#GE24: Housing Justice
Continuing our series of pre-election briefings, today's guest post is written by Jon Kuhrt (CEO of Hope into Action) on the important topic of housing justice.
Posts in the #GE24 blog series include perspectives on health inequality, learning disability inequality, alcohol harm & carer support from writers with experience and insight in their field.
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Tackling housing injustice should be at the heart of this election.
The Conservative Manifesto for the 2019 election said this:
“We will end the blight of rough sleeping by the end of the next Parliament.” (p.30)
We will have a new Parliament this summer and, as anyone who spends time in towns or city centres can testify, rough sleeping has nowhere near ‘ended’. The last two annual official counts bear this out: in 2022 rough sleeping rose by 26% and in 2023 by 27%.
There is no doubt that there has been significant investment in addressing rough sleeping over the last 6 years. Outreach and emergency services have been improved and thousands of vulnerable people have been helped into emergency accommodation. This was particularly evident during the pandemic when the Everyone In initiative saw 39,000 people move into emergency accommodation.
But, despite such progress, such initiatives must be judged on the targets they set for themselves. And by its own metrics, the campaign to end rough sleeping has failed. Battles have been won, but the overall war has been lost.
It is important we understand why this has happened. Housing is the number one social injustice in our country and we desperately need both a better public conversation about rough sleeping and a better political response to homelessness.
The reason it has failed is because rough sleeping is just the most visible tip of a far bigger iceberg of homelessness. It cannot be addressed as if it were a stand-alone, discrete issue because it is connected to a deep form of housing injustice affecting the whole country.
Whilst the government initiative has focused on the visible tip of the iceberg and the relatively small numbers who sleep rough, the homelessness hidden under the waterline has grown exponentially. There are now 109,000 households homeless in temporary accommodation – up 10% in a year. This includes 142,490 children – up 16,960 (14%) in a year. This is the highest since records began.
This graph illustrates the problem. The UK’s rates of homelessness are appalling in comparison with other countries but our level of rough sleeping is relatively low:
An analogy might be helpful. Imagine the Ministry of Health sought to improve hospital care by only investing in more ambulances and Accident and Emergency departments whilst cutting funding to all other hospital departments. Some of the indicators of immediate response might improve but the overall performance of hospitals would plummet.
This is what has happened in housing. The government focus has increased in funding in emergency provision for rough sleepers, but this has been like a small island of increased funding amid an ocean of wider cuts. And all the while the water has got colder and the iceberg has grown.
And whilst much is made of annual snapshot counts of a relatively small number of rough sleepers, the hidden forms of homelessness have been neglected. But the cost of providing emergency accommodation is mind-boggling. It is estimated that £1.6 billion a year is being spent on emergency accommodation and these costs are bankrupting Local Authorities. Money which could be used to create more social homes is being wasted on hotels.
Rough sleeping is a tragic scandal but we should also care about the more hidden aspects of poverty as well as the most obvious. It is a combination of economic context and government policies that often lead to a deepening of our severe housing crisis. The roots lie in austerity, increasing poverty, the slashing of Local Authority funding, the failure to create more social housing and address the increasing unaffordability of housing.
In Isaiah 58, it says that the kind of fasting God wants is ‘to provide the poor wanderer with shelter’ and almost all the homelessness charities in the UK were established by Christians and churches. Hope into Action is one of those, founded 14 years ago when one Christian used his inheritance to purchase our first house to house ‘the poor wanderer’. From here, we have grown into a network of 115 houses and over £28m has been invested. Last year we housed 486 people.
Housing and homelessness should be top of the agenda for this coming election. Christians have led the way in establishing innovative responses to the homelessness crisis but this is an issue where we need political action. Pray that this election might led to greater housing justice in the UK.
Written by Jon Kuhrt (CEO of Hope into Action)
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Opinions expressed in guest posts are those of the author, and do not represent any official position held by Jubilee+.
