Councils have a duty to find new homes for households that are eligible for rehousing under the terms of the homelessness legislation -ie those who are in one of the priority need groups, are unintentionally homeless and have a local connection.
About one in four homeless families go straight into a new, permanent home. The other three quarters are put into temporary accommodation.
Temporary accommodation is often insecure, unsuitable and expensive. Some of it is private rented housing, some is shared hostels and bed and breakfast hotels and some is hard-to-let council stock. Most is provided at high rents, creating poverty traps for people because they are forced to rely on housing benefit to meet the cost. What’s more, authorities often use temporary accommodation outside their own boundaries. This can mean families are split up, cut off from their support networks or forced to make long journeys to access services such as schools and GPs.
Temporary accommodation is often not very temporary – the average length of stay by homeless households in temporary accommodation has increased from 98 days in 1997 to 267 days in 2004.
Government figures show that the number of households in temporary accommodation is at a high level of almost 94,000 families (more than double the level of 1997). More than half (54%) of these households are families with dependent children.
This reliance on temporary accommodation reflects the acute shortage of social rented housing in areas like London. In fact, more than one in three homelessness acceptances last year were in London and the South East, where affordable housing is in shortest supply.
Local authorities have, following government action, stopped using inappropriate bed and breakfast hotels to house homeless families. The temporary accommodation now used by councils to house families is better than the b&bs it replaced but better standards of accommodation do not address problems of insecurity, frequent moves and displacement.
And there is still a need to provide new homes for the more than 22,000 households who are ‘homeless at home’ -that is their current homes are not fit under the terms of the legislation, this is usually due to overcrowding. Taken together, the two figures (households in temporary accommodation and homeless at home) mean that more than 120,000 households in England are waiting for local authorities to fulfil their duty to re-house them.