Temporary accommodation is the sharp end of England’s housing crisis. Official data shows that there are now more than 117,000 households in this unenviable situation— an increase of 23 per cent in the past three years—including 151,000 children under the age of 16. Together, they could occupy every home in Cambridge.
For years, this phenomenon has been a stain on British politics—but in the past decade it has become much worse. The number of households living in temporary accommodation has been rising, more or less, since 2010, but since 2014, the rate has steadily increased almost every quarter. Over the past three years, the number of households placed in hotels or B&Bs has risen by 74 per cent nationally. The UK has more people living in stop-gap housing than any other nation in the OECD.
Households facing homelessness can be placed in temporary accommodation, funded by their local council, until a long-term home is found. They might be offered a flat, house, shared house, B&B, bedsit or hotel. Ideally, households are relocated close to school, work and family, but in recent years the number placed further from home has reached record levels. Compared with three years ago, 10,000 more households are in temporary accommodation outside of their borough.
As councils across England struggle with underfunding and a trend of real-terms budget cuts, many are buckling under the pressure of sourcing accommodation. The housing crisis makes the problem only more acute, because the pool of available housing has dried up. Greater London, where local authorities spend £1bn every 12 months placing people facing homelessness in temporary accommodation, was once disproportionately affected. These ballooning costs are seriously threatening the ability of many to function. But now the phenomenon is growing at a faster rate outside the capital.
Through a series of Freedom of Information (FOI) requests, I have found that local authorities across England are now paying millions of pounds to hoteliers to keep up with the demand for temporary accommodation. In the absence of a joined-up, national approach to tackling homelessness, an absurd scenario has also developed, in which local authorities essentially trade residents who need temporary accommodation.
Across the country, temporary accommodation is far from temporary. The statutory legal limit that households with children are allowed to stay in temporary accommodation in hotels or B&Bs is six weeks. But as the number of people living in this precarious way has risen, so has the duration of the average stay. In 2024, for the first time, more than 5,000 households with children were placed in hotels by their local authority—and some families are languishing for months, even years. I can reveal that some households have been in temporary accommodation for more than a decade.
The trend is becoming only more dystopian—and the consequences for people in temporary accommodation, some of the country’s most vulnerable residents, are severe.
For years, councils have relied on private rental properties to temporarily house families. Local authorities receive a subsidy from central government to help pay for placing people in stop-gap housing—and for landlords whose properties were too poor quality to compete in the private market it was good business to rent to local authorities instead. But since 2011, the rate of this subsidy has remained static, set at 90 per cent of the 2011 local housing allowance (the amount of housing benefit available to households renting privately; the rate varies from council to council). If rents or a B&B or hotel stay cost more—which increasingly they do—the council must make up the difference.
For a two-bedroom property in London’s most disadvantaged local authority, Barking and Dagenham, where I am an elected councillor, the authority receives £176.47 a week for every two-bedroom temporary accommodation property. The council would be entitled to £258.90, an additional £82.43 a week for every household, if the government had increased the subsidy alongside the increase of local housing allowance since 2011, taking into account rising private rents. Instead, councils are struggling to cover the shortfall. The town of Eastbourne, with a population of just over 100,000, spent £5m on temporary accommodation in this year alone, according to council leader Stephen Holt. It had to ask Whitehall for additional financial assistance to cope, as has the east London borough of Newham.
For hotel chains including Travelodge and Premier Inn, temporary accommodation has opened up a new line of business
Frozen subsidy rates and squeezed council finances–as well as rising private rents—mean that landlords are now converting their properties into more lucrative houses of multiple occupancy, where they can cram in numerous tenants all sharing kitchens and bathrooms and paying rent separately. In a seller’s market, some are simply supplying their accommodation to the highest bidder—which is rarely, if ever, a council. With many landlords now exiting the temporary accommodation market for more profitable alternatives, there is a shortage of places for households facing homelessness. In Barking and Dagenham, the number of private landlords housing residents in such accommodation has fallen from 1,400 in 2018 to 578 in 2024, according to official figures.
Meanwhile, authorities are routinely gazumped by neighbouring councils as they struggle to secure temporary accommodation for residents, often with very little notice. The subsidy that Westminster City council receives for a two-bedroom property is £412.86 a week: more than double Barking and Dagenham’s entitlement. What this means is that Westminster can afford to place households in pricier accommodation.
This has created a slew of negative outcomes—from councils relying on expensive hotels to councils essentially exchanging some of England’s most vulnerable residents.
For hotel chains including Travelodge and Premier Inn, temporary accommodation has opened up a new line of business. Greenwich’s local authority spent £8.8m on Travelodge hotels in 2023–24, placing more than 700 households, according to my FOI requests. Kensington and Chelsea spent £3.5m on Travelodge over the same period. Ealing has supported 407 households in Travelodge hotels, while Barnet has placed 300. Data for the total spend at these councils was unavailable.
