The homelessness charity Crisis is making the move to become a provider of it’s own housing, with Matt Downie, the charity’s chief executive saying: “We wouldn’t be doing this unless the wheels had come off the homelessness and housing system.”

The move will represent the first instance in the charity’s 60 year history that it has been a provider of it’s own housing, claiming that today they simply don’t have access to the social housing they need.

“We don’t want to do this, but if nobody else is going to provide housing, we’ll do it ourselves,” Downie said. “It’s something that would have been inconceivable for my predecessors 10, 30, 50 years ago, because people would have expected both councils and housing associations to provide the stock needed for people on low incomes. It’s just no longer available.”

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Levels of homelessness in the UK are spiraling out of control, and the transition of Crisis from charity to landlord is an indicator of the dire situation at hand. A previous report from Crisis put into perspective the inadequacy of the current homelessness support system, showing that in 2024 acute homelessness affected 300,000 households, an increase of 21% since 2022.

Downie also claimed these are the worst homelessness numbers we have seen in living memory, but “we’ve also never had better evidence on what to do about it”. “Nobody needs persuading that we’re in a catastrophic scenario,” he added. “When I started working in homelessness, the average age of death [for a homeless male] was 47. It’s now gone down to 44. We’ve started to see the first cases of children on our streets. That doesn’t seem to shock people enough.”

The charity already has its own means to help clients find private rented accommodation, and will now be looking to provide social housing for those in need in both London and Newcastle as it makes the transition.

“We will proudly go about acquiring and providing our own homes, mainstream housing, because that’s the answer. We won’t get anywhere without the housing,” he said.

“Our strategy is to get to at least a thousand homes in the first phase, and we’ve got Housing First tenancy support teams in those two cities ready to go to support people. But the ambition is to move to something even bigger so that we can demonstrate that the solution to homelessness is housing.”