Dr Jessica Field is an independent researcher and Research Affiliate with the University of Manchester

Temporary accommodation has hit headlines a lot recently, for all the wrong reasons: terrible conditions, prolonged stays, child deaths. People are calling this a ‘crisis’. Yet, the emergency framing suggests there was a past ‘norm’ of decent temporary accommodation (TA) we need to return to.

I partnered with TA charity Justlife to investigate whether that was ever the case, and what might be driving conditions today. Far from a recent crisis, the archives reveal a litany of continuities: exclusions from assistance, poor-quality TA, family separations, prolonged stays, placements away from communities and frequent deaths. Their persistence speaks to a structural problem in the governance of TA itself.

The problem, I argue in Lifelines: A History of Temporary Accommodation, is one of two parts. First, nineteenth century attitudes about homeless families’ ‘deservingness’ to state assistance have endured.

The Victorian workhouses were infamous for their grime, family separations, and cruelty against those who didn’t conform to labour and family norms. The Poor Law system was abolished in 1948. But ‘deservingness’ was administratively recoded into welfare conditionality.

It frequently operated by deterring those judged less deserving of help – including single mothers and immigrant families – from housing assistance. Or else, by placing them in the worst quality TA and separating families – with children taken into care. Ken Loach’s powerful 1966 film Cathy Come Home depicted these very processes, using a fictional family to speak of real experiences.

The second part of the governance problem has been the fragmentation of TA administration, which obscures harmful practices and prevents learning from good ones.

The 1977 Housing (Homeless Persons) Act was a watershed, creating a statutory definition for homelessness and guaranteeing rehousing for those owed a duty. Yet, the law continued to exclude single people from its remit and codified ‘priority need’ categories and ‘intentionally homeless’ provisions – remaking conditionality. Where harmful effects have been identified, statutory change or enforcement rarely followed – enabling poor treatment to evolve along with conditions.

For instance, after the 1977 act, duty acceptances for single parent households increased significantly at the same time as the use of B&B TA exploded, exacerbating already heavy care burdens for those vulnerable families. A 1995 Barnardo’s study reported a lack of play space, shared beds, infestations, criminality and child abuse as not uncommon in these nightly-paid dwellings.

While there’s a strict six-week limit on B&B placements today, it’s frequently broken. The Children’s Commissioner recently reported on how children in these conditions continue to lack privacy, play space and healthy childhoods. Some homeless families are still separated and children taken into care.

These patterns are enabled by a fragmented system that prioritises local discretion and cost calculations over decent conditions and statutory accountability. Responsibilities are split across departments and often contracted out or exported via out-of-area placements – distancing accountability even further away.

Standards exemptions have also endured, ostensibly to reflect the short-term nature of TA. But they leave families staying for years in properties that wouldn’t be legal to rent in the social or private rented market.

History repeatedly shows exclusions and TA-related harms have disproportionately fallen on already-marginalised groups – especially single people experiencing homelessness, single parent families and racialised minorities and migrants. Yet, calls for statutory equality- and conditions-monitoring have been persistently ignored or diluted.

Even H-CLIC – the Homelessness Case Level Information Collection system introduced in 2017 reforms – doesn’t map protected characteristics data onto TA conditions. Local housing officers are left firefighting with inadequate tools.

What discriminatory outcomes do these gaps keep concealing? We’ll only know if we look. In Lifelines we call for three changes:

Equality monitoring mapped onto TA conditions. This is the minimum requirement to detect harms that the current system obscures – and local authorities don’t need to wait for national legislation to implement it.

End silo working and the outsourcing of accountability with statutory coordination. Cross-sector collaboration is a key component, and increasingly happening, though it cannot plug statutory gaps.

Create a coherent and enforceable legal framework for TA, free from the exemptions and discretion that has allowed so many TA providers to escape responsibility for poor conditions. Before that, local authorities must use existing powers – like pre-inspection – to weed out substandard properties and providers.

The question is not how to quell the current crisis. Rather, it’s how to transform the structures that keep so many homeless families in a perpetual state of emergency.

Jessica Field is the author of Lifelines: A history of temporary accommodation in England 1834-2011 (Justlife, June 2026) and Eviction: A Social History of Rent (Verso, 2025).