I was just 15 years old when the 2007-08 financial crash hit – but I remember it like it was yesterday. I can replay in my mind the bankers leaving Lehman Brothers for the last time. I can see the lines of people waiting to withdraw their savings from Northern Rock. But the image that has stuck with me more than any other is the encampments of people in America – living out of cars, in tents and under bridges – having been evicted from their homes after the subprime mortgage crisis.
I knew things were bad in the UK – I knew they might even get worse. But I vividly remember thinking: at least we are not the US.
Fast-forward 10 years and I am feeling much less confident. A decade of austerity has torn gaping holes in our social safety net. We have had the slowest recovery in wages since the Napoleonic wars. Poverty is now rising again among young and old alike. And our public services are at breaking point, with many struggling to access the support they need. However, the most visible and distressing sign that our country has taken a turn for the worse is the rise in homelessness we see all around us.
According to official numbers, rough sleeping has increased by 165% since 2010. As a result, the image I once associated so powerfully with the US has now become commonplace in the UK. An investigation by the Guardian finds that the number of homeless camps forcibly removed by councils has more than trebled in five years. Tents, cardboard structures and a garden shed are among the items confiscated by local councils in these “evictions”. And this is just the tip of the homelessness iceberg: the number of people in temporary accommodation or sofa-surfing far exceeds those currently on the street.
All these statistics tell us what we already knew from our daily commute or trip to the supermarket: we are now facing a homelessness crisis in this country.
The causes of this crisis are no mystery. The UK faces a severe shortage of housing – with the huge drop in social housing since the 1980s forcing people into the private rented sector. This has seen housing costs rise while their tenure security and access to support has declined. Meanwhile, stagnant wages and the botched rollout of universal credit – at the same time as deep welfare cuts – has meant that people’s incomes have just not kept pace with their cost of living. The result: more than 169 evictions every day, with the termination of private sector tenancies by far the biggest cause of the rise in homelessness in the UK.
Luckily, there is now a recognition among both main political parties that we have to do something about this issue. The question is what?
The US points towards one potential solution. Far from being a short-term effect of the financial crisis, “tent cities” in the US have become a permanent feature of the landscape – with growing conurbations of homeless people in most major urban areas. In Seattle, they have come up with a novel response to this crisis. They are expanding legally sanctioned camps: allowing people to stay permanently, creating formal governance – including democratic oversight – and establishing support services on site.
This is undoubtedly better than what many local authorities in the UK have done, with homeless people constantly moved on, fined, given criminal convictions, and even imprisoned for begging and rough sleeping. But the truth is, it is not a humane, nor a sustainable answer. As Frederick Brewer, an elected leader in Tent City 3, one of the camps in Seattle, has said: “It worked ... but it didn’t solve the problem.”
A far more satisfying solution can be found in Finland, where homelessness has dropped precipitously over the past decade, even as it has risen in other parts of the world. Their answer is painfully simple: give homes to homeless people. This makes housing a human right rather than a luxury, and puts problems like mental health and addiction – often a barrier to accessing stable accommodation in the UK – to one side. This has been enabled by a big programme of house building. In fact, despite having a population 12 times smaller than the UK, Finland now builds more social housing every year than we do.
We must now decide what kind of country we want to be. The US provides us with a cautionary tale. Despite being the richest nation on earth, they have chosen to normalise rather than reject the most extreme forms of deprivation. The result is nothing short of dystopian. But we can make a different choice.
If we reinvest in social housing, reverse cuts to welfare and provide the support people need, ending homelessness is far from impossible. It just requires us to put our apathy and prejudice aside and embrace a bold plan to deliver social justice instead.
Harry Quilter-Pinner is a senior research fellow at IPPR and has worked in the homelessness sector with SCT since 2015. He writes here in a personal capacity