Working Families At Risk Of Homelessness

Homelessness is now a serious risk for working families with stable jobs who cannot find somewhere affordable to live after being evicted by private-sector landlords seeking higher rents.

The local government ombudsman, Michael King, said nurses, taxi drivers, hospitality staff and council workers were among those assisted by his office after being made homeless and placed in often squalid and unsafe temporary accommodation by local authorities. “People are coming to us not because they have a ‘life crisis’ or a drug and alcohol problem, but because they are losing what they thought was a stable private-sector tenancy, being evicted and then being priced out of the [rental] market,” he said.

King said the common perception that homelessness was about people with chaotic lives who slept rough no longer held true. “Increasingly, [homeless people] are normal families who would not have expected to be in this situation,” he said.

The ombudsman’s report came as the latest statistics show that there are 79,150 homeless families in temporary accommodation, including 6,400 living in bed & breakfast. The homelessness charity Crisis said: “As social housing declines, welfare cuts bite and private renting costs soar, people who were less likely to become homeless in the past are now being pushed further to the brink of losing their homes.”

The ombudsman investigates individual complaints about public services and registered social care providers, and fines councils thousands of pounds when complaints are upheld. In 2016-17, the ombudsman received 450 complaints about council homelessness services, with 70% of those investigated upheld. King was particularly critical of local authorities he had investigated that rehoused homeless families in damp, filthy and dangerous temporary homes. He said: “You do not have to look to Victorian fiction to see totally Dickensian housing conditions.”

Some councils routinely flouted homelessness law, with many placing homeless families with children in B&B rooms for longer than the legal six-week limit, a practice that had a “devastating impact” on many tenants’ lives, King said. The situation had deteriorated in the four years since the ombudsman last examined it.

“Sometimes it is an authority which has just made a mistake and does not understand the law. In other cases, it is a conscious attempt to manage a problem they are overwhelmed by. In some cases, they say they just do not have the staff to meet the number of applications,” he said.

Although some councils had changed their homelessness policies after being admonished by the ombudsman, King said, “we still see too many families left in situations which are simply unacceptable in modern society”.