The homelessness situation in Wiltshire and the rest of England has been described as “worse than it has ever been”.

This comes after figures released from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government in October showed that the number of households in the country facing homelessness exceeded 320,000 between 2023-2024, the highest number since records began.

Wiltshire Council’s environment select committee discussed the local authority’s progress on the issue at its latest meeting, during which the cabinet member for housing, Cllr Phil Alford, said the results of the Homeless Prevention Strategy Action Plan had demonstrated “a really positive outcome for the council”.

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Total households in temporary accommodation.Total households in temporary accommodation. (Image: Wiltshire Council) The five-year action plan was adopted in 2019, and according to the report presented to the committee on Tuesday, November 12, it has seen “significant progress” despite what Cllr Alford described as a “real significant increase in demand” and a “huge amount of pressure” in the sector.

He noted that the council is no longer using B&B as temporary accommodation (TA), after reaching a high of 16 single clients in B&B in February 2023, costing an average of £490 per person per week.

Cllr Alford added: “The team have worked incredibly hard to reduce those numbers and retain that sustainability.”

Housing Solutions Manager John Walker said: “The situation with homelessness in England, not only in Wiltshire, is worse than it has ever been, since I started doing this kind of work, which was in the late 1990s.”

He told attendees that the “unaffordability” and “relative insecurity” of the private renting sector, as well as rising demand, had led to footfall in the housing solutions service and the rough sleeper service being “higher than it has ever been”.

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Reading a statement on behalf of Jo Kitching, the director of a homeless charity in Chippenham called Doorway, Cllr Derek Walters said: “Our main gripe is that there are nowhere near enough social homes in Wiltshire, there shouldn’t be any families in temporary accommodation at all, and the priority should be building good quality homes for families and single people who are often at the bottom of the priority pile.”

Ms Kitching had also noted that Doorway is seeing “a steady stream of new homeless cases”.

Mr Walker explained that the lack of social housing was “true of Wiltshire” and “a lot of England”.

He said: “The rate at which social rented and affordable rented homes are being built is not at the pace of demand because demand is led by the market and the changing demographic composition of the council’s population, which are not things that we have control over as a local authority.”

He argued, however, that Wiltshire has a “very large” council house building programme and that he has been told that the council is spending “as much as it is able to” on new developments.

The council’s design for a scheme in Salisbury utilising an unused car park to deliver 7 low carbon affordable homes for temporary accommodation.The council’s design for a scheme in Salisbury utilising an unused car park to deliver 7 low carbon affordable homes for temporary accommodation. (Image: Wiltshire Council) Finally, he noted that Wiltshire Council has no powers “whatsoever” over the housing associations selling their homes.

He concluded: “All we can do is make the housing associations aware of the demand that we have for social housing in the Wiltshire Council area and ask them to consider flexibility in the application of their disposals policies.”

The report shown to the committee indicated there were 124 families in temporary accommodation in Wiltshire at the end of September.

This figure is a slight increase from the previous quarter, but the trend shows that the numbers have been steadily decreasing since 2023.