The Government is at risk of breaching human rights commitments to provide people with suitable housing, a coalition of charities has warned.
A report from group Just Fair highlights that rising numbers of people are facing soaring housing costs, low supply, insecure tenancies and homes unfit for habitation meaning the UK is failing to meet United Nations obligations agreed upon 30 years ago.
The body formed of charities including Crisis, Oxfam, Amnesty International, Save the Children and Unicef UK said housing was in ‘crisis’.
Problems ‘plague’ all of England’s housing tenure types – including social housing – and affect broad swathes of the population who ‘live in situations of insecurity and uncertainty’, the report said.
Homelessness, which Just Fair described as the model violation of housing rights, has risen by 55% since 2010 and 14% in the last year. Some 280,000 English households are currently at risk of homelessness, a 9% rise on last year.
Cuts to frontline homelessness services have reduced the number of shelters, residential overcrowding is persistent and use of temporary ‘bed and breakfast’ accommodation is now higher than at any time in the past five years – the report added.
Just Fair said this evidence pointed to ‘a retrogressive step in the enjoyment of the right to housing, and thus a serious failing in the Government’s obligations’.
Responding to the report, Conservative housing minister, Brandon Lewis, said his party had ‘inherited a broken housing market’ but had ‘worked to increase housebuilding to its highest since 2007 and delivered 217,000 new affordable homes’.
Labour’s shadow housing minister Emma Reynolds said: ‘Under David Cameron, housebuilding is at its lowest levels in peacetime since the 1920s, there is a severe lack of affordable homes, families face growing insecurity in the private rented sector, and there has been a dramatic rise in homelessness and rough sleeping. Labour will take action to tackle this crisis.’
