The sprawling 419-bed Oscott Gardens in north Birmingham was once home to hundreds of first-year university students. From January, however, in a first-of-its-kind project for the city, the student halls will become temporary accommodation for homeless families as the council buckles under the strain of a national housing crisis.
“We’re seeing around 300 families a month present to us as homeless, enough to fill a whole tower block,” said Sharon Thompson, Birmingham city council’s cabinet member for vulnerable children, families and homelessness. “Having been a councillor since 2014, I’ve never seen local communities hit in the way they are at the moment.”
About 3,800 households are currently in temporary housing across the city, and 580 of those are in a bed and breakfast or hotel, where families are often crammed into one room with no access to cooking or washing facilities.
Oscott Gardens will house up to 300 families who will each be given their own self-contained flats with en suite bedrooms, and former student common rooms will be turned into support centres so families can easily access council services.
“This will be more modern, more comfortable. No council wants to put people in a bed and breakfast, but there’s not enough housing stock. And when people come to us in crisis, they’re coming to us with their clothes in black bin-bags and two or three children, and we need to find them somewhere now,” Thompson said.
With the eviction ban, brought in during the Covid pandemic, having ended in May and rent in the city expected to rise by 16% over the next five years, the council is bracing itself for the numbers to increase.
“The profile of people that are coming forward as homeless is very different nowadays. We’re seeing more professionals who have been on furlough and found themselves in a pickle,” said Thompson “We always said, in housing terms, we wouldn’t see the real impact of the pandemic until towards the end of it – and that’s what is happening now.”
Frustrations are erupting in the community, too. In November, the housing charity Shelter launched the Birmingham Fair Housing campaign, calling for more social housing and better rights for people in temporary accommodation.
Clare Caudery joined the campaign after spending 18 months in temporary council accommodation with her two young children during lockdown.
“In that 18 months, we moved 12 times. Once we had to leave a Travelodge we were staying in with a day’s notice. It was really distressing,” said Caudery, who had lived in a privately rented flat for six years but was forced to leave when it was declared unfit to live in.
Moving around the city meant the family were often forced to make long journeys involving multiple buses to get to school and had to rely on takeaway food that left one of her children ill. “I did learn how to do pasta in a Thermos flask, just letting it sit there in the water,” she said. “But you can’t even sneak a microwave or toaster in because the electrics can’t handle it or you set the smoke alarms off and everyone ends up out in the freezing cold. Some families did it because they were so desperate.”
She said being housed somewhere like Oscott Gardens would have been significantly better, but she has some doubts over the long-term impact of the project.
“It sounds like a much better alternative to B&Bs, but a lot of it depends how it’s managed and I don’t think it’s going to be enough unless we actually start building social housing again. Before you know it, it’s going to be 600, 800. It’s investing money in the plaster, not in preventing the wound.”
Research has estimated that Birmingham needs 4,000 new homes a year over the next decade to meet demand, but average supply has been approximately 900 homes a year since 2010. The number of people on the waiting list for social housing has soared to 19,500, up from about 14,000 last year.
The council’s housing stock has fallen from more than 120,000 units in the 1980s to about 60,000, largely as a result of schemes such as right to buy. In 2019, the city council launched a 10-year housing plan committing to building 2,708 new homes but admits the scale of the problem is huge.
“Birmingham city council is the biggest council house builder in the country, and we still can’t meet our demand,” said Thompson. “We have built on as much council land as we can. It’s estimated by 2031 we’ll have an additional 158,000 people living in the city, which equates to nearly 90,000 properties. Now we’re starting to look outside the city boundary.”
The council’s main priority now is trying to prevent homelessness in the first place. “We can very quickly fill Oscott Gardens and anything else we get, and we’re back to square one and we’re filling up hotels again,” said Stephen Philpott, head of housing solutions at the council, adding they’re recruiting 123 staff to try to reach families before they hit a crisis. “When we get an opportunity to do prevention, 75% of the time we’re successful in it.”
For campaigners such as Caudery, the main focus is ensuring families don’t have to experience what she went through.
“No child should be stuck in temporary accommodation in a country that is so wealthy. I just find it appalling. Our leaders should be ashamed that this is going on,” she said. “My own child, she was nine and able to recognise that the way we’d been treated was inhumane.
“It feels like wherever you turn, you’re just smashing your head against brick walls. Sometimes it’s very compassionate people but all they can say is there’s a housing crisis, there’s no houses, there’s nothing they can actually do. We need a huge overhaul of housing in this country.”