A postgraduate’s study of people who live in cars and vans on Bristol’s streets says they make the choice to do so, in part, because of rising rents.

Ruth McAllister – the postgraduate student at the University of the West of England and a worker at a lettings agents rating website –  studied the so-called van dwellers in Bristol during 2018.

Now she claims that ‘urban vehicle dwelling’ is growing because housing has become unaffordable to many.

McAllister claims rents in Bristol had “skyrocketed” and that, along with “a mix of poor quality private rented accommodation, insecure short-term leases, inaccessible social housing and a rental market that they believed favoured unresponsive landlords over tenants” led them to self-provide their own housing by living in a van.

McAllister, who interviewed 13 van dwellers, says Bristol council is one of the first local authorities in the UK to develop a strategy for lived-in vehicles on roads. She says it has proposed that lived-in vehicles will be assessed taking welfare needs into account.