Homelessness is a European problem. All governments must act to end it

The housing crisis stretches far beyond the UK. Figures this week have revealed that more than 24m households in Europe are paying too much for housing, nearly 37m households are overcrowded, and nearly 34m households live in damp conditions.

The third report on housing exclusion in Europe from Feantsa, the European umbrella body for organisations working with homeless people, shows that between 2010 and 2016 the cost of housing for poor households increased in three-quarters of EU countries. In almost half of EU countries, housing costs rose by more than 20%. The highest rise was in Bulgaria, where housing costs have increased by 54%, followed by the UK, where housing costs have risen by 45%.

Feantsa says a consensus has been building for several years across Europe on an approach to reinstate housing as a fundamental right guaranteed by international and European treaties, but acknowledges that there is little sign of systemic change. The organisation wants EU governments, national and local, to pledge to eradicate homelessness by 2030.

The UK government and opposition’s local government representatives have been very busy in recent years in cities like London, Glasgow and Manchester, social cleansing their poorest residents out of what they consider high-value areas. The edges of cities and low-value parts of the country they are moved into are often the post-industrial areas with poor infrastructure and low-paid, precarious work.

This has been enabled by private property developers helpfully taking what they claim to be poor-quality social housing and redeveloping it into luxury for-profit housing. It truly is a magic trick, and most communities are finding out that their own political representatives are facilitating it.

It is clear who our local government representatives value when the figures show (pdf) that England has the largest rise in rough sleeping in the whole of Europe – up 169%, with 4,751 homeless people counted on the streets of England on one night.

Millions of people are experiencing hidden homelessness, with families living in poor-quality, expensive and precarious housing that in no way can be called a home. Instead of providing genuinely affordable socially rented homes, local governments are being dazzled by the alluring image of luxury flats gleaming in the sky. The report examines how, over several years and many administrations all over Europe, lip service has been paid to housing exclusion, with national governments creating policy but then outsourcing that policy to local governments with only light-touch follow-up, resulting in little progressive and positive housing policy getting through to local communities.

The report argues that housing exclusion needs to be taken seriously throughout Europe. In the UK, as in the rest of Europe, the housing crisis has hit poorer people hardest. Since the banking crash in 2008 and particularly since the harsh regime of austerity benefit changes and cuts, inequality in the UK has widened.

Research in 2012 has shown that generational low pay, with intermittent no pay, is structural and personal. It hits families that can never build up resources to fall back on when an industry folds, or a recession hits, or welfare benefits change – circumstances that are totally beyond their control.

While middle-class people, who are also undoubtedly struggling in the housing market, can cash in pensions and draw on the resources of their own housing capital to help their children get on the housing ladder or get through university in expensive cities, working class people are struggling with the most basic of needs: a decent, affordable home.

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