Homelessness crisis: a tale of rogue operators, neglect and abuse

The news that one-in-three Britons has been touched by homelessness should shock us into action

Homelessness is rising, and coalition policies on housing and welfare are making the situation worse. Photograph: Janine Wiedel Photolibrary/Alamy

Families evicted from their homes at little notice, or forced out of settled accommodation because of cuts to welfare; children placed in dangerous and unsafe B&B hotels for longer than the law allows; vulnerable adults exposed to abuse in unregulated emergency accommodation. This is not a description of the plight of wartime refugees, but an account of the grave housing crisis here in the UK.

Homelessness is rising, and coalition policies on housing and welfare are making the situation worse. The impact of the bedroom tax and caps on overall benefit claims are pushing more people into the private rented sector, at a time when private landlords are fleeing the market because many can no longer return by housing benefit claimants. Between April and June this year, 3,580 households became homeless due to their private tenancy coming to an end, an increase of a third over the same period in 2012.

The problem is particularly acute for families: 34,080 households with children were accepted as homeless by local authorities in 2012, an increase of 12% on the previous year, and almost 77,000 children are living in temporary accommodation.

Homelessness is not a minority concern. Like Cathy Come Home in the 1960s, the news this week that one-in-three Britons has been touched by homelessness is shocking. It should shock us into action.

What makes this statistic even more alarming is that it comes at a time when the homelessness sector is facing a standards crisis of its own. Rogue operators are setting up services for homeless people without experience or understanding of their needs, cashing in on our spiralling housing crisis.

This summer I reported on alarming levels of neglect and abuse: hostels run by dealers picking up drug-dependent clients, alcoholics placed in hostels with a licensed bar, women sexually assaulted, vulnerable young people placed next to residents with a history of offending, buildings in poor physical condition.

The local government ombudsman this week hit out at councils for inappropriate use of temporary accommodation, including leaving families in B&Bs for longer than the legal six-week limit. But it is unfair to heap the blame on local authorities who are themselves running out of options as government funding dries up.

The Homeless Link survey, which identified how widespread homelessness has become, also found that eight in nine people agreed it was up to councils to do more to solve the problem. But the same study revealed that, since 2010, government cuts have led to the closure of 133 homelessness projects, the loss of more than 4,000 bed spaces and a 16% cut in the number of full-time staff employed in the sector.

Homeless people are forced to live in these squalid, dangerous conditions because local authorities have no other option but to place homeless households in unregulated private accommodation.

It is up to the government to take a stand. A widespread development programme to help ease the housing crisis will take time, but in the short term homelessness services must be subject to strict regulation so we can be sure that if we or those we know fall on hard times there will be quality provision to help them back on their feet.

Today, hostel owners and B&B managers face virtually no regulation at all – despite pocketing large sums of public money through housing benefit payments. We are spending taxpayers' money on services that compound costly social problems rather than working to solve them.

Filling in a form to register a house of multiple occupation is not a sufficient test for such an important service. We need a form of regulation which ensures that hostel and B&B owners are educated in their clients' needs, are providing safe and secure accommodation, and are taking action around safety issues such as the risks involved in placing care leavers next to known offenders. Most fundamentally, regulation must eradicate the rogues who are exploiting homeless people and compounding their problems.

Last Thursday's World Homelessness Day passed relatively unnoticed. If we ignore the problems we face, none of us will have the luxury of blindness on the matter this time next year. We need a minimum standard for homeless accommodation and support now more than ever. The coalition government has done so much to exacerbate our housing crisis: here's one simple measure it can take to ameliorate its most destructive qualities.

Guardian