Brighton & Hove likes to think of itself as compassionate, progressive and creative. Yet behind the slogans and seafront optimism sits one of the city’s most entrenched – and least visible – crises: family homelessness.
According to latest figures, around 3,500 people in Brighton & Hove are currently homeless, with the overwhelming majority not sleeping on the streets but living in temporary accommodation. Nearly half of those households include children. Rough sleeping remains highly visible, and rightly draws concern, but it is the quieter, long-term homelessness of families that now defines the crisis.
Shelter’s most recent analysis placed Brighton & Hove among the worst affected areas in the country, with one in every 77 residents homeless – around 1.3 per cent of the city’s population. The city also ranks among the highest in England for rough sleeping. But those headline figures only hint at the deeper problem: thousands of children growing up in places never meant to be homes.
The slow erosion of stability, dignity and childhood
Temporary accommodation is meant to be short-term. In reality, it has become a holding pen. Families spend months, then years, in converted offices, former care homes, cramped flats and single rooms. Many are moved repeatedly, often with little notice, disrupting schooling, medical care, friendships and support networks. This is not simply a housing issue; it is the slow erosion of stability, dignity and childhood itself.
For Anna and David, raising four children in Brighton & Hove without a permanent home for more than a decade, that erosion has been relentless. Their youngest son has never known anything other than temporary accommodation. Over the years, the family has been moved through different properties, sometimes with as little as a week’s notice. Twice, those moves came just before Christmas.
“We moved everything in our car, over and over,” David says. “We even wrapped the Christmas tree in cling film and carried it out in one go.”
The accommodation itself was often unsafe. In one flat, the mould was so severe Anna hoovered the walls daily. “My son would wake up with white flecks all over his bedding,” she says. In another room, damp was so bad her daughter’s mattress became slimy and began to disintegrate in her hands. Some rooms were not proper bedrooms at all. Some had no windows. In one property, the floor gave way beneath them.
‘Where are we moving this time?’
The instability has shaped every part of the children’s lives. Packing boxes no longer signals excitement, only upheaval. “When we start packing, the kids ask, ‘Where are we moving this time?’” Anna says. “And I can’t tell them.” Her youngest son, recently diagnosed as autistic, struggles deeply with change. Even leaving a bad home brings grief. “He’ll mourn the old place for a month,” she says, “even if it was horrible.”
This is not a story of parental neglect or unwillingness to work. David was in full-time employment for years, and Anna worked part-time while looking after the children. However, David was forced to go self-employed when Anna’s health deteriorated so that he could offer her more support. “We’re not asking for anything special,” she says. “We just have a housing need. Social housing should be for people who need it – until they don’t.”
What a permanent home would mean is simple. Not luxury. Not excess. Just the absence of fear. “It would mean we wouldn’t have to worry,” Anna says. “I could finally stop telling the kids I don’t know how long we’re here for.”
This is the human cost of a system stretched beyond capacity. Homelessness applications in Brighton & Hove have been rising steadily for several years, while the supply of genuinely affordable social housing has failed to keep pace. The council’s own homelessness strategy acknowledges record numbers of families trapped in temporary accommodation, often at huge financial and social cost.
Scarlett Chapman’s mission
It is within this context that an unexpected source of hope has emerged.
Scarlett Chapman is 15 and from Hove. She has been raising money for homeless charities since she was eight, busking on city streets. So far, she has raised more than £10,000. But when she learned how many families – and how many children – were stuck in temporary accommodation, often in conditions like those Anna describes, she decided charity alone was no longer enough.
Her response is Mission: HOME, a campaign calling on Brighton & Hove City Council to use small, underused plots of council-owned land – so-called “microsites” – to build permanent social housing for local families. These are not grand developments or speculative builds. They are modest, practical interventions designed to do one thing well: give children stable homes.
Small social housing developments work because when families are placed into small developments within existing communities:
- Children integrate more quickly
- Local services experience negligible additional pressure
- Communities are able to support and welcome families
- Long-term costs to society are significantly reduced
The first proposed site is in Woodingdean, where plans have been submitted to build permanent housing for four families. The South Downs National Park planning portal is now open, with a 28-day window for residents to leave comments explaining why the development should go ahead. Public support matters – planning decisions are shaped not just by policy but by whether communities speak up.
“Having a home gives children stability and a sense of belonging,” Scarlett says. “It breaks my heart to hear about children living in fear of having to move again – not knowing when they’ll have to change schools or leave friends behind. No child should grow up like that.”
Her clarity cuts through the fog that often surrounds housing debates. This is not about aesthetics or abstract targets. It is about whether a city that prides itself on compassion is willing to use land it already owns to house its own families.
More social housing is crucial
Simon Gale, chief executive of Brighton-based charity Justlife, is blunt. “Across Brighton & Hove we’re seeing record numbers of people trapped in temporary accommodation. The only way to bring those numbers down is to build more social housing. This crisis won’t be solved by short-term fixes.”
Labour councillor Jacob Allen agrees. “We should not tolerate allowing small, underused plots of land to sit idle while families live in crisis,” he says. “This strategy should be encouraged.”
Mission: HOME does not pretend to solve everything. What it offers is something rarer: a credible, humane starting point. A reminder that policy is not abstract, and that change does not only arrive from the top down. It also arrives when residents add their voices, support local developments, and insist that children deserve better than mould, instability and fear.
Sometimes hope arrives with a guitar case on the pavement – and a teenager who refuses to accept that this is the best a city like Brighton & Hove can do.
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