Homelessness is up 45% since 2012 and the epidemic is continuing under Keir Starmer’s administration. So a charity – Crisis – is stepping in with its own social housing programme, having already set up a letting agency to do so.

“Inconceivable”

Matt Downie, the charity’s chief executive, said:

We don’t want to do this, but if nobody else is going to provide housing, we’ll do it ourselves. It’s something that would have been inconceivable for my predecessors 10, 30, 50 years ago, because people would have expected both councils and housing associations to provide the stock needed for people on low incomes. It’s just no longer available. We wouldn’t be doing this unless the wheels had come off the homelessness and housing system.

The intervention follows a study from Crisis that showed 299,110 households experienced the worst forms of homelessness in 2024. That includes rough sleeping, tents, squats, and precarious B&B accomodation.

Downie further said that they had not:

seen homelessness numbers this bad in living memory but we’ve also never had better evidence on what to do about it. Nobody needs persuading that we’re in a catastrophic scenario. When I started working in homelessness, the average age of death [for a homeless male] was 47. It’s now gone down to 44. We’ve started to see the first cases of children on our streets. That doesn’t seem to shock people enough.

Like suicide, homelessness is more of an issue for men than women. According to a Commons report, 83% of rough sleepers are male. While women face additional risks, we should house all genders.

Charity is a sign of system failure

The need for any charity to step in shows society is failing. Research from Northumbria University found that 94% of homeless people have experienced trauma, demonstrating we need a public health approach.

It’s not as simple as: get a job, strive and succeed. In the three months to September 2025, there were around 717,000 job vacancies in the UK. Yet there are around 1.79 million unemployed people and 9.8 million economically inactive people in the country. And that’s before one considers whether they have the skills for the job.

To solve this, we need a job sharing programme which stops some people working extremely long weeks while others are unemployed. We need to plan the economy more in this way.

These facts demonstrate why Crisis’ social housing programme is ‘Housing First’, whereby people are accommodated and then they get their income sorted.

Downie also said:

We will proudly go about acquiring and providing our own homes, mainstream housing, because that’s the answer. We won’t get anywhere without the housing

Our strategy is to get to at least a thousand homes in the first phase, and we’ve got Housing First tenancy support teams in those two cities ready to go to support people. But the ambition is to move to something even bigger so that we can demonstrate that the solution to homelessness is housing.

Featured image via the Canary

By James Wright

This post was originally published on Canary.