that homes are more than just bricks and mortar or numbers on a spreadsheet.”

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The toll that the temporary accommodation crisis is taking on people trapped in limbo and local authorities is well documented. But digging into the numbers underlines its staggering scale.

In April this year, a House of Commons committee report, investigating housing conditions in temporary accommodation (TA), found: “The government is spending more than ever on [TA] without a good understanding of the quality of provision this money is paying for. This is not acceptable.”

We already knew that a record number of households were living in TA - 134,210 as of the end of 2025, including 176,130 children in England.

Now new data from the English Housing Survey (EHS) suggests that nearly a quarter of those living in TA are stuck in substandard housing - and the actual number could be even higher than that.

We’ve delved into the data to look beyond the headline numbers, to understand what’s being surveyed, what’s been actually found and what it means for the government’s pledges.

One stark thing the report highlights: an urgent TA crisis that’s not only ruining lives but is costing councils a fortune and preventing them from building the homes they need to address the housing crisis.

Council spending matches the government’s claim of rising spend. A recent Local Government Association analysis showed that council TA spend is up 1,077% in 13 years, and the figure is increasing.

However, due to the rates at which the local authorities can claim back the spend, it’s contributing heavily to a £7 billion funding black hole councils are facing across England. In Eastbourne alone, the local authority has warned that it has been spending as much as 49p in every £1 of its total budget on TA in recent years.

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The worrying numbers

The EHS has been running for almost 60 years. It asks a sample of addresses drawn at random from a list of private addresses held by the Royal Mail questions about their housing.

The latest data is split across a number of different areas, from weather resilience in housing to the perceptions of housing quality.

Before we delve into the numbers, it’s worth noting that the government surveyed just 113 TA households over two reports (2023-24 and 2024-25), before being upweighted to give the national figures quoted. The data should be viewed with this in mind.

The government survey itself says: ‘The sample size of temporary and emergency accommodation properties in the EHS is relatively small, and as a result, we cannot be confident that the apparent differences between temporary and emergency accommodation and other homes are real.’

However, the number of issues highlighted, even at this smaller sample size, reflects the wider issues reported by other sources: that many are living in unsuitable housing conditions.

The data around the conditions TA households are living in gives the most worrying headline numbers: 24% of TA households are living in what’s known as ‘non-decent housing’.

The numbers were derived from surveying households in the rented sectors, meaning both private and social renting. Households were asked whether they were living in temporary or emergency accommodation offered by the council, and 2% of renters across England (182,000 households) said they were living in such housing.

Of those surveyed, 11% of TA households (19,000) were found to have a Category 1 hazard, with 13% living in significant damp conditions - a standard of housing that can cause a number of health problems.

The Renters’ Rights Act has handed councils the power to issue £7,000 fines for each separate instance of a Category 1 hazard, as the government seeks to clamp down on unsuitable living conditions. However, this is only if TA households are in private rented homes, not other kinds of TA that may be used.

This shows the gaps that exist in policy and enforcement, depending on what kind of accommodation households are in.

A recent UCL survey suggests the issues those in TA are facing may be larger than the EHS findings. The survey, produced in conjunction with the Town and Country Planning Association, found that people living in office blocks that have been converted into flats via a controversial planning exemption – permitted development rights (PDR) – were far more likely to report damp or mould (23% versus 6%), compared to the national average.

There’s also a geographical disparity present: the report showed the problems facing those in TA were disproportionately concentrated in London.

The survey found that there were 75,000 TA households in London, which was 4% of all renters, compared to 74,000 across the rest of England (just 1% of renters).

Who’s affected?

According to the EHS, those in TA are most likely to be a single person under 60 (32%) - but after that, lone parents with dependent children (27%) and couples with dependent children (18%) are the largest categories.

That means, combined, 45% of TA households contain children. Most of those living in TA also have a disability or long-term illness in the household (56%), compared to 45% living in the private rented sector.

While the report doesn’t break these down into age categories, we’ve already seen that one in eight children growing up homeless has a disability.

Over 21,000 disabled children are growing up in TA, according to children’s charity Variety, which obtained the figures through sending Freedom of Information requests to 296 local authorities in England.

More than half of local councils were unable to provide data on disabled children in temporary accommodation, highlighting how these families are getting lost in the system.

“The results are appalling, quite frankly,” said Laurence Guinness, chief executive of Variety. “Thirteen per cent of all children living in temporary accommodation have a disability.”

There are plenty of examples of families living the reality of these substandard TA conditions - such as Imogen, a single mother of a seven-year-old girl and a four-year-old boy with special educational needs.

The family was placed in TA without a bed big enough for one of her children (so Imogen had to sleep on the floor), no cooking appliances and no laundry services. They were in this accommodation for eight months.

This is just one example of the poor conditions parents are facing when living in TA, which are often inadequate for proper care of their children, especially those with disabilities.

The government’s own response to the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee’s report highlighted “record numbers of people experiencing homelessness, including record numbers of families trying to raise their children in the worst and most dangerous accommodation, such as bed and breakfast”.

Given that more than 100 children – including 76 babies – died with TA listed as a contributory factor to their death between 2019 and 2025, the new EHS report reinforces an urgent need to take action to lift all children out of TA, not just those with disabilities.

The glaring B&B omission

There is one potential blind spot in the report, and it’s crucial in highlighting the state of housing for those in TA.

The EHS, when defining TA, says “it can include a range of properties, from local authority owned dwellings or those in the private rented sector, to less traditional accommodation, such as hotels, B&Bs, hostels, and refuges.

“Not all of these dwelling types are surveyed as part of the EHS.”

We’ve been through the data and it doesn’t break down what type of accommodation the 113 households surveyed were in.

However, in the section regarding concealed households, the type of accommodation they were in was broken down - and of the 16,400 households surveyed, none were in hostels or B&Bs.

It’s not clear if there was any crossover between those being surveyed for around TA and concealed households, so we can’t use the same number with any certainty.

However, the number shows it’s quite possible that this EHS survey hasn’t heard from any TA households in a hostel or B&B. That’s a significant element of the report, because the government has pledged, on multiple occasions, that it wants to improve TA conditions for children in these types of housing.

Promises have been made in the government’s homelessness strategy to eradicate the unlawful use of B&Bs and hostels for TA by the end of parliament and to strengthen protections against poor housing in temporary accommodation.

The housing select committee has called for Awaab’s Law to be extended fully to temporary accommodation by the end of 2029.

The law requires social landlords to act to fix hazards to strict timeframes and is set to be extended to the private rented sector.

Labour has been running an £8m pilot to reduce the dependence on B&Bs as emergency accommodation in 20 local authorities where it is relied on the most.

When writing for Big Issue, homelessness minister Alison McGovern said “We will end the use of B&Bs for families except in emergencies and ensure newborns are never discharged from hospital into B&B accommodation.”

There is progress being made - as of December 2025, there were 1,190 families in B&Bs as TA for over six weeks, which is a 63.2% reduction year over year.

But until the EHS routinely breaks down the types of TA that households find themselves in, the true picture will remain harder to define.

The government has pledged to try and improve this - in its response to the Housing Committee, it said: “We are investigating options to improve the information we collect on the quality of temporary accommodation, building on existing data collections including the English Housing Survey. We will write to the committee in autumn to update them on this work.”

Will things get better?

The Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee’s report on children living in temporary accommodation in April 2025 said it was ‘appalled’ by what it found.

The latest report, looking into wider housing conditions in TA, said those findings ‘[remain] the case’ in 2026.

MPs on the committee highlighted that the “absence of official statistics means it is not possible to establish the prevalence and severity of poor conditions nationally”.

While the latest EHS does give more detail on TA than in previous reports, the sample size of 113 households means the findings can’t be given statistical significance, meaning the EHS doesn’t paint the full picture of what households in England are facing.

While the numbers in the survey do give us an indication of how many people are living in temporary accommodation and a little about the issues they are facing in life, ultimately, it’s worth remembering there are people suffering behind the numbers.

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“No matter what happened in my life, whatever sidewinds came my way, we had a council house,” Angela Rayner told Big Issue recently.

