When Your Home’s Unsafe, Are the Problems Only Just Beginning?

As a housing campaigner — someone who has the audacity to demand, having properly requested but now demands, that the state of UK housing is improved — I believe those who can’t fix it should step aside and let others try.

For those of us who talk about safety issues, it can sometimes feel like the Greek mythology of Cassandra, who the god Apollo gave the gift of prophecy because he desired her, but when she rejected him, he cursed her so that no one would believe her predictions, even though they were true.

I often feel like Cassandra — shouting warnings and doom without anyone taking notice. And it isn’t just my voice. There are a chorus of Cassandras out there, all shouting the same thing: our homes aren’t safe. Yet nobody seems to listen.

What rarely makes the headlines, or so I thought, are the times when people are listened to. Because when residents finally are heard — when the inspections are done and the verdict comes back — they face a new kind of uncertainty: being removed from their homes, placed in temporary accommodation, and separated from their friends, families, schools, and communities. And the question that follows is always the same: how long will they stay there? How long will they live in limbo?

In the most recent episode of the Housing Sector Podcast — Evacuations: When Homes Are Declared Unsafe — I spoke with Matt Hodges-Long, a man who has made it his mission to understand how widespread this crisis has become.

It’s a crisis I still can’t quite get my head around. We have a mass shortage of homes. We have homes being built that aren’t safe. We have historic stock now deemed unsafe. We’re moving people into temporary accommodation even as the system buckles under the weight of demand. Add the pressures of migration and stretched public resources, and the scale becomes almost impossible to comprehend.

And now, on top of all that, we have homes sitting empty because they’re too dangerous to live in.

That’s where people like Matt come in. While most of us try to make sense of this from the outside, he and his team have spent years collecting the data from within. Their work on the Building Safety Register has quietly become one of the only reliable ways to track where prohibition notices, evacuations, and decants are actually taking place.

Matt told me his work started with a simple question: just how dangerous are these buildings considered to be? “Uninhabitable,” he said, “seemed like the most severe category, and we soon found nobody in authority was tracking this.”

Since then, his team have built a timeline stretching from Grenfell to the present day — each entry verified through credible news sources or first-hand information from their network. It’s painstaking work, but it’s the kind of work that should be happening inside government, not left to campaigners and data analysts in their spare time.

As Matt put it: “The biggest takeaway for me over the past eight years is the deliberate lack of curiosity from policy makers, which supports their lack of focus and lack of urgency. You don’t deal with a crisis by applying business-as-usual resource. They deliberately downplay the scale of the problem.”

When you look at Matt’s data as a whole, it tells a story far bigger than any single headline. This isn’t a list of isolated incidents; it’s a pattern — one that’s been steadily growing since Grenfell. Forty-seven major evacuations. More than fourteen thousand people displaced. And those are just the cases we know about. Behind each entry are unreported buildings, quiet conversations, and frightened residents told to keep calm and carry on.

What we’re seeing is the rise of a new housing emergency — one few in power are willing to name. We already had a shortage of homes and a system overwhelmed by temporary accommodation and homelessness. Now, add to that the homes that exist but can’t be lived in — flats standing empty not because people don’t want them, but because they’ve been declared unsafe.

We’ve spent years talking about “unlocking supply” and “building safety reform,” yet here we are locking up homes people have paid mortgages and rents on for years. It’s a crisis inside a crisis — a bureaucratic absurdity that would almost be darkly comic if it weren’t so tragic.

And it’s not as if the data hasn’t been visible. It’s there — in local news reports, resident posts, scattered press releases. What’s missing isn’t information; it’s interest. Policymakers show a deliberate lack of curiosity, and that indifference is its own kind of negligence. You can’t fix what you refuse to see.

Meanwhile, families live in limbo. They’re told to leave their homes at short notice, moved to hotels or temporary flats miles from their lives. Some have waited months, even years, for buildings to be repaired, rebuilt, or demolished. Every evacuation adds another layer of trauma.

And for those of us shouting about this — the Cassandras of housing safety — it’s hard not to ask how many more warnings it will take before someone finally listens.

The real question at the heart of this is not just how many homes have been evacuated, but how many haven’t. How many buildings are still out there with serious fire or structural risks that no one has acted on? How many more residents are sleeping tonight in homes that could be declared unsafe tomorrow?

Matt’s work makes one thing clear: this is not a historic crisis, it’s an ongoing one. The data doesn’t just look back — it warns of what’s still to come. For every evacuation notice issued, there are dozens of buildings waiting for inspection, hundreds of reports ignored, and thousands of residents hoping they’re not next.

If Cassandra were alive today, she’d have a spreadsheet and a Building Safety Register account. She’d be dismissed, told she was exaggerating, told to wait for the “official findings.” And she’d be right — just as she always was.

But today’s warnings aren’t divine. They’re measurable. They’re written in black and white. And still, we see the same reluctance to confront them — the same culture of delay, denial, and avoidance.

These buildings didn’t suddenly become unsafe; they always were. It just took a handful of people brave enough to demand answers, and a few like Matt determined enough to count the evidence, to make that visible.

So the question we should be asking isn’t how this happened again, but how many more are out there — unsafe, unacknowledged, and unaddressed. How many families are still waiting for someone, anyone, to finally believe what they’ve been saying all along?

It was only two or three years ago that we saw school ceilings collapsing because of RAAC concrete. The government promised that lessons would be learned, that safety would finally be prioritised. Yet here we are again — different buildings, same story. Unsafe homes. Unsafe schools. Unsafe promises.

I don’t know where we go from here. If anyone has the answers, put them in the comments, because this can’t carry on. A lot of people have made a lot of profit selling materials and products that were never fit for purpose. Those profits have come at a cost — one being paid every day in residents’ well-being, their security, and their ability to simply live safely. It should bring shame upon us all.

This week’s episode of the Housing Sector Podcast — When Homes Are Declared Unsafe — explores this further with Matt Hodges-Long, founder of the Building Safety Register. You can listen now on all major platforms and view the full post-Grenfell prohibition timeline at:

https://buildingsafetyregister.co.uk/evacuate-decant-or-prohibit