Liverpool was once praised for its tolerance, but housing shortages are driving fearful, unsettling behaviours – and people are blaming outsiders, writes John Harris in the Guardian.

Here is the dream, if you can afford it: gleaming apartments, close to Liverpool’s waterfront, complete with penthouse swimming pools with views of the north Wales mountains, and sumptuous rooftop gardens. They are mostly bought by investors who then rent them to local professionals: three years ago, a report on early sales of flats in one development said that 40% of early buyers were from Australia, China or Singapore.

Ten minutes’ walk away, you can witness a very different spectacle. Every Monday night, a charity called Liverpool In Arms hands out food in the city centre, to queues of people. Some are homeless; others have a house or flat to live in, but can’t afford to eat. While I was reporting on the city’s housing crisis for the Guardian’s video series Anywhere But Westminster, I watched its volunteers in action for the best part of an hour: they told me the need they try to meet has doubled since last year.

I spoke to a 50-something man who had failed to keep up with a £20 weekly surcharge and the rent on his flat, and then had his benefits withdrawn by the Department for Work and Pensions’ sanctioning regime: he suddenly had nowhere to live, and was clearly in a state of complete disorientation. The same was true of Jimmy, who was sleeping rough, and described being endlessly tortured by one of the city council’s cruellest policies: its insistence on summarily disposing of people’s tents, with everything they contain.

I asked him about the prospect of somewhere permanent to stay, and his eyes filled up. “I’ve got more chance of sleeping in that bed there,” he said, and he pointed at a sumptuous double bed, festooned with cushions and pillows, in the illuminated window of Primark.

The next morning, I went to an advice service run by the Merseyside Refugee Support Network, full of the frantic bustle of very fragile lives. In a warren of rooms next to a city-centre church, there was a steady stream of people faced with one of the asylum system’s cruellest features: the fact that, with a handful of exceptions, if you are granted residency in the UK, you will now be served notice of the need to leave accommodation funded by the Home Office in a matter of weeks. The result, as I saw, is a rapid pipeline to living on the streets.

They arrived in an upstairs room, carrying letters from the Home Office contractor Serco. A man from Eritrea, who carried the sense of someone who was utterly terrified, showed me the instructions issued to him and his wife: “The Home Office has told us you have been granted permission to stay in the United Kingdom. You are still required to leave the property no later than 12 noon, which is [on] the date given in the attached notice to quit.”

He was being helped by a volunteer who had come to the UK to escape war in Sudan. “They’re going homeless – they have not any choice,” he told me, before he described what often happens next: the handing-over of tents and sleeping bags, and another increase in the numbers of people who huddle in Liverpool’s doorways.

According to the housing charity Shelter, in the 12 months leading up to March 2025, Liverpool city council received 2,048 applications for homelessness support, a 25% increase on the previous year. The most recent data shows 12,764 households on the city’s social housing waiting list. But one figure is particularly shocking: reflecting the fact that most local authorities now lack either the means or will to build anything more than paltry amounts of new social housing, the city’s “additional social rent dwellings” in 2023-4 totalled – and read this slowly – five.

In the last year alone, private rents across the city have gone up by an average of 9.6%. While I was in Liverpool, I met a single mum called Helen, who works for the local ambulance service. Up to now, she has rented the house she shares with her 15-year-old son – which has damp walls, ceilings covered in mould and an upstairs window that won’t shut – for £600 a month. But her landlord recently hit her with a no-fault eviction notice – because, she suspects, he is set on charging a new tenant the £1,400 monthly rent he now gets for similar properties, which are presumably in a much better state.

The numbers of people waiting for social housing, she told me, means that unless she and her son endure a spell of homelessness, they are highly unlikely to get that kind of help. So she is trying to somehow find a way through all this impossibility, with precious little idea of what comes next. As we talked, she mentioned a seemingly indelible part of the online conversations she sees about people in her predicament. “I see the messages on Facebook [that] blame the asylum seekers: ‘If it wasn’t for these people coming over on the boats, you’d get your house.’ That upsets me tremendously. Cos it’s not right.”