The former housing secretary and deputy prime minister was being interviewed by Big Issue founder and crossbench peer Lord John Bird in her parliamentary office, just a day after Andy Burnham had pledged to ramp up council housebuilding.

As Rayner and Lord Bird discussed their shared experiences of growing up in poverty, it became clear that the security of a secure home was a dividing line between their lives.

The Ashton-under-Lyne MP continued: “[It gave me] that sense of security where my friends were there, the school was my local school that I went to, my community was the community that I knew, that I grew up with.

“[That house] gave this anchor for everything else, no matter what else was going on, no matter how the chaos was, that council home was never in question.

“Many kids today, they don’t have a secure home, they’re in temporary accommodation, they can be moved miles and miles away from the support networks for the family.”

“You can’t keep a job if you can’t keep a home because you don’t know whether you’ll be living near where your work will be. So it just disrupts your whole life if you don’t have a secure home.”

“It’s so incredible what you’re saying,” said Lord Bird. “Because I’ve never really thought about that [the secure council house being an anchor]. But it’s true.

“In fact, you’re the first person in politics who has said that to me, because when I think about it, the reason I’m unstable, or was unstable, was largely because we didn’t know not just where the next meal was coming from, we didn’t know whether we were going to be thrown out.”

A sense of belonging

Rayner’s experience of living in a stable home is starkly contrasted by the rising number of families in temporary accommodation in England.

In March 2011, there were 48,330 households in non-permanent housing - by the end of 2025, there were over 134,000, including over 176,000 children.

Living in temporary accommodation has a harmful effect on children’s health, education and development, especially when so many are being moved outside of their home area.

A government report in February 2026, looking out of area temporary accommodation placements, found “41,250 households in temporary accommodation were in accommodation in a different local authority district, up 6.7% for the same time last year.”

That sense of belonging is something Rayner is keen to see given to more people, enabling more families to find the sense of community she had:

“Those streets were important to me... that sense of security that having a community around you and having a secure home was something that I think was really profound for me, despite all the other chaos that was always there.

“I’d go round to my friend’s house and have some dinner with them. Or if my mum weren’t in, I’d go to Maggie down the road and Maggie would take us in for an hour or so until I realised where my mum has been. So there was this sense, even though we didn’t have a lot, there was a sense of community.

“You can do a data point, you can shift someone into a temporary accommodation so they’re not street homeless, but you’re just sort of shunting one problem into the next.”

What’s being done to help the housing crisis?

During her time in frontline politics (she resigned in September last year after failing to pay the correct amount of stamp duty on her flat in Hove, but was cleared of any wrongdoing by HMRC earlier this year), Rayner was housing secretary and deputy prime minister.

In this time, she was heavily involved in plans to reduce rough sleeping and get people back into more secure housing. She led Labour’s inter-ministerial group on homelessness and promised big changes to fix the housing crisis.

In January 2025, Rayner pledged the “biggest wave of social and affordable housing for a generation”, calling the shortage of social homes the “elephant in the room”.

Later in the year the government laid out a £39bn plan with an ‘ambition’ to create 300,000 affordable and social homes over the next decade, with 180,000 of them designated for social rent.

At the time, Rayner called this a move a “social rent revolution” with more than six times the social rent homes built compared to the decade up to 2024.

However, campaigners were critical that this didn’t go far enough, calling for 90,000 social rent homes to be built each year to stop the record rise in renting costs and spiralling house prices.

Big Issue Housing Ambassador Kwajo Tweneboa highlighted how the numbers didn’t add up: “Around 18,000 social homes [per year] is nowhere near enough to even begin tackling this crisis. On average more 58,000 new households join council waiting lists, that’s over three times more than the number of homes they’re promising to build.”

Making changes that matter

During the course of the interview with Lord Bird, Rayner explained why she believes giving local authorities more power will help in the fight against homelessness.

She said this will help them build schemes to deal with the record-high levels of those in temporary accommodation.

“I think the challenge of government is it tries to do one-size-fits-all and actually that’s where the work I was doing with local authorities in support for devolution and what they could do for the homeless situation was really important.

“I think if you try and do one-size-fits-all at one particular point, then you’ll miss your data or you’ll miss the mark.

