Recommendations from the Households in Temporary Accommodation APPG

Last year, the Households in Temporary Accommodation All Party Parliamentary Group (chaired by Siobhain Mcdonagh MP for Mitcham and Morden, and Bob Blackman MP for Harrow East), gathered evidence of the current standards in TA, from people with lived experience and people who have supported residents of TA. The main themes included:

"Terrible conditions, cramped, no ventilation, alarms going off in the night"

"It’s worse [than] a nightmare. The house is almost 50 staircases without lifts, cockroaches, mice"

"My clearly disabled child was asked if they could sleep in a bunk bed on the topc bunk. We were put up two flights of narrow stairs in a mouldy flat that had a door that wouldn't lock or close"

"The cooking equipment did not work when I moved into the premises and the fridge also didn't work, I reported this immediately and it took 4 months to repair it"

"The nights were the worst as you would hear people walking past your room to get to the bathroom and quite often your door would be tried"

"I suffer with autism and this was not taken into consideration when I moved there... They try to portray the service as being "supported" but the evidence of support is only on paper and not present in real life"

The report proposes 7 policy points that we believe will begin to address these issues, starting with introducing a national temporary accommodation regulator with powers to enforce minimum standards and intervenewhen they are not met.

We know there needs to be more social housing in the long-term, but we can't build them as quickly as they’re needed. Introducing a temporary accommodation regulator is the first step to improving the lives of the 96,000 households living there right now.

We also recommend that basic facilities should be guaranteed in all temporary accommodation. Many homeless households are placed in TA that lacks facilities such as a working oven, hot water, assistive technology (for people with disabilities), clean bedding or WiFi, which only adds to their already traumatic situation.

We also know that people experiencing homelessness are in danger of falling through the gaps of support systems. Installing a national notification system would make sure that at a point a household registers as homeless, relevant services are informed and can respond with appropriate support.

A full summary of our 7 policy points is available here.