People are dying in unsafe accommodation and communities are being irreversibly damaged due to delays to a new law to clamp down on unregulated supported housing in England.
It has been more than two years since the Supported Housing Act, a private member’s bill brought by the Conservative MP Bob Blackman, that applies to England and Wales, was given royal assent but it has yet to be implemented due to delays in creating the regulations.
It was designed to tackle the scandal of “exempt” supported accommodation, in which unscrupulous landlords are making millions of pounds via housing benefit, providing poor-quality homes for vulnerable people, often providing little or no support.
Supported accommodation is typically used to house people who have recently been released from prison, people with substance abuse issues, people fleeing domestic violence or people with mental health problems who require support to live independently.
The government launched a consultation on new regulations for the sector in February as part of the act but has yet to publish its response, and campaigners fear it could be years before the law becomes a reality.
“I’m getting increasingly anxious and angry that we’re in a position where this has been allowed to drift for two years now,” said Blackman. “It has been left in limbo and local authorities are doing their own thing.
“It’s a real problem because we’re not getting the right sort of impetus from the government, and as a result, I’m pretty certain those rogue landlords are just making money hand over fist and increasing the number of properties they’re involved in.”
He urged the government to move quicker to implement the act, which would introduce minimum standards, licensing schemes and a national expert advisory panel to monitor the sector.
Jasmine Basran, the head of policy and campaigns at Crisis, said the charity had heard “horror stories” about exempt accommodation, including “rooms infested with mice and mould, people having to share a washing machine with 70 others, and people facing abuse and intimidation when trying to speak up”.
She said the passing of the act was a “huge win” and some rogue providers had left the sector as a result, but as the powers were yet to take effect, “people in vulnerable situations were still at risk of exploitation”.
The main concern with the sector is that rogue providers are placing very vulnerable people in shared homes, which can exacerbate addiction issues and mental health problems, create violence and antisocial behaviour, and place strain on emergency services.
Meanwhile, some residential areas, particularly in Birmingham, which has about 30,000 exempt accommodation places, have become overrun by landlords converting family homes into eight- and nine-bed house-shares in order to capitalise on the higher rates of housing benefit it brings.
Gill Taylor leads the Dying Homeless Project at the Museum of Homelessness and said there was real concern that people were dying in poor-quality exempt accommodation while delays with the legislation drag on.
In its latest research, it was told about 36 deaths in exempt accommodation in 2024 across 10 local authorities, but as the vast majority of councils do not collect this data, it fears the total figure could be much higher.
“People are dying and people are suffering when they’re not dying, and nobody knows about it,” Taylor said.
“Even with the data that we do have, it’s quite patchy in terms of what we can really say about those people. They are dying really hidden, in potentially quite serious situations, and it’s very unclear whether or not they were getting the support they deserved, or whether being in that accommodation was a factor in their deaths.”
She said there was an urgent need to start collecting more data on how many exempt accommodation properties there were, and who was living in them.
“It’s not that local authorities don’t care about this issue, it’s that at the moment they simply have no way of knowing what’s going on, to who, and where,” she said.
Some councils have started implementing their own measures to try to temper the growth of exempt accommodation, but campaigners said this does not do enough to clamp down on rogue providers.
The market in Birmingham is dominated by five large providers, all of which have been deemed as “non-compliant” by the Regulator of Social Housing.
A report by administrators overseeing one recently bankrupt provider, Midland Livings CIC, said it had employed security guards to protects residents after a number of serious incidents.
These included people associated with the company allegedly using “threatening behaviour and intimidation tactics to pressure residents into signing leases with other companies and to vacate premises at short notice, causing considerable distress to vulnerable tenants”, as well as unlawful entry to homes, theft of white goods and diverting funds.
A Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government spokesperson said: “The failure to build enough safe and affordable homes has meant rising homelessness, unaffordable rents, and increased housing insecurity for millions of people across the country.
“That’s why we have set out our National Plan to End Homelessness, and just last week announced an additional £124m to help people in supported housing.
“The Supported Housing Act is a priority for the government and implementation will begin next month – giving people the support they need and ensuring that providers consider the mix of people in their properties.”
