Councillor worried housing crisis is creating new trauma

Ted Peskett – Local Democracy Reporter

A councillor at the centre of efforts to tackle one of the biggest issues facing Cardiff said she is worried the city’s housing crisis is creating more individuals with trauma.

Cardiff Council’s cabinet member for housing and communities, Cllr Lynda Thorne, said progress is being made to shelter people in Cardiff but added that a lot more needs to be done on top of building thousands of new homes.

Cities across the UK are grappling with a housing crisis and Cardiff is no different.

At the moment, there are about 8,000 people on the council’s housing waiting list and a statement from Cllr Thorne published recently said demand on single people needing accommodation “continues to be of extreme concern”.

The size of the challenge that the council and city has on its hands is not something the cabinet member shies away from talking about in council meetings, but she admits “it is a bit scary”.

Demand

Such is the demand for shelter in the Welsh capital that the council has taken over a number of hotels to help address it.

Cllr Thorne said: “We have still got families living in hotels and I get emails and letters from MPs who are complaining that these families have been there too long. Any time living in a hotel is not suitable is it?”

When asked to provide a sense of what the housing crisis looks like, Cllr Thorne recalled a time when she went to visit a hotel repurposed for emergency housing in the city.

Noticing loud noises coming from an office where staff were speaking with one young mother, Cllr Thorne recounted: “I thought I had better go and try and find out what has gone wrong and she [the mother] had gone out of her room and left her children in there.

“She hadn’t gone for long, but of course in terms of safety she shouldn’t have done that, but if you put yourself in their position you are thinking you are stuck in one room.

“You can’t even go outside… and with kids you can imagine how you can feel trapped can’t you?

“Living in a hotel is just awful.

Concern

“When you think, they [families] become homeless and because we haven’t got vacancies they are waiting very often until the day they get the bailiffs notice, the date, and they don’t know where they are going to go.

“And then when they go there, they don’t know how long they are going to be there and they don’t know what the outcome is and if they have got children… they usually keep them in the same school which is probably the best thing to do, but where we have housed them it might not be anywhere near the school.

“So, there is all of that driving and I just don’t know how families cope to be honest because it is so stressful.”

In September it was reported that Cardiff Council was close to acquiring a student accommodation block of 103 apartments, a hotel of more than 150 units and a 20-bed house of multiple occupation to house homeless people.

Cardiff Council has exclusive use of five hotels in the city for temporary housing and it also has a purpose-built site in Grangetown, called the Gasworks, a temporary accommodation site for families which is now fully completed and made up of 155 units.

On hold

Cllr Thorne added: “I do think most of the temporary accommodation we have got is really good, like the Gasworks site.

“I have spoken to individuals down there and you would think that takes away some of the frustration and pressure, but they all say to me ‘it is really lovely here but we would like to know where we are going so that we can get on with our lives’ because their lives are on hold.

“Even though it [the crisis] is invisible in a way, it is there and it is very traumatic and I guess I worry because we have seen many of these single homeless people, individuals, have been through trauma in their lives.

“That is why they are on drugs and have mental health issues.

“Those young children who are going through this homelessness with their parents . . . are probably going to go through some trauma, so we are growing individuals with problems.

“We are growing those problems rather than addressing them.”

There is some progress being made to tackle Cardiff’s housing crisis, according to Cllr Thorne, who said the council’s homelessness teams are seeing a reduction in family homelessness and that the number of families in hotels continues to reduce.

Even though demand for single-people accommodation remains high, Cllr Thorne said there have been some changes in practice that could help.

She said: “You can see we have probably got about a dozen rough sleepers who we have a duty to and I guess I do think that we can make progress because a lot of the accommodation we are taking on now we are converting into self-contained units and putting support on site means that single people will no longer keep going through this revolving door they used to go through.

“We would house them in a flat with no support or very little support.

“They wouldn’t pay their rent . . . they wouldn’t pay their electric or gas, they would be evicted and they would present as being homeless and some as many as 50 times.

“They are in hostels with self-contained units which are supported hostels . . . making sure that they don’t move on until they are ready and capable.

“I think that will help address it, but I just have a fear about more people coming on.”

Difficult

In March 2024, Cardiff Council reaffirmed its commitment to delivering more than 4,000 new homes over the next 10 years.

The council’s housing stock is now up to 14,000 homes. However, as proud as Cllr Thorne said she is about the council’s housebuilding programme she said the local authority needs to get to a stage where it is delivering about 1,000 homes every year – something that is increasingly difficult with construction companies across the country struggling financially.

Only recently, the firm behind Cardiff Council’s multi-million pound Fairwater Campus project, ISG Construction Ltd, went into administration.

The council is now working on a plan to get construction started again as quickly as possible.

Cllr Thorne said the housing crisis is the product of a perfect storm, with its composit factors varying between issues that were forseeable and ones that have occured more recently.

“We knew that homelessness was going to grow after Covid,” said Cllr Thorne.

“There was a ban on evictions, but we had people still falling into arrears and not engaging . . . anti-social behaviour, and it was the same in the private rented sector.

“It was two years of that, so there was a backlog then as well.”

She went on to add: “We had no idea that all of these other things would come together.”

Crisis

Cllr Thorne said some of the other issues that contributed to the crisis included the freezing of local housing allowance and landlords deciding to leave the private rented sector due to a number of reasons like changes to tax regulations.

Acceleration of decision making on asylum applications and the early release of prisoners have also put pressure on Cardiff’s homelessness and housing services.

The current housing crisis is one of the biggest issues Cllr Thorne has had to face as a cabinet member for housing – a responsibility she has held since being re-elected as a councillor in 2012.

Before that, she held positions with responsibilities involving housing when she was a councillor between the years 1994 and 2005.

Cllr Thorne said witnessing the unstable and unsafe living conditions that some people in Cardiff lived in played a huge part in inspiring her to try and make a difference through politics.

More recently, she was nominated for the LGIU and CCLA Cllr Awards 2024 under the category ‘lifetime legends’.

Cllr Thorne, who grew up in a council house, said: “I guess we used to feel a bit like second-class citizens. Sometimes people feel like that now as a council tenant.

“That used to bother me, but as I grew up actually then I met my husband who was born and brought up in Grangetown, who had to… [be] bathed in in front of the fire and go outside to the toilet and I realised how lucky we really were.

“We had upstairs and downstairs toilets, three old fashioned radiators, even though the house was still freezing, and I suppose that’s what made me interested in housing and particularly building high quality housing.”

Cllr Thorne later moved to a home with her husband in Grangetown, where she is currently a ward councillor for the area.

Damp

Recalling her early days as a councillor, Cllr Thorne said: “Every time I did a surgery, which was weekly then, people came who were in desperate need for housing and they were in the private rented sector and their houses were absolutely appalling.

“[They were] damp, musty, and even the electrics . . . lights hanging down, plugs hanging off the wall. They were disgusting.”

When asked if there was anything about the job she has found particularly rewarding over the years, Cllr Thorne said: “There are lots really.

“Council houses used to have coal fires and steel windows, so we introduced the programme of installing central heating and then double glazing which made a massive difference to peoples’ lives, but it is the housebuilding programme for me.

“My mother lived in a council house until she was 93. I spent a lot of time back and forth there for weekends and I just knew how comforting having a home [like that] . . . that was stable as well as family life [was], but it is hard to have a stable family life when people don’t know what is going to happen to them next.