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The UK’s current addressing system is not only defined by choices made centuries ago, it has also changed in recent years. Where once an address was used to define a location, it is now also become a form of ID used to define people. And, as with most such cases of scope creep, those on the margins suffer the consequences.
More than a location
One consequence is that if a person becomes homeless today, they not only lose their home and shelter but also their address, and with it their identity. They are immediately cut off from the basic services they need to recover, which depend on this identifying information. The ability to apply for jobs, receive benefits, open a bank account, see a GP, receive post: all are made significantly harder or impossible at the point they are most needed.
Despite common assumptions to the contrary, most people who become homeless do not do so because of mental health difficulties or substance abuse – these are more commonly caused by the issue than being the cause themselves. Instead, the primary cause remains eviction as seen from MHCLG's statutory homelessness live Table A2).
People fully capable of recovery, who might otherwise have got back on their feet with a little early support, instead become entrenched in the situation and develop more complex and care-intensive needs over time for want of an address. And the impact of this is being felt by a growing number of people.
There are also those whose numbers can't be counted: the so-called hidden homeless. These are people who move from sofa to sofa, floor to floor, to avoid sleeping rough. In all cases, homelessness is characterised by one pervasive issue: instability.
- Since 2010, the number of people sleeping rough in England has more than doubled, rising by 141% to 4266.
- The average age of death of a rough sleeper in the UK is just 44 – around 6 years younger than the world's lowest national life expectancy found in Sierra Leone.
- Since the 1970s, social rent housing has gone from being a third of all homes in the UK to half that today. The delivery of social rent homes – which typically charge 50% of market rent – has fallen by 83% since 2011, helping contribute to a net loss of nearly 400,000 such homes in England since 1998 – driving up the need use of unstable temporary accommodation for those in need of a home.
- More than 98,000 households, including 127,240 children, now live in temporary accommodation in England, under constant risk of being moved on with little warning – around double the number in 2011.
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It is estimated that, before the pandemic, 1 in 200 people in the UK were homeless. Today, with job losses, erosion of savings and pending evictions, it is only temporary measures such as furlough arrangements, mortgage holidays and the freeze on eviction proceedings that have prevented these numbers rising even higher. Once such measures end, the precarity of thousands will once again be exposed.
A nationally representative survey of more than 1,000 people carried out during the pandemic found that more than 1 in 20 people thought it likely that they will become homeless within the next 6 months. For under-35s, that figure increased to more than 1 in 10. Though we hear the word a lot these days, we are truly in unprecedented times. And as such we need unprecedented solutions.
Access to services
The ProxyAddress system was created in 2017 to provide a stable address throughout the instability of homelessness. I devised it while I was working as an architect, with no remit to steer housing policy beyond designing what was already going to be built. Witnessing the huge increase in homelessness, I knew that the system needed to adapt to meet the needs of those caught in a cruel catch-22.
ProxyAddress allows those facing homelessness to borrow the address details of an existing property to access vital services. This duplicate address is tied to the individual rather than a location, providing the information needed to access support in a standard format. It is a consistent address that follows each person throughout their recovery, no matter how often they move.
All the ProxyAddresses are provided with explicit consent from property owners – including councils, housing associations, developers, volunteer households, and some of the 225,000 long-term vacant homes in England – and there is no impact on the property's credit score, value, or postal deliveries. From its inception, the system has been designed to protect against fraud – something currently being demonstrated in our first pilot, started in October last year, in the London Borough of Lewisham and under the observation of the Financial Conduct Authority.
The system has been awarded the Innovation in Politics Award for Human Rights 2020, the D&AD Impact Award for Humanitarian Aid 2018 and the RIBA President's Medal for Research 2018. It was also named one of the Beazley Designs of the Year 2019, The Big Issue's Top 100 Changemakers 2020, and Wired's 18 things that made the world a better place in 2018.
Through the Lewisham pilot, we hope to establish a solid footing on which ProxyAddress can become national infrastructure. As we take these first steps to making the service available to everyone who needs it, it's critical that we ensure that losing your home no longer means losing access to support, and that the systems we create to organise our environment create opportunities rather than traps.