165,000 reasons for Modular
Recently, I had the pleasure of listening to Nick Kilby, Executive Chairman of Cratus, reminiscing about Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, the film based upon Ian Fleming’s only foray into children’s literature.
This was not a reference to Elon Musk’s recent flying car venture but part of his opening speech for the snappily titled, “Local Authority Toolkit for Relocatable Temporary Accommodation on Meanwhile Use Land” published by The Housing Festival and Building Better: Community of Practice. Those gathered at the launch, local authorities, housing associations, builders, lawyers, and funders are all convinced that rolling out modular alongside the Government’s Social & Affordable Housing Programme would start to tackle the housing crisis head-on.
The growing use of temporary housing, sometimes not that temporary, has moved beyond ‘Crisis’ to national scandal and tragedy. Even since 165,000 reasons, the campaign for children to have permanent homes, was established the number of children in these circumstances has risen above 176,000. Much temporary accommodation is of poor standard, with families living in single rooms, sharing bathrooms and kitchens with complete strangers. The Shared Health Foundation has highlighted the growing number of deaths in such housing. Their research found that between 2019 and 2025 104 children died with ‘living in temporary accommodation’ cited as a contributary factor, 76 were babies under the age ofone. Between October 2023 and September 2025 140 children have died while living in temporary accommodation. These deaths are one tragic indicator of the devastation caused by the housing crisis which spreads more widely into health and educational outcomes.
This crisis is also draining £3bn from council budgets.
The toolkit aims to equip local authorities with the technical, legal, planning, and financial means to provide modular homes on their land. Providing new, high quality homes for people in temporary homes. It is possible to do this at little or no cost to the local authority; their contribution is the land. Many local authorities own usable land hiding in plain sight. In Bristol they have identified, infill sites, land left over from transport schemes (sometimes never completed), underused car parks, ex industrial sites, and others, potentially hundreds, even thousands of plots. Some can be developed on a meanwhile basis, with moveable housing, others permanently. One of the first projects in Bristol was with Zedpods building homes over a carpark without losing any parking spaces.
At Elim Housing, now fully incorporated into Places for People, we took on homes built, ironically, in the gaps between post-war prefabs left when some of them were dismantled. Also in Bristol, Places for People has also built extensions to existing homelessness projects, in one case using our own in-house factory builder, Modularwise.
Modular is not necessarily cheaper then traditionally built homes, but it is quicker to build, is guaranteed to last as long and can be deployed in sites where it is not possible to viably build brick and block homes.
Importantly, modular can be funded privately without requiring Council, Homes England, or GLA capital, providing real additionality to social housing programmes. Councils in crisis are buying up homes to provide TA or even removing housing from their permanent social housing provision both solving and exasperating the temporary housing pressures at the same time. Only the development of modular homes, using the guidance in this toolkit, will provide true additionality to the number of homes available. If the TA crisis in solved those modular homes could then be added to the social housing stock.
You can learn more about the 165,000 Reasons campaign here: 165,000reasons.co.uk