“Actually being able to meet people where they’re at and really [being able to] drill down into some of the challenges that people face, and then work with them on what the opportunities are in their area…that is important.

“I think when you look at it from a centralised government then it’s really hard to drill into that.”

“If you look at what Andy Burnham has done across Greater Manchester working with the 10 local authorities, for example, they have A Bed Every Night, they do Housing First which is based on the Finland model.

“I think that you can really start to see how they’re trying to cater for what’s going on in their local area.”

The idea of Housing First is a proven approach in countries like the aforementioned Finland. It removes the need for rough sleepers to ‘prove’ they deserve housing, instead giving people a home first (hence the name) then providing open-ended support.

It was hoped that Housing First would become central to governmental plans as part of the ‘National Plan to End Homelessness’, unveiled in December 2025.

However, it was only listed as one of the options available to local authorities, rather than a central component.

Labour MP Paula Barker told the Big Issue at the time: “The success of the Housing First pilots across Liverpool, Manchester, and the West Midlands speak for themselves, not to mention the success it has had internationally in combatting homelessness.

“And we know that it saves the state more than it costs – according to a report by the CSJ, for every £1 invested, the state gets £2 back. It is a practical, compassionate and evidence-led approach that complements this government’s wider mission to rebuild public services.”

Burnham, the favourite to take over as prime minister following Keir Starmer’s resignation, has pledged to resolve this, making a Housing First philosophy a key part of his plans to end homelessness.

He said his approach would mean putting council homes back at the centre of government, calling it a “decisive shift to a more preventative, productive state, adopting a national Housing First policy as has been pioneered so successfully in Finland.”

Burnham has already adopted the philosophy in Greater Manchester, where he served as mayor for a decade, taking it wider than supporting just people sleeping rough.

This policy to end homelessness could give more people the stability that Rayner wants to bring back. The UK government-backed Housing First pilots showed 92% were living in long-term accommodation after a year, and continued to get help with issues that previously made it harder to maintain housing.

Questions remain on how this can be funded, and how difficult the UK’s lack of available housing (compared to Finland) will make implementing such a plan - but the opportunity to support people in gaining much-needed stability is clear, and it’s personal to Rayner.

“I believe in an active state that supports people and gives them second chances,” she told Lord Bird.

“And more than a second chance, some people might need a third chance. I wouldn’t give up on my kids and the state shouldn’t give up on its citizens. You should always give opportunity.

“Obviously people have to face consequences when they make the wrong choices. But I absolutely believe that people should also be given opportunities to succeed.

“I didn’t ask to be born into the family I was born into. But the state invested in me, they gave me opportunity.”

Many plans to help end homelessness have stalled before, but a system where stable housing is made more of a priority, combined with giving local authorities more power and resources, is essential to reducing the 176,000 children living in unstable housing.

On Monday 26 June, the 202-year-old Vagrancy Act was finally repealed, removing the definition of rough sleeping as a criminal offence.

It’s the end of a centuries-old chapter in British history that has seen people facing punishment simply for being homeless on the streets.

But homelessness in the UK is not just consigned to rough sleeping. Academics have been looking back to the 1800s, researching the history of life in temporary accommodation (TA).

It comes at a time when the number of households housed in a temporary home by their local authority is at a record high. In England alone, the latest figures show 134,210 households, including 176,130 children, are in TA as of the end of last year.

The Westminster government is funding new homes to improve the situation, including pledging a £950 million investment in ‘good quality’ TA to boost its supply and reduce the use of B&Bs.

But what has led to the current poor conditions faced by people living in TA?

These shelters are meant to be a safe and secure space for people who are experiencing homelessness. But too often families living in them face overcrowding, damp, mould and unsafe conditions.

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It’s not a case of a few bad incidents

Lifelines, a new report from Justlife, takes a deep dive into almost 200 years of TA in Britain, looking at how it’s evolved and exploring how the systemic problems have continued over time.

The report looks at the history of how TA has been delivered, legislated, experienced and contested, and it finds consistent and systemic problems present throughout the decades.

“One of the overriding things I’ve learned is the level of continuity in appalling conditions and the exclusion and marginalisation of certain groups,” Dr Jessica Field, historian, writer and the author of Lifelines, told Big Issue.