Outside London, it is also a growing concern. FOIs reveal that Derby had 143 households in Travelodge sites and 133 in Premier Inn in 2023–24. Leicester City council spent £5m on Travelodge, Premier Inn and Holiday Inn, placing more than 600 households in their hotels that year.
Representatives from two local authorities told me that they were booking nightly stays directly with hotels or on sites such as Booking.com. This means that councils are paying the same price as members of the public, and that price comparison websites are also profiting from rising homelessness. Westminster City council spent £25.7m on temporary accommodation with Eventay in 2023-24, a company that provides venue and accommodation sourcing services, according to another FOI request
Reliance on hotel chains means that accommodation is not always available for households in crisis. When Leicester hosted Radio 2’s three-day Party in the Park concert in September 2023, all of the city’s hotels were fully booked. As a result, one household was sent to a hotel in Derbyshire, more than two hours away on public transport, for the three nights of the event.
Anthony Okereke, the leader of Greenwich council, has been trying to convene hoteliers to discuss how they can coordinate better with the authority. Okereke tells me that Greenwich wants to work with hotels to provide the residents placed in their premises with services, but “it is like swimming against the tide… Multinational companies have no interest in engaging with individual authorities: we need a London-wide approach”.
In Greenwich, the authority has set aside £185,000 to help households in hotels to purchase food, because they don’t have the facilities to cook while staying there. The council has also put funds towards helping households with internet access and has co-produced a booklet with migrant women that sets out the entitlements of households in temporary accommodation. “The least we can do is make people’s stays tolerable,” Okereke tells me.
Moving into temporary accommodation can be incredibly disruptive. The advantage of placing households in hotels, Okereke explains, is that residents are usually able to continue living locally. This is crucial for households in complex situations, such as those whose children have special educational needs. And yet, over the past three years, the proportion of households with children living in hotels for longer than the statutory maximum of six weeks has increased. This is a trend in every region across England.
A spokesperson for Intercontinental Hotels Group, of which Holiday Inn is a part, said it was “unable to share any comment as all bookings are confidential.”
Travelodge said in a statement that it recognises “the pressure local authorities are under and how difficult this is for them and for the people who desperately need a home. Like many other hotel providers, Travelodge works with local authorities to support them with their temporary accommodation needs. We carefully manage these bookings and hold regular meetings with councils to ensure these are handled appropriately, as our hotels are not a long-term solution”.
Across England, while some families stay in temporary accommodation for a few days before entering a more permanent arrangement, other stays can stretch to about a decade.
In Hackney, one person has been in a hotel for 2,929 days—and remains there—according to an FOI request. Hackney council acknowledged in an email that the situation is “not ideal”. In the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, one household has been living in a hotel for six years and eight months, or 2,400 days. In Barnet, another household has lived in a hotel for 2,058 days.
In London in 2021–22, fewer than two in 10 families were in hotels for longer than the six-week statutory maximum; by 2023–24 that figure had increased to more than seven in 10. Households outside the hotel sector are languishing, too. In the 50 authorities with the highest levels of temporary accommodation in England, nearly 14,000 households have been in temporary accommodation for more than five years, according to an FOI request. In London, that’s equivalent to one in five of the households in temporary accommodation.
One household in London placed in temporary accommodation in 2000 is still there. In Dartford, Kent, another has been in temporary accommodation since 2009. In Birmingham, one household has been in stop-gap housing since at least 2011, though the authority doesn’t hold information predating that year. In Manchester, the longest a household has been in such accommodation is nine years.
Demand is growing for time limits on stays in temporary accommodation to be enshrined in legislation, to prevent households being stuck in the system. But, with crises in housing and council funding, the number of households in hotels for longer than the statutory limit continues to rise. Legislation alone is clearly not enough to reverse the trend.
Imagine living for months, even years, in temporary accommodation, where pets are banned, you have to wash your clothes in communal areas, you might have no cooking facilities and your belongings are locked up in storage. Council-owned temporary accommodation—sometimes in buildings converted from previous use, such as office blocks—is often dated and colourless, with the feel of a hospital or an army base. In one English local authority, officers have an affectionate nickname for the site they use for temporary accommodation. It starts with “HMP”, after His Majesty’s Prison Service.
Temporary accommodation can be a refuge, whether from the cost of private tenancies, domestic abuse or from something else entirely. Hallways become sites of shared experience, strangers become friends. There is a sense of community. But this does not make up for the lack of certainty and routine, or the denial of agency and dignity over a person’s life, that comes with not having a stable home.
In the language of officialdom, many of these households are not living in “separate, self-contained units”. They have no access to a kitchen or washing machines of their own. Those staying in hotels tend to have their own toilets and showers, but that is not the case in other kinds of temporary housing. And households are impacted by the lifestyles of others—sometimes very different to their own—with whom they share facilities. I visited one site where children were living, and the smell of cannabis in one corridor was overpowering. Many residents in temporary accommodation require support with substance or alcohol misuse. As many as 38 per cent of households living in such accommodation are classed as vulnerable.
