The previous two chapters explored how ideological shifts in the UK stemming from the rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s and 80s altered the country's housing landscape. Social housing, once an emblem of hopeful societal progression, became the centrepiece of revived class prejudice. The bedroom tax – the focus of Chapter 2 – is just one cog in a machine of disinvestment in and derision of social housing as a valid choice of home. Despite the underlying premise that pivoting away from social housing is part of a long-term campaign to support increased homeownership, the reality is that the mass privatisation of housing stock has instead given rise to a rapidly growing, and incredibly unregulated, private rented sector. In this chapter, I begin by examining the rise of the private rented sector and the snowball effect of family homelessness. Following this, I interrogate the increasing state emphasis on temporary accommodation – including purpose-built iterations – as a homelessness solution. With a focus on a purpose-built temporary housing scheme in Lewisham, south London, I argue that such schemes are ultimately domicidal in their further establishment of temporariness and precarity as the norm for working-class and low-income families.

The rise of the private rented sector

As discussed in previous chapters, Margaret Thatcher's government introduced the Right to Buy scheme in 1980, stripping the UK of much of its council housing stock and flooding the housing market with privately owned homes. Alongside this, the 1980 and 1988 Housing Acts deregulated the private rented sector and introduced assured shorthold tenancies. This has meant that landlords are now able to set and raise rents to whatever they wish, and evict tenants without reason using section 21 of the 1980 Act. This almost entirely unregulated sector is now the second most common (owner-occupation, though dwindling, remains the most common), and fastest-growing, tenure in the UK (Wilson and Barton 2019). According to the Office for National Statistics (2018), the number of households living in the private rented sector in the UK rose from 2.8 million in 2007 to 4.5 million in 2017, an increase of 63 per cent.