Our open letter to government on child poverty and social housing:
Dear Liz Kendall and Bridget Phillipson,
We, the undersigned, are writing to support IKEA and Shelter’s campaign calling on the Government to build 90,000 social homes a year to help end the housing emergency.
There are a shocking 151,630 babies, children and teenagers who are homeless in England with their families. They live in a state of uncertainty in damaging temporary accommodation.
Thousands of families are living in slum like conditions; they face constant disruption, being moved with just 48 hours’ notice, often away from their home area, schools and workplaces. It entrenches poverty - cutting parents off from support networks for childcare and forcing them to lose work. And it is far from temporary, with families living in these conditions for years, some more than a decade.
If the government is to achieve its ambition that ’every child should have a loving, secure home’, and succeed where previous governments have failed, it must act fast to tackle this shameful record of child homelessness. Every month that goes by is putting children at risk.
This autumn, IKEA and Shelter are continuing their campaign to highlight the shocking conditions in temporary accommodation. They share a simple aim of asking the new Government to build more social rent homes. Social rent is the only genuinely affordable tenure as it is linked to local incomes. And the security of tenure gives families the stability to put down roots and thrive.
This investment is key. Homelessness cannot be ended unless we are building 90,000 new social rent homes a year for ten years.
We ask you to put ending child homelessness by building social housing front and centre of the Child Poverty Taskforce’s recommendations.
Shelter and IKEA