Extent of Bristol’s housing crisis revealed

The scale of Bristol’s housing crisis has been revealed in a detailed new council report.

The wide-ranging study pulls together the latest figures on the housing market, rental prices, housing affordability, council housing, homelessness and rough sleeping in the city.

Number after number sets out the harsh reality for thousands of Bristolians and the magnitude and complexity of the problem facing city leaders.

More than 11,000 languish on a waiting list for a council house. Average house prices approach £300,000. Average rents exceed £1,000 a month. Around 120 people sleep rough every night. The list goes on.

Meanwhile, not enough social homes are being built or allocated to meet the growing need.

Bristol City Council’s plans for tackling the housing crisis are also outlined in the report prepared by the council’s director of homes and landlord services.

Paul Smith says the council plans to provide 1,300 extra affordable homes

But the cabinet member for housing, Paul Smith, has admitted it is difficult to know what effect some of the measures will have.

The council plans to provide 1,300 extra affordable homes over the next two years, but the increase is “marginal”, Smith told fellow councillors at a recent scrutiny meeting.

And it would be difficult to predict “in any meaningful way” the impact of the extra homes on housing in the city, Smith said.

The report, presented to the communities scrutiny commission on November 12, is based on recent and historical data from a range of sources.

Some of the headline figures are below:

There are an estimated 200,284 residential properties in Bristol.

Of those, just over half are owner occupied, 29 per cent are privately rented and 18 per cent are social rented.

The private rented sector is a growing slice of the housing market pie and the only option for those priced out from buying a house but ineligible for affordable or social housing.

Meanwhile, the social rented sector has shrunk, with fewer built and fewer allocated in recent years.

House prices in Bristol have risen by 56.5 per cent in the last decade.

That means house prices have grown faster in Bristol than in any of the other major UK cities in the Core City group: Birmingham, Cardiff, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester Newcastle upon Tyne, Nottingham and Sheffield.

In August, the average house price in Bristol was £282,624.

That’s about £50,000 higher than the UK average and £70,000 higher than the next most expensive core city for housing, Cardiff.

House prices have more than doubled in the last decade

Housing affordability has plunged

Housing affordability in Bristol has declined sharply in the last two decades.

In 1999, the cheapest homes cost more than three times the annual earnings of the poorest households.

Now they cost more than nine times the lowest earnings.

Private sector rents on the rise

It is more expensive to rent a home in Bristol than in any of the other Core Cities.

Rents in Bristol have risen by about 25 per cent in the past four years, reaching an average of £1085 per month.

That’s about £250 a month more than the average rent in England, where rents have risen by about 10 per cent since 2014.

Housing benefits still failing to keep up with rents.

The gap between housing benefit rates and actual market rents in Bristol continues to rise, despite a three per cent increase in the Local Housing Allowance last year.

Based on average rents in the city, that gap is more than £1,000 a month for families renting a four-bedroom home in Bristol.

For a single person under 35 renting a room in a shared flat, the gap is about £130 a month.

It has been estimated that Bristol needs an extra 16,228 affordable homes by 2036.

That means the city needs 811 more affordable homes each year until then.

But it has gained fewer than 200 each year for the past three years running, and fewer of them were built by developers as part of planning requirements last year than the year before.

The council has plans in place to boost those numbers and expects 1561 affordable homes to be built in the city over the coming three years. Of those, 431 are expected to social housing and 809 homes with “affordable” rent.

Some 64 new council homes are being built across four sites in Henbury and Brislington, and development is about to start on 133 new council homes in Ashton Vale, the report says.

The council is also looking at borrowing to develop on 11 more sites across the city, it states.

The number of social homes allocated each year in Bristol has fallen from around 3,000 to less than 2,000 over the last decade.

Some 1,815 were allocated in Bristol in the year to March.

But there were 11,693 households still waiting for social housing in the city on April 1.

Most of those on the waiting list were waiting for a one-bedroom home, but 5,173 needed a home with two or three bedrooms and 408 were waiting for a home with more than three bedrooms.

Of those allocated a social home last year, more than 1,000 were in the two highest priority groups, reflecting a “significant increase” in allocations from these groups over the past decade.

More than 1,000 homes lie empty.

At any one point, there are usually around 1,120 properties that are empty and unfurnished on the Council Tax list for more than six months.

The council says it brings hundreds of these back into use each year.

Homelessness in the city has risen dramatically

Homelessness numbers double in five years

Bristol City Council has a statutory duty to help people who are unintentionally homeless or threatened with homelessness if they meet certain criteria.

Last year, the council helped 721 of these “statutorily homeless households”, more than double the number five years ago.

People who seek help from the council’s homelessness prevention team are most likely to have lost rented accommodation or do not have any family who can take them in.

In recent years, the council has become heavily reliant on placing applicants in “interim” temporary accommodation while it assesses their eligibility.

The number of homeless households living in temporary accommodation in Bristol has more than tripled in six years, reaching 517 in March of this year.

The term temporary accommodation mostly covers night shelters, hostels and short-term lets. The council has more or less stopped using B&Bs as a back-stop.

The council expects to spend more than £5.5million on temporary accommodation this year but will only get around half that money back in housing benefits, for a net spend of £2.3million in 2018/19.

This is because of a growing number of homeless families who are waged and not entitled to full housing benefit need temporary accommodation.

Among the Core Cities, only Manchester and Birmingham outstrip Bristol in terms of the number of statutorily homeless households and households in temporary accommodation.

The number of people sleeping rough in Bristol has risen dramatically in recent years.

Monthly “hotspot” counts by outreach workers indicate there are now more than 120 rough sleepers a night in the city.

If that number is confirmed in this year’s National Rough Sleeper Count, that will equate to a rise of 40 per cent on last year’s official figure.

Bristol recorded 86 rough sleepers in November 2017, putting it on a par with Manchester with 94.

Amanda Cameron is a local democracy reporter for Bristol