Why are we in a TA Crisis?

BY JESSIE HAYDEN, PROJECTS AND POLICY LEAD, HOUSING FESTIVAL

If you have visited IKEA lately, you may have seen the recently launched ‘Real Life Roomsets’, designed to reveal the reality of those living in Temporary Accommodation (TA). These, coupled with Shelter’s latest report ‘Still Living in Limbo’ have brought the harsh realities of TA into the spotlight, but how did we get here, and what’s the solution?

TA is provided by Local Authorities because they have a statutory responsibility to house people that are legally homeless, have a priority need or meet immigration conditions. It is meant to be a quick, short-term solution while longer term housing is found.

Nearly 100,000 households in England currently live in TA, including over 125,000 children (Shelter, 2023). In Bristol, the number of households in TA is over 1000, up from 727 in March 2020 just prior to the pandemic. Three-quarters of households in TA live in unsuitable conditions, including one in five with a safety hazard, such as faulty wiring or fire risks, more than two thirds of people have inadequate access to basic facilities, such as cooking or laundry facilities, and more than one in three parents say their children do not have their own bed (Shelter, 2023). The IKEA Real Life Roomsets provide a stark visual to this statistical evidence, and highlight the human crisis we are facing.

It is clear that TA is one of the areas of critical need currently presented by the housing crisis. But how did we get here?

In the last ten years the number of people presenting as homeless has far exceeded the available social housing, which has meant that more and more people find themselves in TA for longer than a year, and some much longer than that.

Unsurprisingly, the numbers are connected to social housing provision. According to Shelter’s report, the numbers of people living in TA in England increased from fewer than 5,000 households in 1980 to over 100,000 in 2004, as the number of social homes dropped, significantly impacted by Right to Buy and a wider contraction in the supply of new social housing. The number then halved to 48,010 by 2010 because local authorities started to secure accommodation from the private sector to discharge rehousing duties. Unfortunately, as private rental costs have become increasingly unaffordable and housing benefit was frozen in 2011, the demand for TA has been rising exponentially again.

Alongside the human cost of this crisis, TA is also causing increasing pressure on Local Authority budgets. Bristol City Council, in preparing its revised budget for consultation, has completed a series of internal deep dives to better address the key service areas that are under budget pressure, and one of these areas is TA. Proposals aim to both create new TA and repurpose existing properties while ensuring that homes are safe, accessible, adaptable, near support networks and meet differing needs, including for larger families and for minority ethnic communities, single households and young people (For more, see the latest council budget).

In the long term, supply of high quality, affordable homes is critical if we are to address this area of need. IKEA’s ‘Real Life Roomsets’ and Shelter’s research are a reminder of the real human cost of our structural deficit in housing, but it also creates an urgency and an opportunity for strategic, innovative and collaborative solutions.

Bristol City Council’s plans for TA sits hand-in-hand with their ambitious target to increase delivery of affordable homes to 1,000 every year by 2024 to help address the chronic lack of affordable housing in the city. This will mean continuing to incubate the new MMC supply chain to deliver high quality, sustainable homes at pace. (Find out more about some of our pilot projects here). It will also mean tackling land supply and addressing the viability challenge of unlocking brown and greyfield sites in the city. We’re currently working on this through the Climate Smart Cities Challenge. Finally it will require a shift to outcomes-led commissioning, where social value is the driver, not purely financial return.

We cannot afford to see this scale of human cost in our city. However, If we can learn from the past, innovate and collaborate in the present to ensure quality, affordable social housing is delivered at pace, we can look to a future that meets the One City Vision of ‘everybody with access to affordable housing in a safe, thriving community.’