Number of households homeless or threatened with homelessness increases by 11% in one year

David Cameron used his New Year message in 2016 to commit his last four years in Downing Street to beating poverty. The speech was needed to gloss over rapidly rising hardship and homelessness arising from austerity measures, now proven to be little more than a class war strategy and not an economic programme. At the time, homelessness had doubled in just six years.

Cameron said tackling poverty will be one of four priorities in 2016 and said his 10 years as Prime Minister will be looked back on as one of the “great reforming decades”. He went on to say – “So we need a more targeted strategy for those most in need of help, focusing on tackling the root causes like worklessness and family instability. ”

On the dawn of a new decade, those hollow words saw homelessness reach new records and hardship on almost every metric dramatically increase.

The last year alone has witnessed an 11.4% increase in the number of households assessed by local authorities as either homeless or threatened with homelessness. And these are the latest government figures for England.

 

One in every 200 people in the country are without a home

 

In the three months up until June 2019, 68,170 households were owed a homelessness prevention or relief duty from their local authority, up from 61,210 in the same quarter last year.

The number of households in temporary accommodation is the highest in over a decade, with 86,130 households living in various forms of temporary housing at the end of June this year.

 

 

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