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The homelessness charity Crisis is going to become a landlord for the first time in its 60-year history, saying the housing crisis in the UK has reached a “catastrophic scenario”.
Matt Downie, the charity’s chief executive, said it was preparing to launch a fundraising appeal to buy its own housing stock as it can longer get access to social housing to help homeless people.
“We don’t want to do this, but if nobody else is going to provide housing, we’ll do it ourselves,” he said.
“It’s something that would have been inconceivable for my predecessors 10, 30, 50 years ago, because people would have expected both councils and housing associations to provide the stock needed for people on low incomes. It’s just no longer available.
“We wouldn’t be doing this unless the wheels had come off the homelessness and housing system.”
A study from Crisis released on Monday revealed that almost 300,000 families and individuals across England are experiencing the worst forms of homelessness, including sleeping on the streets, in tents or squats, or stuck in unsuitable temporary accommodation such as B&Bs and hostels.
The study, led by Heriot-Watt University, showed that 299,100 households in England experienced acute homelessness in 2024, an increase of 21% since 2022 and 45% since 2012.
Homelessness among people discharged from hospitals, prisons and other institutions increased by 22% in the last year, while homelessness from evictions from UK asylum accommodation was up 37%.
Downie said the country had not “seen homelessness numbers this bad in living memory but we’ve also never had better evidence on what to do about it”.
“Nobody needs persuading that we’re in a catastrophic scenario,” he added. “When I started working in homelessness, the average age of death [for a homeless male] was 47. It’s now gone down to 44. We’ve started to see the first cases of children on our streets. That doesn’t seem to shock people enough.”
The charity has already set up its own lettings agency to help secure access to private rented housing for its clients, and it is now about to embark on providing its own social housing to high-needs people with bespoke support, starting in London and Newcastle.
“We will proudly go about acquiring and providing our own homes, mainstream housing, because that’s the answer. We won’t get anywhere without the housing,” he said.
“Our strategy is to get to at least a thousand homes in the first phase, and we’ve got Housing First tenancy support teams in those two cities ready to go to support people. But the ambition is to move to something even bigger so that we can demonstrate that the solution to homelessness is housing.”
He said the charity, headquartered on Commercial Street in London, would be following in the footsteps of housing associations, originally created by Victorian philanthropists in the 1800s to help homeless people and alleviate poverty.
“We’re about 200 yards away here from the first Peabody estate which is the birth of social housing in this country and yet around the corner we’re having to start again,” he said.
The charity is calling on the government to urgently deliver the homelessness strategy, promised in Labour’s manifesto and now due to be published by Christmas, and increase housing benefit to reflect the true cost of private rents.
The government has committed £39bn towards its social and affordable homes programme, with a target of building 180,000 new social homes over the next 10 years.
But the new housing secretary, Steve Reed, prompted a backlash last month when he cut affordable housing targets in London from 35% to 20% to try to speed up housing projects. Crisis want ministers to provide “cast iron guarantees” that social housing building will happen at scale.
“It’s really worrying to see more and more people have concluded that you can make money out of making people and keeping people homeless,” said Downie. “The cost of temporary accommodation is astronomical but the fact that a lot of that money is going into the hands of people that are effectively exploiting the situation is really a disgrace.
“We need a political leader to grasp all of this. The truth of this is that for many years to come we’ll just keep talking about a bigger sized problem unless there’s some fundamental rethinking.”
