Michael Gove has admitted “regret” over the increased number of children in temporary accommodation, as the latest government figures have laid bare the scale of England’s housing crisis.
Figures published by the government at the end of April show nearly 112,000 households were in temporary accommodation on 31 December 2023, a 12.1% increase from the previous year. Of those, 63% included dependent children, hitting record levels in 2023.
“I can’t look at those figures with anything other than regret,” the housing secretary told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Saturday. “The biggest issue overall is that whether it’s in the private rental sector, the socially rented sector, or homes to buy, we still need to increase the supply of homes.”
The latest government homelessness figures drew scrutiny over the Conservative party’s failure to tackle housing shortages and rising prices, which critics have described as taking a “wrecking ball” to secure housing. Last year, the government added only 234,400 new homes to England’s housing stock of a promised 300,000 additional homes.
Gove said: “We’ve missed the 300,000 target but we’ve hit the 1 million over the course of parliament target.
“There’s an increasing pressure on housing supply … We have not been building enough homes, we have not been creating the new housing that matches the new formation of households.”
The remarks come as the Conservative government’s long-promised legislation to scrap section 21 notices, which allow landlords to end tenancies at will with just two months’ notice, is expected to come within “a matter of months” said Gove, who was unable to give an exact timetable.
Speaking in the House of Commons last month, Lord Best, a cross-bench peer and member of the all-party parliamentary group on housing market and housing delivery, called for a statutory national housing committee to be established, “to see the job done”.
Best said: “It is certainly worth trying, against the backdrop of human misery that the severe underprovision of genuinely affordable housing has created.”
The housing secretary’s housing reform bill, now in its second reading in the House of Lords, is expected to become law, after the promise to abolish section 21 came in the Conservatives’ 2019 manifesto. Labour has previously said the housing sector changes promised by the government have subsequently been watered down.
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The data, from the Department for Levelling up, Housing and Communities, shows 34,220 households faced the threat of homelessness, an increase of 4.8% from the same quarter the previous year. Of this figure, 5,790 households faced a section 21 notice, an increase of 10.9% from the same period the previous year.
Gove said: “The legislation will have been passed by the time of the next election. The end of section 21 for new tenants and the election should be within weeks of one another.
“I think that the government has done a huge amount. You know, we will have built a million homes in this parliament, but we need to do even better in the future.”
To solve the housing crisis, the Labour leader, Keir Starmer, has set a target of 1.5m new homes over five years and said the party would strengthen guidance to ensure developers included sufficient affordable housing.