None of these are specifically Liverpudlian problems: they form one particularly vivid element of a national story split between an ever-growing crisis, and housing policy that is still nowhere near to convincingly dealing with it. On the upside, the Renters Rights Bill – which offers people such as Helen a range of new protections – is about to receive royal assent. Ministers say their £39bn social and affordable housing plan will deliver at least 180,000 homes for social rent by 2036. But spending on that policy has been back-loaded to the end of the current parliament – and besides, the target amounts to only 18,000 a year. On the ground, therefore, everything still feels terribly fragile and uncertain.

In London, housing policy is about to undergo the utterly absurd change that was recently decried by my colleague Aditya Chakrabortty, whereby developers will be free to build even less “affordable” housing in return for even greater public subsidy. Liverpool city council, meanwhile, has just started a public consultation on its target of 30,000 new homes over the next 15 years, but any hardened specifics on social housing are hard to come by (its latest draft Local Plan says the council will require large developments to set aside 10% of homes for social rent, but clearly, this won’t get near current levels of need). This is the focus of a brilliantly energised new campaign called Help – Housing Everyone in Liverpool Properly. It keeps its collective eye on the city’s gleaming new developments, and also wants to steer the local conversation about housing away from blaming outsiders, and blurring the politics of housing into asylum and immigration: the city’s crisis, they say, should bring people together rather than pulling them apart.

Which brings us to a particularly disquieting shift. Liverpool has long been credited with the so-called “Scouse exceptionalism” that supposedly makes its people less prone to belligerent expressions of national identity and Little Englandism. But in many neighbourhoods, there are now streets festooned with union flags and St George’s flags. In the midst of what I heard about its housing shortage, they began to look like a desperate, distorted show of a fear laced with defiance, and proof of an unshakable political fact: that if you make people feel scared about something as basic as the roof over their heads, they will sooner or later start to behave in very unsettling ways.

Rents across England continue to rise as the numbers of households in temporary accommodation across the country are at a record high, writes Meghan Owen for the BBC.

Meanwhile, the amount of housing benefit private renters can claim – the Local Housing Allowance (LHA) – remain frozen as it has been for most of the past decade. Housing sector organisations, including landlords and homeless charities, are urging the government to unfreeze LHA, fearful that it’s driving more renters into homelessness.

Artist Esther Planas, 65, rents a one-bedroom flat in Hackney, east London and claims Universal Credit (UC). She fears she is just one small rent rise away from homelessness. “It’s like you’re in quicksand. Nothing is stable under your feet. Things mutate all the time. Rents are crazy, and nothing is out there to protect you.” In 2023, Esther applied for homelessness after her landlord tried to raise her rent by £500 a month, which she couldn’t afford.

Hackney Council mediated and the rent rise was reduced to £200 a month – something Esther’s local housing allowance only just covers – but she fears it could happen again. “I am really scared because for the moment, they’re letting me be… [but] if my rent was risen again I would have to claim homelessness.”

The Resolution Foundation think tank estimates that Hackney has the largest cash shortfall in London – at £350 a month – between the Local Housing Allowance rate and local rents, according to analysis of the latest data. The foundation’s analysis omits four boroughs with the highest rents – which are calculated differently – and some boroughs don’t fall cleanly into LHA boundaries.

Forty organisations have sent a joint-sector letter to the government, calling for LHA rates to be unfrozen. Alice Walker, Shelter’s assistant director of activism and advocacy, says “people have to choose between eating and having a roof over their heads. There are far too many people stuck in temporary accommodation because they can’t afford to pay their rent.”

According to research by Crisis, as of November 2024, almost half (48%) of the 1.6 million private rented households in receipt of UC had a shortfall between the support they received and their rent, and fewer than three in every 100 privately rented properties listed in England were affordable for people on housing benefit.

