Bristol Big Issue vendor Mike Turner: 'The shortage of housing in this city is a moral injustice'

A Big Issue vendor is demanding answers about the “shameful” shortage of affordable housing in Bristol.

Bristol is England’s least affordable place to rent outside London, according to Office for National Statistics data for 2024. Rent swallowed 45% of renters’ income, compared with 42% in Greater London.

“It’s ridiculous,” says Mike Turner, a Big Issue vendor in the city. “It’s hitting people hard.”

Bristol has more than 2,000 households in temporary accommodation, While 70 people were estimated to be sleeping rough on a single night in autumn 2025. For a period, Turner was counted among this rough sleeping tally. “People say to me, ‘How on earth did you end up on the street?’ I’m one of these people who shows that it can happen to anybody,” he says.

Turner had spent three decades working abroad in the international oil industry. At 73, he returned to the UK for an operation and soon found himself homeless, spending weeks out in the cold in January and February before being offered temporary accommodation.

“It was a real eye-opener for me,” he says. “It would have been quite easy for me to end up even worse off than I am now, you know.

“But people protected me – I still maintain contact with people on the street.”

Since finding accommodation, Turner has turned his attention to Bristol’s housing crisis, joining the housing union ACORN and investigating how the council handles payments developers make instead of providing affordable housing on-site. He’s motivated by what he calls the “moral injustice” of homelessness. A lack of affordable housing is part of the problem. 

“We just need a lot more of it,” Turner adds. Though 687 new affordable homes were constructed in Bristol
during the 2025-26 financial year – the highest in 20 years – there are still around 20,000 households on the social housing waiting list.

Through Section 106 agreements, councils can require developers to provide affordable homes as part of a new development. In some circumstances, developers can instead make financial contributions towards affordable housing elsewhere.

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Turner submitted freedom of information requests to find out how much money Bristol City Council had secured through these arrangements, and what had happened to it. The council’s response recorded £3.71 million in affordable housing contributions secured between 2015-16 and 2024-25. Of that, £1.48m had been received, £632,192 was not yet due and none was recorded as overdue. 

A further £1.59m was categorised as “written off, waived, reduced or not due for payment”. That doesn’t mean developers were let off paying £1.59m. The category combines different circumstances, including developments that never went ahead and schemes delivered entirely as affordable.

Turner and ACORN have reques-ted further details on why the contributions were no longer payable. 

Sam Lane, a local organiser for ACORN, said the Big Issue vendor’s work was a “great example” of what activism can do. 

“If people want to see a change to a more equitable society, and if people want to see their communities improved and the decision makers confronted, then this sort of action… is really important.”

Councillor Barry Parsons, chair of Bristol City Council’s homes and housing delivery committee, acknowledged that the city is in “dire need” of more affordable housing. “Affordable housing contributions play an important role in helping us meet the needs of our growing city, and we remain committed to being open and transparent about how these arrangements work and how funding is used,” he said.

For Turner, the ongoing question is whether the system is doing enough for people who cannot afford a home. “Because it’s the 21st century, it’s criminal. It’s morally unjust.”

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