The housing crisis isn't a competition between helping 'our own' and supporting others

Across the UK, more than 120,000 households are living in temporary accommodation, including 165,000 children – the highest number on record, and a direct consequence of a chronic underinvestment in affordable housing. At the same time public debate has been reignited about the use of hotels to house asylum seekers, as if reducing the use of temporary accommodation for asylum seekers would somehow reduce the number of UK residents in the same situation.

The truth is: local authorities are overwhelmed. Decades of declining social housing, soaring rents, and limited investment have created a system on the brink. Hotels are used because we simply don’t have the affordable, safe and decent homes we need.

The government’s recent £39 billion commitment to the affordable homes programme and pledge to end the use of asylum hotels by 2029 are welcome steps – but they must be matched with urgency, ambition and integrated solutions that address both domestic and global housing needs.

To be effective, policy must address the wider forces driving displacement: ignoring this risks undermining the UK’s commitments to displaced people at home and abroad. This isn’t a competition between helping “our own” and supporting others. These challenges are interconnected. Failing to invest in long-term housing solutions – both at home and abroad – will only deepen social divides, entrench injustice and leave us all more vulnerable in a volatile world.

Most importantly, we must shift the public discourse beyond fear toward facts, empathy and accountability. Refugees are not the problem; broken systems are.

And while headlines often cast asylum seekers as the problem, they are in fact among the most vulnerable victims of a broken and overburdened system – fleeing persecution, war and climate disasters. They are often unfairly scapegoated for failures they had no part in creating. We cannot allow public frustration over housing insecurity to be redirected toward those least responsible.

Instead, those concerned about the money spent by the Home Office and local authorities on hotel accommodation should focus on real solutions, like the empty buildings sitting unused in our communities.

Up and down the country, empty shops, offices and factories indicate to people that their town isn’t what it once was. Many of these buildings could make great social and affordable homes, helping reduce the housing crisis while also protecting the environment from the carbon impact of building and revitalising high streets.

Read more:

• One million homes are lying empty in England. Here’s how we can fill them
• Huge student blocks are transforming city skylines. But is there a darker motive behind the boom?
• This housing project claims it could save Labour millions on housing asylum seekers in hotels

In Barking, East London, Habitat for Humanity GB’s ‘Empty Spaces to Homes’ initiative helped convert retail units into homes for care leavers in partnership with the local council. While not the whole answer, empty buildings could provide a significant chunk of the social homes we need, while cutting the costs of temporary accommodation. A win-win-win for people in need, local places and the government’s balance sheet, that could be unlocked with an active focus from policymakers and communities, and a longer-term more holistic approach to financial decision-making.

Just as UK councils struggle to accommodate people at home, conflict zones contend with makeshift camps – a stark reminder that, globally, the housing crisis for displaced people is just as urgent.

More than 114 million people are currently displaced, driven from their homes by conflict, oppression, and the growing impacts of the climate crisis. Whether in Ukraine, Syria, Palestine or Somalia, housing is not just shelter – it is a cornerstone of recovery, dignity, and return.

International destabilisation and global refugee flows are exacerbated when foreign aid is diverted away from health systems, shelter and resilience in areas of conflict. While under OECD rules it is technically permissible to use the aid budget to fund shelter for refugees in the UK, to do so is short-sighted and costly in the long run.

It’s time to reframe how we think about both housing and aid. Habitat for Humanity GB’s ‘Empty Spaces to Homes’ initiative offers both a proven pilot and a clear blueprint for a scalable solution to tackle, at least in part, the domestic housing crisis by converting unused buildings into affordable, safe homes. At the same time, we need international aid that addresses the root causes of displacement – not just its symptoms – to help build a world where everyone has a decent place to live.

If you care about building a fairer world, ask your MP how they’re tackling housing inequality at home – and supporting global solutions abroad.

Nosheen Malik is global advocacy and policy manager at Habitat for Humanity GB.

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