Jenna Fassa from Hackney Food Bank says the increasing shortfall between LHA and local rents is driving more people to use their services. “We see a large number of working people. It’s not unusual for us to see professions like nurses, the occasional firefighter, policemen – key-worker roles who can’t afford the rents in Hackney. It’s not unusual for our visitors to be living in mouldy, damp and draughty conditions or small buildings where there isn’t enough space.”

The National Residential Landlords Association has also joined calls to unfreeze the LHA rate. Chief executive Ben Beadle said: “If the government is serious about improving access to rented housing, it has to unfreeze the Local Housing Allowance. It cannot be right that a system designed to support rental costs is failing to reflect rents as they actually are.”

However, renters’ groups including the Renters’ Reform Coalition are calling for the government to focus on capping rent increases. Jae Vail from the London Renters Union warns that “we cannot allow private landlords to profiteer and collect billions more pounds of public money every year”.

LHA rates were increased to the 30th percentile of local market rents in April 2024, at a cost of about £7bn over five years across Britain. A spokesperson for the government said it was tackling rising rents and the housing shortage with its commitment to build 1.5 million homes, including “the biggest boost to social and affordable housing in a generation. We’re also putting more money in people’s pockets by uprating benefits, making Universal Credit deductions fairer, and helping people move out of poverty and into good, secure jobs as part of our Plan for Change.”

The building in the city centre will help up 30 people without shelter per night, reports the Liverpool Echo.

As the number of people experiencing homelessness in Liverpool continues to increase, a support hub is preparing to reopen for winter. Since January last year, in partnership with Liverpool Council, the Whitechapel Centre has operated a night assessment hub to provide a safe space for those who find themselves without a roof over their head.

Plans have been submitted to the city council to reinstate the service for at least another six months from December 1 for up to 30 people a night. The Whitechapel Centre is a charitable organisation with significant experience of working with vulnerable individuals who may find themselves rough sleeping. If signed off by the city council’s planning department, the night assessment hub will be a temporary emergency response to the current housing crisis.

A planning statement attached to an application to change the use of a city centre building previously used to support rough sleepers set out how the scheme would work. It said: “The number of people experiencing homelessness, including people sleeping rough continues to increase. A high number of these people are approaching The Whitechapel Centre for help and assistance during night, via the Outreach Team.” The building in the city centre was previously used between January and March last year and between December 2024 and July this year.

The Whitechapel Centre, Liverpool Council, members of the public, businesses and other users of the city centre have valid concerns about the health and wellbeing of vulnerable people who remain outdoors during winter, it said. The statement added: “The Hub will provide a safe space from which to assess the housing and support needs of people finding themselves on the streets, providing another opportunity for intensive work with people sleeping rough to bring them indoors permanently and reduce rough sleeping in the city overall during the winter period.”

The hub will not act as a night shelter, but people assessed as sleeping rough will be permitted to stay overnight in a sit-up style provision until accommodation or other solution is sourced. It will provide a similar service to a day centre in that food will be provided and each person will have their other needs assessed while staying warm. Open between 7.30pm and 8am daily, the facility will be restricted to people sleeping rough only. No direct access will be permitted and anyone who has accommodation will not be allowed to access the service.

One year on from the floods that forced Bootle residents out of their homes, the Liverpool ECHO visited the street to speak to the people affected and examine the impact on the community.

“It was like living in Beirut!” says Linda Crilly, 70, as she tries to describe the aftermath of the Bulwer Street flood last year. Like so many other residents, Linda’s home was flooded with dirty water after a prolonged period of heavy rain and a ‘software fault’ in a United Utilities sewer system. Emergency services were called to Bulwer Street in Bootle on September 30 last year after water started gushing into people’s homes, with many requiring rescue boats to get out safely. It was the second major flooding incident reported on this road in the last 14 years and left dozens of residents effectively homeless.  Their living spaces became submerged in dirty water, ruining household items such as TVs and sofas as well as personal mementos and family heirlooms.

