And if there are none, locally? Would you chuck her out of her current home and into temporary accommodation in a Travelodge, to make way for a family currently in a Travelodge, given the shortage of available social housing of any size? Do you think that should happen? Or maybe move her to the other end of the country to a cheaper area, to make way for a family in her area, because then you’re only moving one person hundreds of miles from their support networks and wider family, rather than an entire family (albeit pissing off everyone in the cheaper part of the country, because their councils can’t outbid wealthier councils scores or hundreds of miles away for accommodation for their own homeless population)? Would you like to see how badly people can behave, or how mentally ill they can become, and how little they can care for the community around them when they feel they have no security, few rights, no sense of belonging to the community, and no respect, because you would likely be increasing the number of such people if you took protections away from those who had finally made it to the top of the waiting lists and been allocated somewhere, and continued to gouge away at many people’s most fundamental desire (to have a home where they feel they belong and feel safe and secure)? Fear of losing your home has a massive effect on behaviour, so unnatural behaviours, lies and manipulations would increase, just so that people can maintain their sense of security and stay in their safe space. And this is not to mention how expensive it would in reality be to councils to keep moving tenants in and out of properties as they juggle changing needs and availability - moving people around is never actually cheap, it costs a lot of money to move people around.
There are no simple answers when houses are investments, not just (or not even) homes - even in the private sector, many wealthy, elderly homeowners of large homes can’t sell their large homes to families at the moment, even when they want to, because families can’t afford them, and in any event they often can’t find places to downsize to, because the families are squeezing themselves into the smaller properties they can afford to maintain, or separated families are buying them up, or people bought them as investment properties. The next big thing will be former private family homes being converted into cramped HMOs, except then wealthy homeowners will complain about disaffected people being moved into their neighbourhoods and changing the character of the area, and having children will become ever less appealing as family-sized homes remain an unaffordable commodity even if councils are playing accommodation chess. Currently, there is a lot of underused or empty accommodation around the country, due to properties’ use as investment (between 100,000 and 300,000 properties in London, for example), holiday homes, holiday lets, inheritances, etc, so the problem is not just lack of space, it’s also the collision of market forces with fundamental needs in which the majority of people in this country are now the loser, because we all suffer when our sense of community is disrupted and large numbers of people struggle to afford to pay for a home to live in. Pretending it’s simple is what political parties do when in opposition. Reality is infinitely more complex and every “solution” tried to date is just the creation of more problems, as social need butts up against the marketplace, with each destabilised by the requirements of the other.
I’m therefore on the fence on this one. I think she should ideally move if there is somewhere smaller and appropriate to move to, but can also see why the whole thing is really not as simple as we would like it to be.