Homelessness: Funding

Jim McMahon Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd December 2025 Westminster Hall

[Jim McMahon (Oldham West, Chadderton and Royton) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Vickers. I congratulate hon. Members on their speeches so far.

The homelessness crisis is a national scandal, and it has a human cost that we all see in our constituencies. In Oldham, there are 517 households, including 633 children, in temporary accommodation. Over half of those are in nightly procured accommodation, and a quarter are in bed-and-breakfast accommodation. Even though we call it temporary accommodation, many young people are there for such a significant part of their childhood that it becomes their home, and these are not homes that any of us present would choose to live in. Over 10% of those households in Oldham are in temporary accommodation for between two and five years, and 32% are in temporary accommodation for between one and two years. For a child growing up in primary school, those are the formative years of their childhood and they make a significant difference to their development and education.

When procuring temporary accommodation, local authorities are often looking further afield. There are many out-of-borough placements, but even within a borough, with local transport not always as it should be, it can be very difficult for parents to get their children to school. It can be difficult for working parents to rely on family members to support childcare before or after school. In practice, it means that many young people are missing out on a good education and their wider support networks during that period.

A lot has been said about the impact of local authority budgets. All of us appreciate the work that the Minister is doing to reconcile not just the financial cost to local government but the human cost to families, particularly children. But let us be honest: this is a gold rush for private landlords, who are absolutely rinsing the taxpayer dry for substandard accommodation. The average cost of nightly accommodation in Oldham is between £25 and £35 a night, and those are single rooms. The accommodation that I visited with the Shared Health Foundation in Oldham had three mattresses with a cooker, a sink and an extractor unit that was supposed to take out the cooking smells from that room, but went nowhere.

I met a woman who had fled domestic violence, and she was contemplating going back to her abuser because she was fearful of what staying in that temporary accommodation meant for her children. I visited the room next door and spoke to her 14-year-old son, who wanted to be an engineer when he left school. He could not get any sleep because he was put on a mattress in the corner of that attic room, and there were holes in the skirting board where, every single night, the mice were chomping through the woodwork and keeping him awake. He showed me the holes in the wall that he was using old socks to fill because he did not want the mice to come through into the room. Mice and rats were running through the whole building. A six-room HMO used for temporary accommodation in a town such as Oldham brings the landlord £65,000 a year in income.

We are also seeing family homes being taken off the housing market, because these private landlords will snap up terraced houses and convert every single room into a letting room for temporary accommodation, charging £25 to £35 a night. As an example, one person—an Oldham councillor who drives around the town in a Rolls-Royce, for God’s sake—had a facility from which eight children and 16 adults had to be removed because of health and safety violations. These were attic rooms again, filled with mattresses and shared facilities, and he was on a £7,000-a-month contract for just that one property.

We have to deal with the human costs, but the system has to be put in order. The Minister is one of the good people in government who absolutely believe that, but she has a job to do with her Home Office colleagues. That is not the Minister, I should say, but there is certainly a culture within the Home Office. Unfortunately, I would say they have a disregard for the impact of their policies on local communities, whether that be the move away from extended support for people moving out of temporary accommodation or even the artificial market that they are driving with the procurement of dispersal accommodation for asylum seekers. If we do not have a whole-of-Government approach to dealing with the housing crisis, we will just not solve it.

[Several hon. Members rose—]