Background
The need for social housing is going up and we currently have around 21,600 households waiting on HomeChoice Bristol (the Bristol Housing Register) to be allocated a home. These include people waiting for their first social housing tenancy and existing tenants who are waiting to move to a different property better suited to their needs. The council is working hard to increase the supply of social housing in the city. We currently have around 27,000 council homes and around 12,000 housing association homes. Over the next two years, we are planning to add 529 homes to council housing stock, which is equivalent to 22 additional properties per month.
General needs council homes are for people on Homechoice Bristol (the Bristol Housing Register), either already housed or on the waiting list. Temporary accommodation provides homes for vulnerable households facing a housing emergency to live in while the council assesses their housing needs and while they wait for a more permanent home. The council is committed to providing safe, secure and suitable temporary accommodation for those who need it. Currently, due to the lack of available affordable housing in the city, households in temporary accommodation are waiting on average over a year before finding suitable long-term accommodation and for some families the wait is over two years.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of households in temporary accommodation has grown significantly in Bristol and across the UK. This demonstrates how the number of people facing a housing emergency has increased dramatically. In Bristol we now have over 1,500 households in temporary accommodation compared to under 800 in 2018.
While the need for temporary accommodation has increased, so has the cost. The amount the council can receive from national government to cover the cost of each temporary accommodation placement has been frozen since 2011, meaning the cost to the council of providing temporary accommodation has increased dramatically. Last financial year (2023/24), the council had to cover a funding shortfall of more than £13m to provide temporary accommodation for over 1,400 households.
To address these challenges, we have developed a dedicated programme to improve the availability, affordability and suitability of temporary accommodation whilst also working to reduce homelessness in the city and prevent the need for this accommodation in the first place. However, much of this work will take time.
The council needs to take immediate action to reduce our dependence on high-cost temporary accommodation while longer-term changes and programmes are put in place to improve supply and demand.
One way to provide safe and secure temporary accommodation is to use some of the council’s general needs homes that become available for re-letting. We piloted this approach successfully from June 2023 to May 2024. During this time, an average of 78 general needs homes became available per month for new and existing tenants on the housing register. We used up to 13 of these homes each month as temporary accommodation.
The pilot delivered significant savings to the council and provided safe and secure temporary accommodation for over 100 households. The average waiting time for people on the HomeChoice Bristol register has been increasing each year for the past three years. During the 12-month pilot, the waiting time to move into a two-bedroom property increased from 532 days to 580 days and for a three-bedroom property the waiting time increased from 622 days to 658 days. We believe the 12-month pilot project contributed to the longer waiting times in the past year, on top of the trend for longer waits.
We have now ended this pilot because we need to consult about the future of this scheme.