Understanding the ‘Nowhere To Grow’ report
On 20 August 2025 the New Economics Foundation produced a report titled ‘Nowhere To Grow’. The report aimed to highlight the scale and severity of harm that children in Temporary Accommodation (TA) face and to provide recommendations for how the situation can be improved. Solicitors from GT Stewart’s Housing team contributed to the report by providing their insights and experiences from working on the front lines of London’s homelessness crisis. This article provides an overview of the report and sets out some of its key recommendations.
The purpose of the report
As homelessness in the UK rises, and the amount of families in TA increases, the Nowhere To Grow report discusses the severe physical and psychological impacts that TA has on children. The report shows that homeless children are 4x more likely to suffer with mental health conditions than non-homeless children. It also shows that, sadly, 74 children have died in a TA in the last year.
The report also highlighted important issues for homeless applicants. This includes ensuring that their needs are met and that they know their rights when it comes to matters such as challenging the suitability of the TA provided to them. The hope being that, armed with this knowledge, homeless applicants can better mitigate the negative effects of unsuitable TA on them and their families.
The report further draws on interviews with homeless applicants and professionals involved in the homelessness crisis. It aims to provide recommendations to decision-makers, about how the situation can be improved. The two main recommendations highlighted in the report are explored in more detail below.
Statutory duty to communicate
A leading issue the report highlights is lack of communication between support services. Children in TA are affected by decisions across: housing, education, health, and social care, yet the report finds that these agencies rarely communicate. This lack of communication was highlighted to cause children to ‘slip through the cracks’ and be under supported due to a lack of understanding about their wider circumstances. The implementation of a statutory duty for service providers within the council to communicate is expected to mitigate some of the harms on children in TA.
Temporary accommodation family support co-ordinator
Another recommendation the report proposed was a dedicated officer in each borough tasked with tracking families in TA, ensuring they access relevant services, and speaking with departments on their behalf. This was recommended as the report found that homelessness applicants struggle to communicate with the range of different services necessary to progress their homelessness application. This complicates the process of and causes delays in the homelessness applicants being housed in suitable accommodation. The report found that if a co-ordinator was in place, this would greatly simplify the homelessness process. It would also hopefully lead to timely results that would see more families moved out of TA quicker.
FAQ’s relating to homelessness
The last section of this article will aim to cover some Frequently Asked Questions relating to homelessness to impower applicants through the homelessness process.
Importantly, any TA offered must be “suitable” for the household’s needs.
Suitability is subjective in each case. This means what is “suitable” for one family may not be suitable for the next. Suitability is assessed through a housing needs assessment. Councils are expected to carry out this assessment when a family first presents as homeless. The assessment should consider a range of factors, including:
- the size and condition of the property required,
- the family’s health and support needs, and
- the proximity to schools or other essential services.
If you have not been provided with a housing needs assessment, or you do not think your housing needs assessment correctly identifies you or your family’s needs, this should be communicated to your homeless case worker.
If you believe your TA is unsuitable, there are different routes to challenge depending on where the TA is provided under s.188 or s.193 of the Housing Act.:
TA under s.188
1. Request an internal review of suitability
2. Judicial review proceedings
TA under s.193
1. Internal review of suitability: This by way of an internal review conducted by the council upon request made by the applicant or as a
2. statutory review under s.202 Housing Act 1996. With a statutory review, homeless applicants must lodge their request with their local authority within 21 days of the decision that the accommodation is suitable. The suitability decision is usually contained in the letter offering the TA. Also, in situations where a client receives a main duty acceptance letter, this letter often refers to the TA being provided at that time as being suitable and so the 21 days would run from the date of that letter. Thereafter, the council should provide a review decision within eight weeks.
The correspondence requesting the review should be clearly labelled as a review.
A recent example of a suitability review that we requested for a client was in relation to accommodation that they were offered 100 miles out of London. We successfully challenged the suitability on the grounds that this would cause our client, a single mother, social isolation due to being so far away from her support network. Read the article here.
3. County Court appeal: If the council upholds that the TA is suitable hoeless applicants can escalate the case to the County Court on a point of law. This is a more complicated process that we would advise families to obtain legal advice for; however, we do link some useful information below in the case that legal advice is not accessible.
Challenging the suitability of TA can be challenging and that is why we always recommend you obtain legal advice. However, if you want to request your own review, or your local housing solicitor does not have capacity, there are helpful resources online that you can use including: