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With a record number of children homeless in the UK, social enterprise leaders met with government to explain the barriers making it hard to reduce this number – and the solutions that work.   "The housing system is broken." That was the blunt opening from Richard Kennedy, co-founder of Cornerstone Place, at the fourth evidence session of the Social, Cooperative and Community Economy All-Party Parliamentary Group. Chaired by Patrick Hurley MP, the session brought together social enterprise leaders from Cornerstone Place, the National House Project, Change Please, Connection Crew, P3, and Beam, which are all working on the frontline of the UK's housing crisis every single day.  With 176,130 children currently living in temporary accommodation in England, according to the most recent figures from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (October–December 2025), Kennedy's assessment was hard to argue with. "I'm sure everyone would agree that that is almost unforgivable in a first world country," he said.  The human cost of a broken system  Mark Simms, Chief Executive of P3, framed the stakes plainly. "People need time to recover from trauma, rebuild their relationships or move forward into work and independence. But without somewhere to live, that's almost impossible. Fragmented short-term housing solutions don't really ever deliver that."  Simms traced the crisis to decades of policy failure. Right to Buy, he argued, had "decimated the social housing stock and made a famine of it." Councils are now spending billions on temporary accommodation, and the businesses profiting from that misery are celebrated rather than challenged, he said. "This profit from misery model just simply has to change." Aside from charities, the biggest provider of temporary accommodation in the UK is hotel chain Travelodge.  Tori Campbell, strategic lead for UK partnerships at Beam and a former Head of Transformation at Cambridge City Council, warned that the system has become dangerously dehumanising. "We're looking at the homelessness system and lots of local authorities are seeing these people as numbers that need to be moved through it. What we need to do is put humans back in the middle of this. How can we do that in a space where budgets are continuing to be cut?"  The trap of temporary accommodation  Patrick Hurley MP offered a vivid illustration from his Lancashire coast constituency. Coastal towns like Southport, Blackpool and Morecambe have an oversupply of B&Bs, and local authorities (particularly those in London) routinely place homeless individuals and families there. What was once a six-week measure has, in the wake of austerity, stretched to two and a half years. By that point, people have put down roots - found a partner, a community, sometimes a drug habit - and when a property becomes available back home, many refuse it. The problem is then passed to the seaside town's already stretched services.  Simms had a concrete example of exactly the kind of upstream intervention that could break this cycle. P3 took on 58 empty flats in Coventry that was previously accommodation for older people. P3 refurbished them, and filled them with families previously housed in B&Bs and budget hotels within two days of opening. The project worked. What didn't work was getting paid. It took nearly seven months for the local authority to process rent payments, leaving P3 carrying 58 rents, 17 staff wages and a housing association lease. "If we were smaller, that cash flow issue could have literally drowned us." The loss to their bottom line: £280,000.  A system working against itself  The session's most searching conversation concerned the perversity baked into commissioning systems. Simms described commissioners funding support, employment and accommodation through entirely separate streams, with no single commissioner responsible for all three. The result is that organisations are sometimes pressured to move people on before they are ready, and the moment a resident gets a job, they can lose all their housing benefit on the same day. "There's a conflict built into the commissioning system," he said. "So there's perversion in the system rather than cohesion."  Procurement was identified as an equally stubborn barrier. Kennedy described presenting solutions to local authorities only to be met with framework demands and bureaucratic checks that cause complex proposals to "wither on the vine." He jokingly dubbed procurement officers the "development prevention officers." Campbell called for a shift to outcomes-led commissioning and suggested piloting more latitude for direct awards to social enterprises in a group of councils.  What needs to change  By the session's close, clear policy asks had emerged. Kennedy called for procurement reform, community asset lock by default for any housing built with public money, and cheaper, more patient capital from institutions like Homes England or the UK Infrastructure Bank. Simms made the bigger picture case: the government's pledge to deliver 1.5 million new homes must be honoured. "You can't be homeless if you've got somewhere to live. It will literally save you billions and transform the lives of millions."  As Warren Rogers of Connection Crew put it, every organisation in the room would happily trade itself out of existence if the problem were solved. That instinct - to end the industry of homelessness rather than build on it - is what makes the social enterprise sector different. Whether government is ready to match that ambition is the question the APPG report, due in June, will need to answer.  Photo shows P3's Wolverhampton Homeless Services which provides safe, temporary accommodation along with advice and support for people aged 18 and over in Wolverhampton who are at risk of or experiencing homelessness.