Linda was at a celebration in Southport when she got a phone call off her husband to say water was coming in through the back of the house again. Linda said ‘again’ because she and her husband were also residents of Bulwer Street when it was flooded back in 2013. Because of that experience, Linda decided they were going to stay in the house during the clean-up process, having moved out into temporary accommodation the last time. But when she considers everything they went through, she is still conflicted about whether it was the right thing to do.

Linda describes the immediate aftermath of last year’s flood: “It was like living in Beirut! That was the way I described it at the time. It looked like it was. My husband and myself had already made the decision that we weren’t going to leave the house, because when I think, when you’re not there, you can get forgotten about. They had to dig up the living room floor so we had to go missing for a full day while they dug this up, and then they laid a new floor, but they used tarmac. The whole house smelled like a road! I still say United Utilities have not given us enough information. They just keep saying that it won’t happen again. They’re hoping it won’t happen again, but they’re not giving us any concrete evidence that they’ve done anything at all.”

Like many other residents, Linda hates it when it rains because of the potential for flooding, she said: “I personally don’t look out the window anymore, but my husband does, and he’s like ‘the street is starting to flood again’. I’ve got to the stage now where I think, I’m not King Canute, I can’t hold it back. If the rain is going to come in, it’s going to come in.”

Flood events in Sefton rose by more than 70% during the year before the Bulwer Street flood, while average rainfall in September 2024 increased by 150-200%, according to a report published by Sefton Council. In terms of the cause of the flooding on Bulwers Street, Sefton Council’s official report stated: “Whilst the area is known to have significant risk of flooding from surface water, the main cause of the flooding during this event was due to a failure of the automated control system in the combined sewer, operated by United Utilities.”

Joan Porter, 64, said she is a ‘three time veteran’ of the Bulwer Street floods. Joan remembers with dread the events of September 30 2024 and the subsequent seven months trying to restore her home. When the rains started, Joan said she was on her way back from the Asda and got a call from her husband who said the entire street was flooded, “I pulled up to the street and all the shopping just got lashed because we went into survival mode.” That night, Joan said the seriousness of their situation ‘hit them like a hammer’ and they had to go and stay with their daughter. They had spoken to other residents who were experiencing flooding for the first time, many of whom optimistically assumed the clean-up would take a few days, but Joan knew differently.

She said: “People were put up in apartments for months on end, and in areas they had no connection to and didn’t want to be in. We went to our daughters and we were there for six months.” Joan showed us around her home which is fully refurbished and she has spent a lot of time and money trying to make it into a home again. However, it’s still difficult for her to relax, knowing it could be taken away again, she said: “When it’s heavy rain, you’re just constantly looking out the window, watching that grid, making sure it goes down. You’re just you’re living on your nerves and we’re all living in fear.” Joan said she is not reassured by United Utilities explanations for the flooding: “Whatever they say, it’s not ‘if’ it happens again, it’s ‘when’ it happens again. They forget that I’ve heard them say ‘it wouldn’t happen again’ last time, and look what happened.”

United Utilities conducted its own investigation and said a ‘software issue’ prevented the system from operating as expected. Its current position is that the issue has been resolved and confirmed it has implemented additional measures to ensure the ‘long-term resilience of our system and minimise the risk of flooding’. A United Utilities spokesperson said: “We understand that flooding is a huge concern for residents in the area and remain committed to doing everything we can to ensure the long-term resilience of the sewer network. Since last year’s flooding, we have implemented several measures, including installing more sensors in our network, manually monitoring our system during periods of heavy rain, and investing £11m to enhance the local sewer network to minimise the risk of flooding. We will continue to play our part in rebuilding the local community and providing support where needed.”

Hidden homelessness is unseen, hard to define and even more difficult to measure, reports the Big Issue.

While homelessness might conjure up the image of someone bedding down in a shop doorway, the reality is that they are the minority. Thousands of people live in temporary accommodation supplied by local authorities. Others have called on the council for help to avoid becoming homeless. But those are just the cases we know about. There’s also another group of people experiencing homelessness who have fallen through the cracks. Out of sight, out of mind. They may be bunking with friends, sleeping on families’ sofas, sleeping in cars parked out of sight. People who find themselves in this position may not even consider themselves homeless. It’s a situation that young people are particularly vulnerable to and minority groups, such as people in the LGBTQ+ community, are also more likely to be affected.

