Newham is the London borough with the most households living in temporary accommodation, with the wider city facing a £740m shortfall for covering these costs.
London boroughs spend the equivalent of 11% of every household’s council tax bill on temporary accommodation alone, a report produced by researchers at the London School of Economics (LSE) has found.
Councils have a legal obligation to provide temporary accommodation to homeless households, meaning that they can do little to cap their spending without wide-reaching government intervention, councillors have said.
London Councils has said this new data shows that the city’s homelessness system is ‘broken’.
LSE’s report found that Newham is the London borough providing temporary accommodation to the most households – 6,980 as of March this year.
Newham is followed by Westminster (4,254) with the second-most and Southwark (4,208) with the third-most families in temporary housing.
51% of the temporary accommodation used in Newham was paid for on a nightly basis – the most expensive way of providing this housing.
Councils use their own housing stock when possible but often rely on private rental properties, which are most commonly paid for night-by-night – researchers say this results in poor value for money and bad conditions for households.
On average, London boroughs use nightly-paid housing for 44% of temporary accommodation.
Amanda Dubarry, chief executive of East London homelessness charity Your Place, said Newham’s reliance on temporary accommodation is draining resources for other work around the prevention and management of homelessness in the borough.
“It’s absolutely critical that we try to re-engineer the current arrangements so that there’s fewer people going into temporary accommodation and people are staying for much shorter periods in temporary accommodation when they are there,” she told the Londoners.
Bexley is the borough with the least households in temporary accommodation (387), which is 94% fewer than Newham.
Maurice Lange, analyst at think tank Centre for Cities, believes the government should adopt a more city-wide approach to homelessness in London, rather than leaving boroughs to rely on their own funds and housing stock.
The city could be split into four large jurisdictions in which all temporary accommodation funding and housing stock is pooled, rather than the existing borough system.
He said: “We need to build way more social housing in and around London and find a way of prioritizing people for that social housing in a sensible, pragmatic way.”
The government gives subsidies to local councils to contribute to the housing benefit claimed by those who cannot pay their rent, but researchers have warned that this subsidy does not meet councils’ outgoings.
Lange said: “Central government is not subsidising the housing benefit enough to fix the problem, and they’re not giving enough money to social housing to fix the problem, and so local government is then in a really sticky situation.”
Following the report, London Councils have called on the government to increase the housing benefit subsidy for temporary accommodation and provide more funding for councils to build social housing.
Newham Council have been contacted for comment.
Featured image credit: sludgegulper via Wikimedia Commons
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