Housing crises intensifies with further increase in temporary accommodation use

The housing crises got worse at the beginning of this year according to new figures out today.

A day after Kier Starmer stated “there’s lot of houses” for councils to came news that households in temporary accommodation increased to 131k households and 169k children up to March 2025, with people often housed in poor conditions at extremely high cost to the taxpayer.

That coincided with Zoopla stating private rents have risen by 21 per cent in the past three years. The ONS state even higher rises at times in the recent past.

Starmer made his “there’s a lot of houses for local authorities” comment yesterday when facing questions on Home Office contractors such as Serco obtaining homes for asylum seekers and offering more money than councils can manage for those needing temporary accommodation, as well as private renters looking for homes.

Councils lack sufficient council homes after many years of Right to Buy and insufficient new council and social housebuilding, which reached a nadir under the Tony Blair and Gordon Brown governments and barely improved since.

Starmer and Reeves appear to be replicating the fundamentals of 40 years of failure leading to today’s problems, which is also costing tens of billions in housing benefits due to high rents alongside temporary accommodation costs.

Spending Review

At the Spending Review Labour announced £39 billion in funding which pleased those outlets that simply rehash government PR such as The Mirror.

Yet it was over ten years, and looking over the lifespan of this Parliament funding for the Affordable Housing Programme are no higher than the last Conservative government.

In that same ten year timespan spending on housing benefit is likely to be at least £300 billion given it’s currently £30 billion a year. Almost ten times the level proposed on building actual new homes.

And that’s if the £39bn is ever spent. As mentioned planned spend until 2029 is low with most of funding backdated to 2030 and beyond in the next Parliament.

Who knows who will be in power then and whether any future chancellor stands up and announces something new. In the here and now, under this government and in this parliament, allocated funds to build new social and council homes are low and will remain low for the next four years.

In terms of new private homes start numbers are at extremely low levels – which is a problem when government fail to support public building and hope to gain a few off the back of private building as this government have made clear from the very first speech made by Rachel Reeves.

With that’s happening what is she now proposing? An increase in risky bank lending on mortgages as part of wider financial deregulation having learned apparently little from what happening in the 2000s. The same old failed ideology leading to today’s housing mess continues.

And thus the huge numbers in temporary accommodation – and resulting vast cost to public finances which today again saw a vast monthly deficit – will not be going away anytime soon.