Writing about housing for years on end can feel like a thankless task: little joy, small acknowledgment of the deepening problems from central government – and strangled local government struggling to address either the causes or consequences of homelessness.

Housing also regularly falls down the list of political priorities. With Brexit dominating the headlines, the lack of any tangible movement on housing problems across the nation has felt terminal. This week, the Commons public accounts committee called the government’s response to the housing crisis an “abject failure”. With over 9,000 people sleeping rough on the streets and more than 78,000 households – including 120,000 children – homeless and living in temporary accommodation, often of a poor standard, the committee called the government’s attitude to reducing homelessness “unacceptably complacent”.

Two factors brought housing into sharper focus this year. The first, of course, was the Grenfell Tower fire in June. The immediate horror came from the loss of life, rendered in startling visuals that shocked people across the world. Human shadows appeared in the windows high up in the tower, then disappeared. Firefighters were only able to reach certain floors given the intensity of the fire.

For those of us watching from the first reports of the blaze, the helplessness of the emergency services was horrifying. Many more people woke early on that Wednesday morning to the fire still blazing – and the news that the death toll would far outstrip that of the Lakanal House fire in south London in 2009, and would rival Hillsborough in becoming one of the biggest UK disasters in recent times.

Days and weeks later, the anger was compounded by reports of the tenant complaints and fears that had been brushed aside by the Tenant Management Organisation and the local council. That the cladding on the outside of the building appeared to have hastened the fire in a block that was designed to be safe and contain fire, led to questions about safety on many other retrofitted towers. Subsequently, almost every cladding system submitted to government testing after the disaster failed safety checks; even more worrying was the fact that fire safety advice and building regulations were so scattergun, they had still conformed to the rules. Understandably, many people have been left wondering how safe they are in their beds at night.

It made David Cameron’s claims of victory in his pursuit of a “bonfire of red tape” now sound like a sick joke. The characterisation of building and safety regulations as needlessly cumbersome, and strangling attempts to build new homes, led to a relaxation of rules that many suspect contributed to the blaze, and has left many buildings across the country unsafe.

Public anger grew, but movements to rehouse survivors and put in place mechanisms for justice were far slower than initially promised, then continued to push past every consecutive deadline. It now looks as though the majority of Grenfell survivors will still be in hotels and temporary accommodation come Christmas day, more than six months after the blaze.

The visibility and horror of Grenfell was unavoidable – and so, too, has street homelessness been this year. In January, official figures reported the number of rough sleepers had more than doubled since 2010.

Travelling around the country throughout the year, I saw a noticeable rise in rough sleepers in Manchester, Oxford, all areas of London, Bristol and Brighton. The demographics changed, too: from hardened rough sleepers with complex problems, to many people who had clearly not been on the street for long, clinging to possessions from a recent eviction. Readers wrote to me from all parts of the country, horrified by the visible rise of rough sleepers in their area – scenes unheard of since the early 1990s – desperate for advice on what they could do.

Public anger about the most visible aspects of the housing crisis has risen, and knowledge of the hidden homeless too has increased: more than 120,000 children will wake in temporary accommodation on Christmas morning.

What hasn’t changed is the government’s attitude towards homelessness. Sticking plaster after sticking plaster is proffered. The Homelessness Reduction Act, much publicised by the Conservatives, has little funding attached, and only stipulates that councils must offer advice to non-priority homelessness cases. It will do little without allowing councils to build social housing on a large scale.

The small glimmer of hope rests on public anger about housing: at the Conservative party conference, in every meeting I sat in on and panel I spoke on, party members and MPs were vocally terrified of the fact their electoral chances were being scuppered by the housing crisis.

Telling the public to pull themselves up by the bootstraps no longer works when millions of households can’t afford to save at all or are facing eviction, when thousands are already homeless – and when 71 people died in a blaze in one of the richest boroughs in the country.

Every day, people are suffering: the only way to force political change is to increase public anger so the Conservatives continue to fear obliteration at the ballot box.

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