Bill for homeless accommodation soars to £1.2 billion

The Government has released figures showing that local councils in England spent £1.2 billion on temporary accommodation for homeless households in 2019/20, with most of the money going to private landlords.

According to analysis carried out by the campaigning charity Shelter, this level of spending has increased by nine per cent in the last year and by 55 per cent in the last five years.

Of the total spent on temporary accommodation by councils in England last year, 87 per cent of it went to private landlords, letting agents or companies. The amount of money paid to these private accommodation providers has increased by 66 per cent in the last five years from £621 million in 2014/15 to £1 billion in 2019/20.

More than a third (38 per cent, or £393 million) of the money paid to private accommodation providers was spent on emergency Bed & Breakfast hotels.

Meaning that spending on emergency B&Bs has increased by a staggering 73 per cent in the last five years.

This is despite B&Bs are widely considered to be some of the least suitable places for families with children to live. This is because they involve having to share facilities (bathrooms and kitchens) with other families and often the whole family will have to sleep in one room. There is a six-week legal limit on families being placed in B&Bs but this is frequently exceeded due to a lack of move-on accommodation.

At the end of March 2020 there were a total of 93,000 households living in temporary accommodation in England.

Polly Neate, chief executive of Shelter, said:

“It is outrageous that almost £1.2 billion a year is being spent on often shoddy and expensive temporary accommodation because of a lack of social homes. It’s a false economy for taxpayers’ money to be used to pay private landlords for grotty emergency B&Bs, which can be so terrible to live in that families end up deeply traumatised.

“The decades of failure to build social homes means too many people on lower incomes are stuck in unstable private rentals – increasing their chances of becoming homeless. This cycle of destitution persists when those who lose their homes turn to the council for help, because councils have so little social housing left that they can’t alleviate their homelessness for good. All they can do is pay over the odds for insecure temporary accommodation.

“If the Government fails to act on this crisis, the economic chaos of the pandemic is only going to make what is already an awful situation worse, as even more people are forced into homelessness. The Government must commit now to spending ‘smarter’ with a rescue package for social homes. By investing £12 billion over the next two years, we could build an extra 144,000 lower-cost homes, including 50,000 desperately needed social homes.”

By Patrick Mooney, Editor