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Peter Apps is an award-winning journalist and Deputy Editor at Inside Housing. He broke a story on the dangers of combustible cladding thirty-four days before the Grenfell Fire. He has not stopped reporting on this national tragedy since, and his book on the disaster, Show Me the Bodies, won the Orwell Prize for Political Writing. He lives in London.

For issue #149 of The Internationalist, we excerpt from his newest book Homesick: How Housing Broke London and How to Fix It. Here he presents a damning indictment of the UK's housing crisis, revealing how the "temporary accommodation" industry generates millions for corporate middlemen while creating slum-like conditions that have become a direct cause of child mortality.

A report by City Hall found that more than half the ‘nightly let’ temporary accommodation units they inspect receive a D-grade or lower for quality, on a scale which runs from A to E. ‘Many Londoners living in TA encounter extremely poor or unsafe conditions, and a lack of safety, privacy and amenities,’ the report said.6 One in four suffer from problems as basic as a lack of running water, the report said. Researchers have described serious malnutrition – families living off meals of Pot Noodles and biscuits because they had nowhere to cook or store food. Basic cleanliness was a problem, with no washing machines and some accommodation giving fourteen families access to one bathroom. Older children were using their baby siblings’ potty in a cupboard because they could not get to the shared toilet. Children arrive at school covered in bites from bedbugs. Particularly in the converted office blocks, the threat of a major fire disaster also looms large. There have been near misses – most notably in a major fire in Croydon in October 2022.

The health impacts of this sort of housing are very direct. As Dr Amaran Uthayakumar-Cumarasamy, a children’s A&E doctor and a volunteer at the charity Medact, told me in 2024: ‘You’ve got people living in homes that have fundamentally not been designed to accommodate people in good health. We end up prescribing inhalers, but that’s a medical solution to a very deep-seated social problem. I had a ten-day-old baby come in with respiratory issues last week, who was in temporary accommodation. The chances are we’ll be seeing that child again and again in the months ahead.’

Because of the length of stays in ‘temporary housing’ entire childhoods will take place in this type of accommodation. Mums will start off sharing a bed with their toddlers, and will still be sharing it with them when they have grown into teenagers. In 2022, I spoke to one mum who was sharing a bed with her fifteen-year-old son, a situation which had persisted since they had first entered the temporary accommodation system when he was eleven. ‘It’s a large chunk of his teenage years just gone,’ she told me. ‘He has missed out on so much: birthdays and Christmas were just miserable.’ London has 20,430 families who have been in ‘temporary accommodation’ for more than five years – fourteen times as many as in the rest of England combined (1,460).

People have found ways to profit from this suffering. Research I carried out with the housing journalist Vicky Spratt in 2024 revealed some of the biggest beneficiaries of this money were effectively middle-men: rent-to-rent companies who sublet properties from private landlords, guarantee their rent and then fill the homes with homeless families who have applied to the local authority and bank profit paid for by the taxpayer. Companies like Theori and Elliott Leigh had turned over in excess of £50 million each in five years from these deals – handing over free rent to the landlords and banking a fee for themselves. In summer 2024 Newham announced it faced bankruptcy due to its temporary housing costs. Local authority sources I’ve spoken to suggest it will be far from the last in London.

This level of homelessness is something which should not be happening in a country as rich as the UK. The country has 51.2 people per 10,000 homeless – either rough sleepers or in temporary accommodation. This figure vastly exceeds that of any other developed country – the next closest is Belgium with a shade over 30. In Finland it is 0.4, meaning homelessness in the UK is 125 times more prevalent. Even in the US – a country known for its homelessness problems – the figure is 19.3 people in every 10,000, less than half the rate of homelessness in the UK. The US has more rough sleepers, but far fewer in temporary accommodation. We are hiding the scale of our problem inside hotels and converted offices.

The brutal logic of our housing crisis ultimately leads to the deaths of children. Analysis by the National Child Mortality Database shows that seventy-nine children died between 2019 and 2024 with temporary accommodation listed as a factor in their deaths, most of them babies.8 Children in temporary accommodation are three times as likely to die in childhood, compared to the general population.

The deaths of these tiny babies – malnourished, abandoned, left to cough and freeze in atrocious housing, from which a faceless landlord extracts a tidy profit at the public expense, is the final result of all the policy failures I have set out since the 1980s. At every juncture, we could have chosen a different path. At every juncture, we kept going, buying into the lie that rising house prices were good for everyone, no matter how many were left behind. And so far things look to continue as they are: a flourishing property market for those at the top and the avoidable deaths of children for those at the bottom. 

Excerpted from Homesick: How Housing Broke London and How to Fix it by Peter Apps, published by Oneworld on 15 September. 

The Internationalist Archive