Ben Keegan, chief executive of Sheffield youth homelessness charity Roundabout, told Big Issue: “The first thing that springs to mind when you think of hidden homelessness among people we see is people sleeping on a settee at a friend’s or an auntie’s. If you’ve lost your home, the first thing you do is go to friends and family and say: ‘Can I stay at your house?’ It’s what people do before they approach a service like ours.”

By its very nature, hidden homelessness is unseen and there is no UK-wide definition of it, which makes it hard to measure. It often ends when someone decides to make themselves known to services that can help. That can come from reaching out to support themselves or when the person they are staying with finally calls time on the living arrangement. Our focus comes at a time when governments across Britain are laying out their vision to tackle homelessness and the housing crisis. Both Scottish and Welsh governments are rolling out new legislation looking to prevent homelessness while the Westminster government is due to publish a cross-government strategy on the issue.

They must not lose sight of those who are falling through the cracks if they are to prevent a new generation seeing the realities of homelessness first-hand.

Nicholas Connolly, CEO of EveryYouth – a network of charities including Roundabout, said reaching young people will be key to that. That includes measures like Upstream, which uses surveys to identify kids at risk of homelessness in school in England and Wales before stepping in to prevent it.

“If this [Westminster] government is going to reduce youth homelessness it must address its root causes. Raising children is hard and the support available is limited,” said Connolly. “Only by scaling programmes like Upstream – pioneered by EveryYouth charities – which proactively identifies children and families that need help, can we reduce hidden homelessness substantially.”

Homelessness is notoriously difficult to count – but for people not in view on the street or approaching services, they might as well be invisible. How many people are in that position? It’s tough to know. Back in 2023, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) attempted to research how many people in the UK may be experiencing hidden homelessness. The statistics body concluded that “it is not currently possible to estimate the true scale of hidden homelessness across the UK because of known complexities in reaching this population group”.

Over the years, plenty of people have tried to quantify how many people might be homeless but out of sight. Homelessness charity Crisis said in 2011 that an estimated 62% of the people they surveyed in England were experiencing hidden homelessness at the time of the poll while 92% had been in that position in the past. The London Assembly’s Housing Committee estimated that 13 times more people were experiencing hidden homelessness than visibly sleeping rough back in 2017.

The English Housing Survey keeps track of ‘concealed households’, meaning people who can’t afford to buy or rent elsewhere. Approximately 1.5 million households in England contained additional concealed households, representing 6% of the country’s total. These concealed households tended to be younger, male and living with their parents with just over half (54%) aged 16 to 24. While not traditionally thought of as homeless, rising numbers of young people are living with parents for longer. Scotland’s homelessness statistics keep track of the accommodation where people were last staying before they made a homelessness application to a local authority. While not a cast-iron measure of hidden homelessness, the family home (26% of cases) and a friend’s places (20%) were the most common answers in 2023-24.

The ONS noted that evidence suggested women, young people and ethnic minorities are more likely to experience hidden homelessness. Overcrowding can also be considered a form of homelessness and ethnic minorities are more likely to experience it. The 2021 Census in England and Wales showed households where all members were Muslim were five times more likely to experience overcrowding in England and six times more likely in Wales. Households where all members identified as black, black British, black Welsh, Caribbean or African had the highest level of overcrowding – 16.1% in England and 11.9% in Wales – compared with all households.

The hidden nature of homelessness for women even inspired Single Homeless Project and Solace Women’s Aid to set up the women’s rough sleeping census to keep track. The groups argue that the dangers on the street mean women are more likely to hide away than bed down on the street. Their census takes in night buses, 24-hour fast food restaurants and other places where women might seek shelter instead. They have found 10 times as many women could be sleeping rough in some form than is counted in England’s official rough sleeping snapshot.