The Week in Housing: homeless at Christmas

Good afternoon.

By any metric, the housing crisis has set the sort of records in 2023 that should shame the leaders of any wealthy country. Levels of rough sleeping, homelessness and people living in temporary accommodation are all going in the wrong direction.

It’s enough to keep you up at night, unless you’re the actual prime minister, who admitted in an inquiry session this week that inequality doesn’t disturb his sleep at all.

Rishi Sunak did say, however, that he wanted “to make sure we reduce economic inequality and spread opportunity around the country”.

Spreading opportunities sounds great, it’s just not clear to me how the?140,000 children that will spend this Christmas without a home are going to access any of them.

If some of that opportunity was part of this week’s ￡64.1bn core budget settlement for councils in England, I must have missed it.

The much trumpeted above-inflation plan still leaves local authorities facing a funding gap of ￡4bn over the next two years. The Local Government Association said it was “unthinkable” that the government has not provided “desperately needed new funding”.

At the same time, The Salvation Army estimates that around 23,500 households in England will be classed as homeless in the last quarter of 2023.

Of these, around 5,500 homeless households will not qualify as in priority need for emergency accommodation and could be sleeping on the streets by Christmas.

Even Baroness Penn, parliamentary under secretary of state in the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, admitted?“those figures are too high”.

The sector has spent record amounts of funding on its existing homes this year.

However, more than a year on from the inquest into the tragic death of two-year-old Awaab Ishak, Inside Housing has reported on two more shocking cases that show landlords are still dealing with the issue of damp and mould in a way that is putting more lives at risk.

First,?a coroner issued a warning to a council after a tenant died of lung disease after living in a mould-affected property for months.

Neena Sharma, the coroner for Nottingham City and Nottinghamshire, sent a prevention of future deaths report to the head of housing at Mansfield District Council regarding the death of the 52-year-old tenant in June this year.

The coroner has begun her investigation, but unusually the report has been sent before an inquest takes place.

Medical experts have concluded that the mould could have contributed to the tenant’s illness.

In the second case, a large association told Inside Housing it was deeply concerned after a three-year-old child living in damp and mould in one of its homes was?hospitalised for the seventh time.

Ian Gregg, executive director of asset services at Riverside, said the landlord initially believed previous work done on the child’s home in Middleton, Greater Manchester, had addressed concerns, but a further inspection following the child’s ill health found that this was not the case.

The Greater Manchester Tenants Union said it contacted Riverside several times asking for something to be done, but in the end resorted to posting the case on social media.?

It should not take this for a landlord to take action.?

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