Homelessness in Devon Today

Homelessness in Devon Today

To lose your home is a devastating thing to happen to anyone.  To lose it because interest rates have gone up again, and your landlord needs to sell up is a failure of government, a failure of a financial system and a blot on our society.

And where can you go? There are many more households chasing a reducing number of places to rent. Given a few weeks to move, you may well end up having to call on your local council to help – but they don’t have spare houses to rent out either.

Every week I receive messages from families that are being evicted – often through a Section 21 ‘no fault’ eviction.  And every week I hear that there is nowhere for them to go, and that we have more and more households in temporary accommodation, unsuitable and often far from jobs and schools. A Bed &Breakfast is no place to live with no prospect of a home to call your own.

Too many of our local families are finding that the economic chaos has cost them their home, and the Government is still busy in-fighting and doing little or nothing to fix the chaos that they have largely caused. 

We are in the middle of a storm that is raging.  We are suffering multiple Interest rate hikes after the government’s disastrous financial management of the last year or more.  New homes are built by developers at a rate to keep the prices high and out of the reach of many local families.

It is time that we changed the system.  In Teignbridge Lib Dems have started building new council homes. It is a good start, but not nearly enough yet for the 1,200 or so households registered in need of a new home.  We are working to accelerate the programme of delivering new homes, and that will help.  Like many other councils Teignbridge doesn’t have the funds or land to build enough new council homes to meet the need quickly enough.  We also need more help right now.

One thing that would make a difference is getting second and holiday homes back into use.  Too many are not being used as a place to live, but just as a financial investment.

We could make a massive and rapid difference across Devon by changing planning laws to require permission to turn a house into a short-term holiday let.  Taxing empty properties that aren’t lived in would help to bring them back into use too.

Somewhere along the line we have lost sight of what make sense, and simply allowed society to turn houses purely into financial investments.  Let’s make them homes again.  Let’s get the tourists and visitors back into the B&Bs and hotels, and our local homeless families back into the homes.