It is almost a year since the Labour Party swept into power with a promise to end Britain’s housing crisis by building 1.5 million new homes in its first term, prioritising homes for social rent and finally make good on the pledge first made five years earlier by then Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May to end no-fault evictions once and for all. On every measure it has failed. Homelessness is soaring, hitting record levels again this year, the number of homes available for social rent is falling steadily, evictions are rising and the poorest sections of the working class are facing housing conditions that have been compared to Victorian slums.
Homelessness kills kids…
In 2024, the OECD found that England had by far the highest rate of homelessness in the developed world, with 124 out of every 10,000 households lacking a permanent residence. In April 2025, the housing charity Shelter reported the eighth consecutive rise in the number of children now living in temporary accommodation – 165,510, an increase of 14% on the previous year. The charity expects that at current rates, more than 200,000 children will become homeless within the next five years. Much of the housing used to put up homeless families is unsuitable, cramped, damp and dangerous. According to the National Child Mortality Database, in the year to September 2024, of 80 children who died while living in temporary accommodation, the deaths of 74 were associated with their living conditions. 58 of the children were aged under one. 38% were from families classed as ‘non-white’. Doctors are increasingly reporting a rise in what they describe as ‘Victorian conditions’ associated with poverty, overcrowding and cold homes, including scabies, tuberculosis and hypothermia. Damp and mould are turning minor respiratory ailments into chronic and life-threatening conditions.
Bankrupts councils…
The same councils that are selling off social housing properties and failing to build social housing are at the same time shelling out millions of pounds to provide temporary housing for homeless families. London alone spends £4m a day. Across Britain, the cost to councils of temporary accommodation is expected to rise from £2.3bn to £3.9bn by 2029.
…But lines capitalist pockets
The money being shelled out by councils is being pocketed by private companies and charities, amassing millions of pounds in profits. St Mungo’s, YMCA, Travelodge, Premier Inn and the Salvation Army are among just 20 providers who received a third of all identified spending on such accommodation. Alongside these major players, hundreds of small entrepreneurs are cashing in on the money to be made by offering pay-by-night, stopgap housing at rates far above market rents. This includes converted office space and retail outlets, almost universally cramped, dirty, rat-infested and dangerous, and completely unsuitable for families with children. In east London’s Newham, for example, a closed burger bar has been hastily retrofitted as rooms for rent, with a dozen families sharing one kitchen. Households with children are crammed into single rooms, with one mother complaining she’d ended up having to share a bed with her teenage son. One woman with two toddlers said she’d been moved in when the site was still under construction, with exposed electrical works and trailing wires. Newham expects to pay out £40m for temporary accommodation this year.
Homelessness on the rise
Labour Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner can cry all the crocodile tears she likes over working class babies dying in wretched temporary accommodation, but her government has done precisely nothing to, as she put it, ‘tackle the root causes of homelessness’. Legislation to stop notorious Section 21 ‘No fault’ evictions has still not been passed – with the result that bailiff evictions continue to rise. Between January and March, there was a 9% increase in such evictions on the same period last year, affecting 2,931 households. Even if the promised law does eventually hit the statute books, landlords are finding other ways of removing tenants. In May 2025, Shelter found that low-income households in private accommodation were now spending nearly two thirds of their income on rent. Average monthly rents, already at record levels, rose 7.8% in the last year and have now outpaced wage rises for 19 consecutive months. Yet in her spring statement, Labour Chancellor Rachel Reeves opted not to raise Local Housing Allowance in line with the bottom 30% of market rents. At the same time, Labour has just shelved its report on child poverty and will make no decision on whether to lift the odious two-child benefit cap – that plunges 100 more children into poverty every single day – until October at the earliest. Shelter predicts that unaffordable rents will eventually replace Section 21 as an even more insidious form of eviction.
No homes for the poor
Housing and child poverty charities concur that a minimum of 90,000 homes for social rent need to be built each year to make even a dent in the current housing crisis facing the working class. Rayner has refused to say what proportion of the increasingly fantastical figure of 1.5m homes Labour has promised by 2029 will be for social rent. Just 6% of homes approved in Labour’s first six months were social rent homes, with half of all councils not approving a single council home. Most London boroughs saw no new ‘affordable’ housing starts at all. Meanwhile, there are 1.3 million people on council waiting lists. With councils increasingly relying on private developers to build any kind of local affordable housing, these numbers will only rise. Private developers will only build housing if they can make a profit from it. For them, affordable housing is a drain on profits, or as they coyly put it, ‘viability’. Ergo, they will reduce the ‘affordable’ offering on any development to the bare minimum. The Labour government is more than willing to throw the working class under the bus to protect the interests of private capital. The housing crisis is the direct result of the chaos inherent in the capitalist system, where human need is trampled and the only rationale is private profit.
Cat Wiener
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 306 June/July 2025
