Where are the zeros?

Government’s housing plan is a national disgrace.

Image from Shared Health Foundation

Yesterday, the Government announced it would inject £350 million to the Affordable Homes Programme to build 1,400 homes for social rent and 250 additional council homes to provide ‘homes for those in need of better-quality temporary accommodation.’  Angela Raynor herself accepted that there are 1.3 million households on the housing list in England, so we must ask – where are the zeros in the Government’s plan? 

PILC’s gentrification project manager Saskia O’Hara said of the announcement,

‘With over 34,000 on the housing list in Newham alone, it’s unimaginable that the government’s nation-wide plan amounts to such little progress. It is a national disgrace.’ 

The proposed plan barely accounts for 1% of the need with Shelter finding that at least 90,000 homes need to be built in England every year for the next ten years to truly address the housing crisis. 

Worse still, the plan is dressed up in the cloak of ‘affordable housing’ which as we have argued before is the new frontier for investors to make significant profit in the long term. 

In London, local authorities are spending £114 million per month on temporary accommodation, rendering this '£350 million' national plan a drop in the ocean for the worsening situation.

We have to do better than this, especially as the Shared Health Foundation’s damming report found that

‘Between 1st April 2019 to 31st March 2024, 74 children have died with temporary accommodation as a contributing factor to their vulnerability, ill-health, or death.  Of these 74 children, 58 were under the age of 1.’

This is an emergency and the Government is 3 steps behind.