The Housing Failure With No One's Name On It

Ronesha's younger son needs a fridge for his medication. For seven weeks last year, in a bed and breakfast in England, he didn't have one. The stay itself was already unlawful — the law caps a family's time in a B&B at six weeks, on the theory that anything longer causes measurable harm — but the illegality is not the interesting part. The interesting part is that nobody was fined, nobody resigned, and nobody at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government could tell you whose job it was to stop it happening, because responsibility for it is distributed across so many desks that it has, functionally, ceased to exist.

This is now the ordinary condition of childhood homelessness in England. Figures published this month show 177,530 children living in temporary accommodation as of March, up 5% on the year and the eighteenth consecutive quarterly rise. Eighteen quarters is four and a half years. It spans two prime ministers, three housing secretaries, and one general election fought partly on the promise to fix it. The number has risen in every single one of those quarters regardless of who was in office, which is the first clue that the people nominally in charge are not the ones deciding the outcome.

Follow the chain and it runs somewhere strange. Statutory duty rests with local councils, who must house homeless families under the Housing Act. Councils, though, don't set the housing allowance, the subsidy rates for temporary accommodation, or the planning system that would let them build their way out of paying private landlords by the night. Central government sets those. So the family in the B&B is the output of a decision made across a council's housing options team, a funding formula set in Whitehall, and a spending settlement negotiated by the Treasury — and at no point does that chain terminate in a person you could vote out for this specific outcome. That is not an accident of complexity. It is the settlement both main parties have preferred for a generation: give councils the duty, keep the money and the levers, then decline to say whose job it was to prevent this.

The government's defence is not unreasonable on its own terms. Prime Minister Andy Burnham has promised what his department calls "the biggest council house-building programme since the postwar period," a genuinely ambitious phrase if it turns out to be more than a phrase. Ministers can point to money committed, reforms to the rented sector, a homelessness strategy in preparation, and a housing market distorted by a decade of underbuilding and mortgage rates that turned home ownership into a luxury good. Councils, they might add, have discretion over how they procure temporary accommodation and could in principle do it more cheaply. None of this is fiction.

But eighteen quarters is not a number that survives a defence about circumstances. Circumstances change — interest rates rise and fall, chancellors come and go — and the number has done one thing throughout: risen. Eighteen quarters in a row is a design choice, and nobody signed their name to it.

What that design choice produces at ground level is documented with a thoroughness that ought to embarrass whoever last read it and moved on. The Shared Health Foundation's research into temporary accommodation identifies thirteen separate breaches of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, each one catalogued, not implied. Research from UCL's Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose finds children developing along what its authors delicately call "unconventional trajectories": isolation from friends, a measurable loss of the ordinary business of play, parents describing guilt and a total loss of agency over their own children's lives. Older data, now two decades stale, put school absence for this group at fifty-five days a year. Nobody has produced a fresher figure, which given how much longer stays have grown since is not a comfort.

Here is the one sentence I will allow myself without qualification: a country that lets a child's medication spoil for want of a fridge, in a stay that was already illegal, and then produces the same press release about it eighteen quarters running, has stopped treating this as a scandal and started treating it as weather.

Clement Attlee's government took office with the Treasury empty, half the housing stock bombed or condemned, and rationing that would run another nine years. It built roughly 200,000 houses a year and, while it was at it, a health service. Nobody in that cabinet had the luxury of blaming the previous government indefinitely, because the country had run out of time for that pleasure. What it had, and what ours conspicuously lacks, was a settlement in which the person announcing the target and the person answerable for missing it sat in the same chair — and rationing ran to 1954 anyway.

Today's Britain is roughly forty times richer than Attlee's and has produced, across those same eighteen quarters, a series of strategies still described as forthcoming. The number they are forthcoming about is 177,530. Somebody should have to say it out loud in the Commons, and then say exactly which desk it belongs to.