“There are lots of problems with the label temporary. Families have had to live there for far longer than is appropriate for the nature of the accommodation.

“It can be several months or several years. We’re not thinking through the material and social consequences of being in those conditions for so long.

“The research establishes patterns over time – patterns that have been known by decision-makers at all levels of local authority and national level that have failed to be acted upon,” added Dr Field.

“It speaks to the structural nature of the problem. It’s not a case of a few bad incidents.”

What it means to be ‘undeserving’

The report’s timeline begins in 1834, when the Poor Law Amendment Act reorganised the workhouses into a system ‘underpinned by an ideology of deservingness’.

What this meant was a system that sorted and excluded social groups that were deemed ‘undeserving’.

Those that ‘deserved’ support were predicated on whether they conformed to ideals of wage-earning and being self-sufficient (if part of a family), as well as being physically located in the parish to which they ‘belonged’.

This is something the report shows as ‘structurally entrenched’, with people, especially single people, needing to prove themselves as vulnerable to be seen as a priority need, in the same way as those with children might be.

Despite this, Dr Field says family separation still exists, even though legislation (such as the 1977 Housing (Homeless Persons) Act) has been passed to combat it.

“One of the things that shocked me most [in my research] was the separation of families and the placement of children into care as a homelessness response,” said Dr Field.

“This was a routine operation through the 50s and 60s but it petered out from the 1980s as child welfare legislation improved (through the Children Act 1989) and the imperative was to keep children with their families.

“But family separation and the placement of children in care, simply because of the primary reason being homelessness, is still happening. That stark continuity was one of the shock takeaways for me.”

Her research found these initial norms have remained within the use of TA as a way to respond to homelessness, even if the consequences have changed over time.

“The legislation is meant to put child welfare and keeping the family together as a legal priority. It’s the implementation and enforceability of these laws where there is a big gap. It’s not just a resource issue.

“We often lazily fall back on that narrative. It gets to a point where you know the patterns are so persistent and so obvious that we’ve got to call it what it is and that’s political choice.”

Who is accountable?

A strong theme of the report was one of understanding who is gatekeeping these decisions or, as Dr Field called it, an ‘architecture of unaccountability’.

When responsibility for administering TA was delegated across different authorities, it created a fragmented decision-making structure.

This meant positive results didn’t effect change, and poor conditions can simply be ascribed as ‘case specific’.

Outsourcing to the private sector also created a system where self-reporting was unlikely, meaning poor housing conditions could easily be left unseen.

“The regulation and administration of temporary accommodation have been fragmented across so many different areas,” says Dr Field.

“One of the glaring gaps has been a lack of comprehensive data collection around temporary accommodation conditions linked to equality data.

“There has been some monitoring of protected characteristics but that is extremely late - it has been recommended by academics and policymakers and advocates for decades, because of known gaps in provision that keep occurring for particular groups.

“I think the glaring data and evidence gaps that have characterised this temporary accommodation system have to be viewed as a change for the worse, because it’s a decision not to act.

“There has to be the paper collection and the evidence that enables local authorities or whoever the relevant powers are to actually be able to enforce some of its provisions because that’s been one of the consistent patterns.

“Regulations are so frequently broken with zero or very minimal consequences.”

Voices of resistance

The report highlights that some of the biggest changes to TA standards have come from those most affected by it, with campaigns, action and protests leading to meaningful improvements.

“There are some fantastic examples of resistance and direct action undertaken by households experiencing homelessness themselves, or their advocates and allies, particularly from the post-war period to the present,” says Dr Field.

“One of the more powerful stories was the arrangements that squatters and the squatting community came to with local authorities, particularly in the late 60s and 70s.

“The historical context was relevant there in a way it might not be today, but squatting groups and support groups occupied empty houses and came and often they were forced out by councillors.

“There was a watershed case in Lewisham in the late 1960s where a squatting group came to an agreement with the council to say: ‘We will transform this into liveable self-contained temporary accommodation, and it remains your property and if you need it back in the meantime that’s fine.’

“That was incredibly powerful. Properties varied massively but when they were done up well these were self-contained. They weren’t just single B&B rooms.

