Introduction

By the spring of 1992, the local authority homelessness crisis had reached its peak; in the 12 months to 31 March of that year, 145,000 families had claimed to be statutorily homeless, had been assessed as being unintentionally so and in priority need, thus becoming eligible for eventual rehousing by councils.

Ever since April 1975 when, in response to a joint Department of Environment and Department of Health circular, local council housing departments had first begun to take on the responsibility from their social services colleagues, numbers of homeless families had begun to increase relentlessly. For the next 17 years, each annual set of returns showed increases substantially larger than the previous one.

Inevitably the numbers of families resorting to Bed & Breakfast hotels, hostels and women's refuges also expanded and local authorities were constrained to find ever more ingenious temporary solutions as the tensions between waiting list applicants and those on the fast-track homeless route to permanent tenancies, became palpable.

However, despite the peak of the crisis having been reached by March 1992 and the very substantial annual reductions each year since, the emerging picture reveals a number of anomalies and problems for researchers and practitioners alike. The tide, as it were, in receding, has left contradictions and exposed a number of issues which mean that the official statistics must be treated with caution: the end of the crisis is only one way of describing the position which now faces both practitioners and policy makers.

Not the least of the confusions remaining concerns terminology. ‘Statutory’ homelessness is of little value in understanding the extent of housing shortage. It refers to those families and individuals who are covered by the 1977 Housing (Homeless Persons) Act and the successor legislation, currently the 1996 Housing Act. The statutes severely limit those who are eligible for assistance; not only must the applicant have no home, but must demonstrate that their loss of home is ‘unintentional’; also that they are in priority need. Normally this means having children or some medical or other vulnerability which places them at risk.

Even on the basis of official figures garnered from local authority returns, in a typical year, for every hundred families rehoused under these rules, a further 108 were turned away after having been given advice.