Special Investigation: After six months of reporting, we tell the story of the city's most pressing social problem - and how the authorities are flailing in response. Developers have prioritised building luxury accommodation over homes which ordinary people can afford, pushing up the numbers of homeless residents as rents spiral up and the social housing list swells.
But is it true? Does Manchester have a crisis that is starkly different to other northern cities? We thought it would take a few days before we published something, perhaps a few weeks. The reality is β well, the reality is long. There are good intentions and bad consequences. There are misunderstandings and flawed systems. Because it turns out that yes, Manchester has a huge and worrying problem with homelessness. This one was by Tim Gray, a highly respected expert who has been working in housing and homelessness for three decades.
After interviewing council officials and reviewing key data, Gray concluded that the council was making major mistakes β and was probably breaking the law. Temporary accommodation, or TA, is where councils put people who are homeless or who the council agrees are at risk of homelessness. The key thing to know is that, according to the dozens of homeless people we have spoken to, living in temporary accommodation is pretty miserable.
Many of the TA blocks do not have cooking facilities and enforce a night-time curfew. The average stay is currently days, or more than 14 months, and allocations data from the council suggests those moving on from TA into other forms of accommodation have often been there for around three years.
In every one of these types of buildings, people will try and take advantage of the vulnerable. The city is warehousing an astonishing number of households in temporary accommodation. The rise is best illustrated by this extraordinary graph, which compares Manchester to other boroughs in Greater Manchester. And that means Manchester now has a higher number of people in TA per population than any local authority outside London and Luton. Little of this can be blamed on the pandemic because the numbers were already stratospheric two years ago and they have merely continued their trajectory since In , a year of data almost entirely unaffected by the pandemic, Manchester had 10 homeless households in TA per households living in the city, compared to two per in places like Salford, Oldham or Liverpool and less than one in Leeds and Sheffield.