“Families could have a home to live in where they could lock their front door and have that level of privacy that all households aspired to.”

The report looks at other landmark moments in the improvement of TA conditions over the years, such as the Friends of King Hill campaign group, which hit the headlines in 1965.

It sought to change a policy where, in King Hill hostel in Kent, husbands and children over 16 were unable to sleep overnight, and families were evicted after three months, even with nowhere to go.

The Friends of King Hill led a lengthy campaign that involved picketing, protests at the House of Commons and even camping outside the Minister for Health’s house.

This pressure led to Kent County Council reversing the policy, removing the time limit for stays and allowing families to stay together.

Hope for the future

In post-war Britain, the Housing (Temporary Accommodation) Act 1944 saw the creation of over 150,000 prefabricated bungalows to house those forced into homelessness from the Second World War.

This shows that if there’s a political will to create better living conditions - these bungalows were self-contained units, with small front gardens and one household living in each - it can lead to action.

There have been other progressive reforms over the years too.

“Britain and England have [actually] been world leaders in this area,” says Dr Field.

“The 1977 Housing (Homeless Persons) Act was a key piece of legislation that statutorily defined homelessness and offered guaranteed rehousing.

“It wasn’t universal, which was a key problem, but it was still pioneering at the time.

“There’ve been similar legislative reforms that have expanded priority needs, inclusions or enabled massive investment in homelessness prevention. That was one of the big flagship programmes of the New Labour years.”

However, the Lifelines report does show there is plenty left to do for the government of today to enact material change.

“Tinkering around the edges of temporary accommodation legislation and regulations isn’t good enough and won’t change what the fundamental problem is, which is structural,” says Dr Field.

“[The fragmented system] makes accountability extremely challenging and places the burden of accountability on those who are least able to bear it: the households who are stuck in temporary accommodation that isn’t up to standard.

“There needs to be wholesale reform of the system and a unified regulatory framework governing temporary accommodation.”

Here at Big Issue, we’ve spent 35 years working on our mission to end poverty - and to do that we must reach, and engage with, as many people as possible.

We have always showcased the issues that members of the public, often shut out of the mainstream media, face on a daily basis. We give them a voice, and highlight the work that’s going on to help them.

To do that, we need to be on all the best platforms, so we can give a space for others to speak from and help us on our mission.

A new addition to the family

That’s why we’re starting this new Substack, Biggest Issue. It’ll sit alongside our award-winning journalism in print, regular newsletters and on the website, giving our supporters a chance to take an ever deeper dive into the issues that really matter.

If you’re new to Substack, this is a great time to sign up. In addition to our weekly posts, we’ll be putting up regular smaller insights - called Notes - on the things that matter, the work we’re doing and surfacing other great articles you might like - getting the Substack app is a great way to see those.

It’ll allow you to be part of our new digital community, posting comments on articles, resharing our Notes and interacting with the issues that matter to you.

We’ll also be highlighting interesting posts and thoughts from other related writers across the Substack landscape. However, if there’s no space in your life for another app, don’t worry, you can just get our posts as emails straight to your inbox too!

Biggest Issue will be bringing you in-depth posts on all the areas that we report on regularly in the magazine, whether that’s housing, financial and digital inclusion, health and wellbeing, learning and employment or the environment and communities.

We’ve been fiercely championing voices in these areas for decades, and this platform gives us a chance to go further and present you with regular updates about what’s going on with Big Issue Group as we work to end poverty.

You can expect weekly posts that explore the things that matter, with first person stories, our trademark investigative journalism and deep explainers, breaking down the echo chambers and encouraging understanding, not division.

You can look forward to us working with other top Substacks, posting regular Notes and giving you a ‘behind-the-scenes’ look at how we champion positive change and solutions.

If you’ve ever wanted to know more about what goes on at Big Issue, subscribe now to get everything straight to your app (or inbox).

We’re going to be starting with an in-depth look at temporary accommodation, showing how we’ve got to where we are, the people being affected and taking the stories in the mainstream media further - in the way that our journalism has become famous for.

We’d love to have you along for the ride - become part of Biggest Issue by entering your email address below and get our regular posts in your inbox.