By Keith Cooper, investigative housing journalist

With depressing predictability, the number of child deaths linked to temporary accommodation has risen again. Recently released figures reveal that 74 child deaths in the past five years can be linked to temporary accommodation. Last year, it was 55 child deaths between 2019 and 2023. The year before that 34 until 2022. Most of these children are in fact under one – babies, as we say outside of officialdom.

An unsurprising prediction for 2025 is that child deaths tied to the often-crap and expensive housing we call temporary accommodation will rise once again. The (NCMD) National Child Mortality Database, which works out these figures, has found that 80 children and babies who died in 2024 were in temporary accommodation. More intricate analysis will show how closely their housing conditions relate to their deaths.

But what is already well known is that babies die for want of a safe place to sleep. In 2020, the NCMD identified a “strong link” between SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome) and sleeping arrangements. It found that, in 2020, more than half (52%) of 124 unexplained deaths of sleeping infants had occurred when their sleeping surface was shared with an adult or older sibling, as is too often the case in temporary accommodation.

Deputy prime minister Angela Rayner described the child death figures for 2024 as “truly shocking”, admits families are “failed by the very system there to protect them” and has promised to “turn the tide and homelessness once and for all”. She points to the nearly £1bn her government has put up to prevent homelessness and provide “safe, secure and stable housing”.

The funding boost will surely be welcomed by councils as they struggle to pay multi-billion-pound bills to house homeless families. But it will do little to prevent a further escalation in the number of child deaths.

For starters, the law is still stacked against homeless families with babies and infants. As we said back in 2023, our outdated housing legislation says “no account” should be taken of “children under the age one” (that official name for babies again) in the “space standards” that determine the suitability of temporary accommodation. This legal absurdity allows parents with babies to be rehoused in tiny rooms without enough space for a cot.

In early 2024, after the first rise in child death figures, the then government issued a half-hearted update to homelessness guidance, asking councils to “consider” offering cots to children under two. Does the latest awful statistic of 80 child deaths in temporary accommodation suggest this measure has worked?

No. Of course not and nobody should be surprised.

Despite the link between SIDS and shared sleeping arrangement has been established, there are still no legal protections to prevent this from happening in temporary accommodation.

Instead, we’ve a rock-solid law, preventing councils from providing rooms for babies, paper-thin non-statutory guidance asking councils to provide cots, and a seemingly endless supply of wholly inadequate temporary accommodation for an ever-increasing population of children, infants, and babies that need it.

There is a simple and potentially short-term solution to this acute problem of babies with unsafe sleeping arrangements in temporary accommodation. We’ve said it once, let’s say it again: we need a legally-binding requirement on local authorities to provide families with suitably safe accommodation, cots for their babies and funding to do it.

Without this kind of immediate measure, the number of child deaths in temporary accommodation can only continue to rise. And in 2026, who knows? Like damp, mould, and flammable cladding before them, what were once “heart-breaking” indictments of housing conditions in England may even soon lose their power to shock.