Last week Crawley councillors unanimously agreed to declare a housing emergency within the Borough.  We may be one of the first councils in England to make this call, but I do not believe we will be the last.

Crawley has seen huge increases in homelessness demand on the back of the national housing crisis, the lack of housing supply, and the costs of both ownership and rental.  People are being evicted from their homes by bailiffs because either they can’t afford the rents or their landlords can no longer afford their mortgages and need to sell, with nowhere else to go.

The Tories try to claim this is all down to population growth, but the evidence is this is very low down the list of contributory factors.  Most is attributable to the disastrous crashing of the economy by Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng in their brief time in charge, soaring interest rates and inflation and ongoing Tory mismanagement.

And who the council is having to provide temporary accommodation, for the most part, aren’t rough sleepers or migrants, that’s a popular misconception.  These are local people: friends, family members, neighbours you know – even if you don’t realise it.

494 households – 1219 people – are in temporary accommodation. Nearly 2,400 households are on the Council’s housing register, with 11 applicants per property and increasing.

This is not about the council’s local record. We have a council and social housing building record the envy of most other areas.  Local government in this country wasn’t built for these volumes of homelessness.

Five years ago our temporary accommodation annual net cost was £262,000. This year it is over £5million, nearly a 20-fold increase, over a third of the council’s net-revenue budget.  If this trend continues, in 18 months’ time it will exceed half.

This is simply not sustainable. The system is broken. We’re quickly approaching the point this will inavoidably impact on local council services for everyone.

This is why we are sending a clear message to the Tory Government: do what you were elected for and actually address the problems people are facing.

Cllr Michael Jones

Leader, Crawley Borough Council