The Social, Cooperative and Community Economy All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) convened last week to hear from social enterprise leaders on the government's defining mission: growth. They made the case that growth without community at its heart is growth that fails most people. Growth has been the buzzword of the Labour government since it was elected, but there's a stark difference between growth that widens inequality and 'good growth' that delivers better living standards for everyone. Social enterprise leaders came to Westminster to tell Patrick Hurley MP that their sector is not just part of the answer; it is often ahead of where government policy currently sits. The social enterprise economy in action Gareth Hart, Director of the Plymouth Social Enterprise Network, offered some striking numbers. Plymouth is home to 250 social enterprises, representing 10,000 jobs and around £650 million a year, roughly 20% of the local economy. The city has catalysed £15 million of social investment, seen measurable improvements in the Index of Multiple Deprivation, and been recognised by PwC as one of the best cities for living and working. But Hart was equally clear about what is still needed: access to finance, advice and training, markets, and much better support with impact reporting. The social enterprise infrastructure, he warned, is fragile and needs sustained investment and better policy at both local and national level. More than GDP One of the meeting's most striking statements came from Social Enterprise Coalition Group CEO Peter Holbrook, who challenged the very framing of growth as a measure of national progress. Pointing to the Joint Intelligence Committee's 2026 report on threats including water scarcity, conflict and migration, he argued that social enterprises don't just deliver growth: they deliver security and resilience. Decentralised, community-rooted organisations, he said, have proven their capacity to adapt in a crisis, as COVID made plain. "Social enterprises aren't just delivering resilience and security and growth," said Holbrook, "they're also creating opportunities for communities to come together, build relationships and become self-determining." A narrow focus on GDP figures, he warned, obscures the full value of what the sector contributes. Liverpool's blueprint Jennifer Van der Merwe, Executive Director of Kindred in the Liverpool City Region (and now also seconded as a Place Advisor to the Office for the Impact Economy) described a model others might learn from. Liverpool's ten-year local growth plan has inclusive growth at its core, she told the room. Kindred is scaling its social investment from £6.5 million to around £50 million, working with eight infrastructure organisations across the city region. Since 2020, its membership of socially trading organisations has grown from 150 to 1,600. Central to the approach is the concept of social and financial innovation zones — placing social economy thinking at the heart of industrial clusters in sectors like advanced manufacturing and health sciences that wouldn't traditionally associate themselves with social enterprise. As Van der Merwe put it: "You're either a social business or you're an antisocial business. It's not what your governance structure is; what are your behaviours?" What's blocking progress Duncan Howard of ECT Charity put his finger on a persistent frustration: the Social Value Act is not being followed by local authorities. ECT moves people where the market won't, getting children to school and older people into town, connecting communities. That social value isn't being factored into contracting decisions, leaving community transport operators to deliver subsidised services ... but without any subsidy. Community asset transfer was another flashpoint. Birgit Kehrer of ChangeKitchen CIC in Birmingham described the local picture as a near-failure with the responsible part of the council near enough blocking transfers, and assets being sold off to developers for a fraction of their value.  Central government, the room agreed, needs to issue clear guidance and hold local authorities to account. What needs to happen Several concrete proposals emerged. Van der Merwe called for capital to be redesigned and devolved to place. Kehrer argued for longer-term funding settlements and better support for apprenticeships within social enterprises. Holbrook suggested aligning local authority pension fund incentives with local investment opportunities, and asked government to match the sector's ambition in its own language and leadership. Gareth Hart's suggestion drew immediate recognition from the chair: social enterprise economic development zones, where CIC startups receive corporation tax exemptions and business rate relief, and CICs are brought into line with charities for policy purposes. "There are no new ideas under the sun," Patrick Hurley acknowledged, citing a twenty-year-old pamphlet he still had on social enterprise zones. "But it's a good idea. We should do it." The Social, Cooperative and Community Economy holds regular evidence sessions with practitioners, investors and policymakers.