A waiting list in the thousands, and only five new homes for social rent: This city shows the depth of Britain’s housing crisis | John Harris

HThis is the dream, if you can afford it: shiny apartments, close to Liverpool’s waterfront, equipped with rooftop pools with views of the North Wales mountains, and lavish rooftop gardens. They are mostly bought by investors who then rent them out to local professionals: three years ago, a report was released on early sales of apartments in a development He said that 40% of buyers are early They were from Australia, China or Singapore.

A ten-minute walk away, you can see a completely different scene. Every Monday night, a charity called Liverpool In Arms. Food distribution Downtown, queues of people. Some are homeless. Others have a house or apartment to live in, but cannot afford food. As I reported on the city’s housing crisis for the Guardian’s video series Anywhere But Westminster, I watched its volunteers work for the better part of an hour: the needs they were trying to meet, they told me, had doubled since last year.

I spoke to a man in his 50s who had failed to keep up with the £20 weekly surcharge and rent on his flat, and then had his benefits withdrawn by the Department for Work and Pensions’ sanctions regime: suddenly he had nowhere to live and was clearly in a state of complete disarray. The same was true for Jimmy, who was sleeping rough and described being subjected to endless torture at the hands of one of the City Council’s harshest policies: its insistence on summarily disposing of people’s tents and whatever they contained.

I asked him about the possibility of moving in permanently, and his eyes lit up. “I have more chance of sleeping in that bed over there,” he said, and pointed to a plush double bed, decorated with pillows and cushions, in the bright Primark window.

The next morning, I went to a counseling service Run by the Merseyside Refugee Support Networkfull of the frenetic bustle of a very fragile life. In a cluster of rooms next to a church in the city centre, there was a steady stream of people facing one of the harshest features of the asylum system: the fact that, with a few exceptions, if you are granted UK residency, you will now be told you must leave Home Office-funded accommodation within weeks. The result, as you have seen, is a fast track to life on the streets.

They arrived at an upstairs room, carrying letters from Serco, the Home Office contractor. A man from Eritrea, who was absolutely terrified, showed me the instructions given to him and his wife: “The Home Office has told us that you have been given permission to remain in the UK. You must still leave the property no later than 12 noon, which is the specified time.” [on] The date stated in the attached notice of resignation.

He was helped by a volunteer who came to the UK to escape the war in Sudan. “They will be homeless – they have no choice,” he told me, before describing what often happens next: the delivery of tents and sleeping bags, and a further increase in the numbers of people gathering at the entrances to Liverpool.

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According to housing charity Shelter, in the 12 months leading up to March 2025, Liverpool City Council received 2,048 applications for homelessness support, an increase of 25% on the previous year. Latest data Shows 12,764 families On the city’s social housing waiting list. But there is one number that is particularly shocking: it reflects the fact that most local authorities now lack the means or inclination to build anything more than trivial amounts of new social housing. “Additional social rented housing” in the city in 2023-24 It totaled – and read this slowly – five.

In the past year alone, private rentals all over the city I rose At a rate of 9.6%. While in Liverpool, I met a single mother called Helen, who worked for the local ambulance service. So far, she has rented the house she shares with her 15-year-old son – which has damp walls, mold-covered ceilings and an upstairs window that won’t close – for £600 a month. But her landlord recently served her with an eviction notice through no fault – because, she suspects, he is intent on charging the new tenant the £1,400 a month rent he is now getting for similar properties, which are supposedly in much better condition.

She told me that the numbers of people waiting for social housing meant that unless she and her son endured a wave of homelessness, they were unlikely to get this kind of help. So she somehow tries to find a way around all this impossibility, with precious little idea of ​​what comes next. As we spoke, she mentioned a seemingly indelible part of the online conversations she sees about people experiencing her plight. “I see messages on Facebook [that] Blame asylum seekers: “If it weren’t for those people coming on the boats, you would have your house.” This bothers me greatly. Because it’s not true.”

None of these problems are Liverpool’s problems specifically: they form a particularly vital element in a national story divided between a growing crisis and a housing policy that is still far from being dealt with convincingly. On the plus side, the Tenants’ Rights Bill – which offers people like Helen a range of new protections – is About to receive Royal approval. Ministers say the £39bn social and affordable housing plan will do just that Delivering at least 180,000 homes for social rent by 2036. But spending on that policy Backloaded Until the end of the current parliamentary session – moreover, the target is only 18 thousand per year. So, on Earth, everything still seems fragile and highly uncertain.

In London, housing policy is about to undergo the absolutely absurd change that my colleague Aditya Chakraborty recently criticized, under which developers will be free to build less “affordable” housing in exchange for greater public subsidies. Meanwhile, Liverpool City Council has just begun a public consultation on its target of 30,000 new homes over the next 15 years, but any hard-line details on social housing are hard to come by (the latest draft of the Local Plan suggests the council will require significant developments to set aside 10% of homes for social rent, but this will clearly not come close to current levels of need). And that’s the focus of a brilliantly lively new campaign called ‘Help’ – Accommodate everyone in Liverpool properly. She has her eye on the city’s shiny new developments, and also wants to steer the local conversation about housing away from blaming outsiders and obliterating housing policies toward asylum and immigration: the city’s crisis, they say, should bring people together rather than tear them apart.

Which brings us to a particularly troubling shift. Liverpool has always been credited with the so-called “exceptional” It’s supposed to make its people Less likely For hostile expressions of national identity and little of England. But in many neighborhoods, there are now streets decorated with Union and St. George flags. In the midst of what I had heard about the housing shortage, it began to sound like a desperate, distorted display of fear mixed with defiance, evidence of an unshakeable political truth: that if you make people fearful about something as basic as the roof over their heads, sooner or later they will begin to behave in deeply disturbing ways.

• John Harris is a columnist for The Guardian

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