Bankruptcy, Ernest Hemingway once wrote, comes gradually, then suddenly. For years, England’s dysfunctional housing market was a distant concern for most district councils in the relatively affluent home counties; now, unexpectedly, it is in their faces, out of control and threatening to overwhelm them.
Hastings, a coastal district in East Sussex, has warned it could become effectively insolvent this year as the housing crisis rips through. High house prices, soaring rents, housing benefit cuts, a 120% year-on-year rise in evictions, shortages of social housing and a shrinking, volatile, local private rented sector have created a perfect storm.
It expects to spend £5.6m – almost a third of its £17m net budget this year – picking up the pieces, providing emergency housing for more than 1,000 homeless people. By contrast, in 2019, it spent just £730,000 supporting 170 people. A homelessness service that ticked over relatively uneventfully for years could now break the council.
The crisis is so acute that earlier this year Hasting borough council’s Labour leader, Paul Barnett, even appealed to local residents with spare rooms to consider letting them to homeless people. The council hopes to buy 50 homes to house homeless families and has longer-term plans to build more social housing, but this seems too little and too late.
“The financial difficulties that we are facing are a result of national housing crisis. The system is broken, and as a result is forcing many of our residents out of secure accommodation into temporary housing provided by the council,” Barnett said in a statement this week.
His point is that the housing whirlwind crashing through councils such as Hastings is structural. The town may be an outlier but the crisis is national, affecting scores of authorities all feeling the effects of a “seismic shift” in housing affordability caused by rising demand and shrinking supply.
The shift is driven by many things: demographic change, the long-term erosion of social housing and housing benefit levels, the failure to build sufficient new homes, the growing impossibility of home ownership for many, the rise in “no fault” evictions and the defunding of local authorities.
The consequence is human pain and social disruption. Stephen Robinson, the Liberal Democrat leader of Chelmsford city council, said a pensioner recently presented as homeless at the council’s housing office, facing eviction after their rent was raised by £200 a month. But in the main it deals with familieswho have been priced out of the area and placed in temporary housing, often miles away in Ipswich or Peterborough.
The imminent closure of Home Office-funded hotels for Afghan asylum seekers in the coming weeks could exacerbate the housing problem. Robinson said this was a relatively tiny part of the risk facing the council: “Most of the 465 households we have in temporary accommodation are local families in work, or who have lost a job.”
Andrew Baggott, the Tory leader of Basildon borough council in Essex, said that radical solutions were needed, including regulation of the private rented sector to keep rents affordable, long-term government investment in social housing, and an increase in local housing allowance to reflect local rent levels.
Asked whether a government long-wedded to the idea of a deregulated housing market and a smaller benefits bill would listen to such demands, he replied: “Times change. Any government that does not change with the times is not fit for purpose, by definition.”
