Britain is the fourth richest country in the world, economically prosperous and possessing a progressive, developed social welfare system. Yet despite this reputation, walk through any city in Britain on any given night and you are likely to be met with the most visible victims of homelessness; young men and women curled up on cardboard boxes, shivering with cold - proof of the gaping gaps in the state safety.
The vast majority of British people enjoy a relatively high standard of living and homelessness isn't an everyday concern. But for some of the more vulnerable groups in our society - people leaving prison, those with mental health needs, young people leaving care, single parents and older people - the risk of homelessness is much higher. For them, it can be a thin line between having a home and becoming homeless, leaving a significant number of people constantly either falling beneath or teetering above the homelessness threshold.
Take Stephanie, who was forced to leave home at the age of 22. For years she had suffered domestic abuse, and finally decided a night on the streets was preferable to violent beatings. Soon she found out there was no one to turn to after being refused help by her local authority. "I walked out. I really wanted to harm myself, I couldn't stop crying, and I didn't know what to do. I needed somebody to talk to but there wasn't anyone."
The following night Stephanie was given a place in emergency hostel accommodation. "But they said they could only give me one night. It was horrible, really dirty, a sad place to be. I didn't really see any other women there either. I slept in my coat and shoes."
Stephanie is one of many homeless people whose experience of the hostel system is quite negative and for some, this actively encourages them to stay on the streets. In a recent survey of homeless people carried out by Shelter, 57 per cent mentioned problems with other residents in hostels, including drug and alcohol use, violence, theft and bullying. However, with 70 per cent saying they had been unable to find a hostel space at some point, lack of bed space continues to be the major reason people end up on the streets. While more hostel places are needed, this shortage is partly caused by ‘bed-blocking' in hostels due to a lack of move-on accommodation for former rough sleepers.
Finding a place to stay in a hostel does help get people off the streets. But it doesn't solve homelessness, because for the majority of people, homelessness is the product of a range of other related, multiple and complex problems. For Dean, aged 32, who was a heroin addict for ten years, ‘drugs was more of a problem for me than homelessness. I didn't see homelessness as a problem'. After being released from prison, he ended up on the streets for two years, struggling to stay anywhere permanently due to his addiction. Finally, he found a place in a hostel where he was able to tackle the root cause of his problems through completing a drug detox programme. He has since been drug-free for 6 months. In Shelter's survey, 23 per cent of people identified drugs and alcohol as a major reason for becoming homeless.
The scale of the problem
Ten years ago, when Tony Blair swept to power, the pledge was to cut the number of people sleeping rough by at least two thirds and ultimately to reduce the numbers to ‘as close to zero as possible'. Since then, some real progress has been made and thousands of people have been helped off the streets. But for Dean and Stephanie and thousands of other homeless or vulnerable people, much more still needs to be done to enable them to permanently exit the revolving door of homelessness.
There is an urgent need to provide more hostel beds, including places where people can access crucial drug and alcohol treatment programmes. The Government must also provide more low cost, social housing to give people the chance to move out of hostels and find an affordable, permanent, safe place to live. In addition to increasing the supply of social housing, they must also increase the support available for people to help them settle in permanent homes, maintain their tenancy, find employment, manage finances and build their confidence.
While street homelessness is a damning indictment of British society in 21st century, this is in fact just one form of a much wider, complex problem, which often remains hidden from view. Despite many people's perception of homelessness, the term actually applies to anyone without a home, not just those without a roof over their head. Today in Britain nearly 90,000 households are housed in temporary accommodation, many being families with children. They can wait for months and even years to be housed by their local authorities, in accommodation which is often poor quality and inappropriate.
Tracey and her partner Nigel were living in the private rented sector, but after complaining about mould growing on the walls which was making their sons ill, their landlord evicted them. They couldn't afford to rent again privately as they were not earning enough to meet the high price of accommodation in their area. With nowhere else to go, their local authority placed the family in temporary accommodation in the neighbouring area - but unfortunately, it is far from ideal. The family have to travel for an hour to get to school, where Tracey works as a breakfast club assistant and dinner lady. She said: "The kids have to get up at 6. Then it's a half an hour walk. Then another half an hour on the bus. I didn't want them to move schools as they're really settled there and have lots of friends. Besides, the council told me I'd be in temporary accommodation for 18 months tops. It's been nearly three years."
