It is sad, really, but there is a massive gap between what we know about child psychology and how we actually house our children in the UK. On one hand, my degree is teaching me that stability is a physiological requirement; on the other, I walk outside, and I am met by a city that seems determined to ignore it. We talk about secure bases in our textbooks, but on the streets of London, that base has been replaced by the frantic arithmetic of the housing crisis.
In my psychology degree, we learn that you can’t expect a child to thrive if they don’t feel safe. It’s the basic starting line for human development. But out in the real world, 150,000 children are being denied that start, living in what our government calls ‘temporary’ housing. It’s a sanitised word for a cruel reality because there is nothing ‘temporary’ about it. Children, specifically in big cities like London, are currently spending their whole childhoods in these rooms. If you’re seven years old, a single year in a hostel represents 14 per cent of your life. That isn’t a transition; it’s an eternity.
The ‘Asset Poor’ trap
There is a lazy assumption that families in temporary accommodation are completely destitute. We imagine Victorian-level poverty where people have nothing. But this misunderstanding hides the real crisis we are facing. I see parents who don’t look ‘homeless’—they are working, they are buying the school uniforms, they can put food on the table. They are part of the consumer economy. They have enough to survive the day. They are solvent by every traditional metric, but the bridge to a stable home has been burned. They aren’t failing the system; the maths of the system is failing them.
We are told help is on the way. The Renters’ Rights Act is set to land in May 2026, promising to finally kill off ‘bidding wars’ and those discriminatory ‘No Benefits’ or ‘No Children’ bans that have treated families like liabilities for years. These changes are vital, and they are long overdue, but let’s be honest here: a law can fix the cruelty of the process, but it cannot fix the cold arithmetic of the market.
You can ban a bidding war on a London flat, but if that starting price is £2,200 a month and a single mother is bringing in £1,800, she isn’t being discriminated against anymore – she is just being priced out by the maths. We are making the process of being excluded ‘fairer,’ but the result is the same.
The maths that don’t add up
In London, the average rent for a two-bedroom flat starts at £1,500 in the outer boroughs and climbs to nearly £3,900 in the centre. But if you are a single parent working full-time on a minimum wage, or capped by benefits, you might only see £1,800 to £2,300 land in your account. The maths here is brutal. We aren’t just talking about ‘expensive’ housing anymore; we are talking about rents that are literally higher than a family’s entire income. You can’t budget your way out of a deficit that starts before you’ve even bought a loaf of bread.
We have completely severed the link between income and shelter. I see parents who are doing everything right, managing their daily bills and participating in the economy, but they are still living in hostels. They are solvent on paper, but the rental market has moved so far into the stratosphere that their income is frankly irrelevant. In today’s UK, you can be a ‘success’ by consumer standards and still be statistically homeless.
We need homes, not just rights
When a family falls into this gap – too ‘rich’ for emergency support but too poor for the private rental market – they land in the limbo of temporary accommodation. It is a middle ground that shouldn’t exist.
I see the impact of this through my studies, but I also see it in the faces of parents at the school gates. When a child spends their formative years in a space that doesn’t belong to them – living in overcrowded conditions where the living room doubles as a bedroom – they internalise a sense of impermanence.
In psychology, we talk about the ‘secure base’ – the idea that a child needs a solid platform from which to explore the world. When that base is just a room that could be taken away with a week’s notice, the child remains in a state of hyper-vigilance. These children are living in permanent survival mode, their cortisol levels spiked by the simple fact that they have nowhere to truly belong.
The new laws coming in May 2026 are a start, but rights are useless without a roof. We need to stop viewing homelessness solely as a failure of regulation and start seeing it for what it is: a failure of supply. We need to return to genuine social housing with rents that actually match with what people earn, not the whims of an overheated market.
Until then, we are merely making the process of being priced out slightly fairer.
Salwa’s Substack: https://quietlybecoming.substack.com
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