How did we get here?
The central reason for this backlog of people waiting to be housed is the chronic shortage of social rented homes across the UK. Historically, these have been built by central government and provide low cost housing through subsidised rents. Since 1980, 2.3 million of these homes have been sold off by successive governments, who have also failed to replace them. Nowhere has the affect of this policy been felt more acutely than in London, where thousands of families are living at the sharp end of Britain's housing crisis. Here, the pressure on the remaining social housing stock has been exacerbated by sky-high property prices, pushing home-ownership and even private renting out of the reach of many. This has created a widening housing divide in London, leaving many ordinary families and first time buyers simply unable to find anywhere affordable to live.
While many people have been completely locked out of the property market, the irresponsible lending practices of banks have meant people on very margins of affordability have been willing, and able, to overstretch themselves to get a foot on the property ladder. Just five years ago, most mortgage lenders would turn down any mortgage applications that asked for more than three times a person's salary. Until very recently, lenders were eagerly handing out up to seven times a borrower's salary.
Now, as the credit crunch takes hold, growing numbers of homeowners are being squeezed by rising mortgage costs, interest rate rises, as well as fuel and food bills, leaving many ordinary families living under the shadow of repossession and homelessness. This year alone, 37,740 households have faced court action by their mortgage lender, an increase of 20 per cent since the same time last year, indicating that homelessness figures could see a surge in the coming year.
So, whether you look at a family in temporary accommodation, facing repossession or a young care leaver struggling to find a decent place to live, the picture of housing and homelessness in Britain today is pretty dismal.
Shelter's achievement
However, looking at the problem solely in its contemporary context fails to acknowledge the considerable progress made in the battle against homelessness, particularly over the last forty years.
In 1966, a film called Cathy Come Home depicted the devastation of a family's life through the loss of their home. The film, watched by 12 million people on the BBC, woke the nation up to homelessness and bad housing. It helped launch Shelter too. Over the past four decades, Shelter has campaigned to highlight the plight of homeless people, lobby the Government to recognise their needs, extend their rights and campaign for lasting political change to end homelessness and the housing crisis for good.
This has resulted in important steps forward, such as the transformative Rent Act and the groundbreaking Homelessness Act 2002 which places a legal duty on local authorities to house many vulnerable groups of people. More recently Shelter has been instrumental in the introduction of the tenancy deposit protection scheme, giving greater security to tenants.
Yet despite this, Britain is still failing to prevent people from losing their homes and becoming caught in a cycle of homelessness. Why? One of the fundamental reasons is that there simply aren't enough homes social and affordable homes to go around. As a result, those on low incomes, who can't afford to buy or privately rent, are increasingly unable to afford or access anywhere decent to live.
More Homes Now
In answer to this crisis, Shelter launched its More Homes Now campaign in 2005, calling on the Government to build 20,000 extra social rented homes each year to meet this growing housing need. Increasing housing supply is not universally supported - there is considerable opposition to any new house building in Britain, from environmental groups, NIMBYs (‘not in my back yard') and those who perceive immigration to be the cause of the housing crisis. However, just days after Gordon Brown took power last year, he promised to tackle the thorny issue of housing supply, pledging to build 3 million homes - with the focus on affordable housing - by 2020.
Although it would be wrong for Shelter to take all the credit for the Government's commitment to a new house-building era, this was perhaps one of the biggest campaigning victories in Shelter's history. But it is not a time for sitting back and enjoying the success. If we are to deliver that number, and if - say - a third of them are to be social rented homes, the challenge of getting there is going to be huge. We now need to work closely with local authorities, house builders and local communities to work out how we, Government, and the industry are going to make it happen
Let's be clear, building these new homes won't solve homelessness or even end housing need in Britain. But, in a country of housing haves and have nots, this will be an important step forwards in closing the widening gap.