Abul Uddin*, an Uber driver, spent more than 12 months living in a hotel, following three separate stints at two Travelodge sites. He told me that he hadn’t been able to cook a meal in over a year because he had no cooking facilities. The hotels had rejected his request for access to their kitchens.
Uddin’s story reflects the chaotic nature of the system in which he is trapped. His wife suffers from epilepsy and has had several seizures while in hotel accommodation. His elderly mother-in-law has been placed in temporary accommodation with them. The NHS had said that the accommodation was causing his wife’s health to deteriorate and he instructed solicitors to issue a legal notice against Waltham Forest, his local authority, accusing it of not meeting its obligations under the Equality Act. “I am dying,” he said of the experience.
After Uddin complained to the council in July of this year, Waltham Forest conceded that the accommodation was indeed not suitable, but the authority could not confirm when something suitable would become available.
Uddin is not the only person placed by Waltham Forest in that hotel. In 2023–24, the authority spent £940,000 housing another 101 households at the same premises, according an FoI request. At the time of writing, Uddin had been moved again, this time to a house which he describes as “definitely better” but still not suitable for his disabled wife. “We accepted it because if we didn’t, they would leave us in the hotel for much longer.”
In response, Ahsan Khan, the deputy leader of Waltham Forest council, said that: “The suitability of temporary accommodation is laid out under UK law, to which we adhere... Every offer of temporary accommodation is made in line with our publicly available policy. When we are made aware of potential issues in temporary accommodation we have arranged, we will do what we can to resolve them and ensure that households who are homeless have a safe and secure place to stay.”
In a statement, Travelodge said that: “There may be occasions when a guest is placed with us for a longer period. This can happen when an agreed alternative solution hasn’t been found. We recognise this can put both the guest and us in a difficult position but meets an ongoing need for someone who may not otherwise have accommodation. Travelodge’s focus is on ensuring all of our customers have a high-quality experience across our hotels and we recognise that a hotel room is not a substitute for a home.”
It would be difficult to design a system more complex than the current temporary accommodation regime: authorities place households wherever they can afford to, but with subsidies frozen since 2011, local authorities are increasingly placing households in more disadvantaged areas where rent is cheaper.
This has led to absurd, and often cruel, outcomes. For instance, from April to June 2023, the London borough of Haringey placed 260 households in temporary accommodation outside its area of responsibility, while at the same time 232 households from 15 authorities, principally across London, were placed in temporary accommodation inside Haringey. Croydon has experienced similar, with 420 households placed inside the authority by 16 other local councils.
Local authorities are increasingly placing households in disadvantaged areas, where rent is cheaper
This scenario breeds further injustice. Not only are people who already face hardship often moved away from lives they have built up over years, they are frequently placed in disadvantaged areas where employment prospects tend to be poorer and where public services struggle to meet demand. I can reveal details of this for the first time. For example, over the same three-month period, only eight households were placed in the wealthy borough of Kensington and Chelsea, but the authority placed 194 outside its local area. Meanwhile, leafy Richmond placed 121 households outside its local area, but only 18 were placed there.
Loretta Lees, a professor of sociology at the University of Boston, and the former chair of the mayor of London’s housing panel, has accused local authorities of “erasing, socially cleansing and hiding the poor, marginalised and homeless”. But this is less the fault of individual authorities, and more a structural flaw, an unintended consequence of a poor housing and homelessness policy.
The Supreme Court has taken a dim view on authorities placing households outside their boundaries. The 2015 case of Nzolameso v City of Westminster (then a Conservative-run council) is a pertinent example. Authorities have a statutory responsibility to provide accommodation in their own area “so far as reasonably practicable” under the terms of the Housing Act (1996). Nzolameso was a 51-year-old single mother of five children under the age of 16. She was HIV positive and suffered from diabetes and hypertension. When Nzolameso’s private landlord kicked her out, she and her family moved into two rooms in a hotel in Kensington and Chelsea before being offered a permanent property in Bletchley, some 50 miles away. Nzolameso rejected the offer because of the distance. She relied on her support network to look after her children. She also wanted to remain with her GP, and did not want to pull her children out of their school.
Under current legislation, because Nzolameso had rejected the offer, Westminster was no longer responsible for providing her with accommodation. With few options available to her, Nzolameso’s children were placed in three different foster settings. It was not until the case was brought to the Supreme Court that the ruling was reversed. In fact, the court observed that Westminster provided no evidence that it had procured accommodation in line with the Housing Act.
In another case, a teenager with autism was days away from homelessness because Devon County Council failed to decide where he should live when he became 18 (the point at which the teenager needed to move into a residential facility for adults which offered the live-in care he required). Devon offered the young man a placement 40 miles away from his mother, who did not drive, and, according to the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman’s ruling, the authority expected the teenager to “make his own way to school, unsupported” despite his additional needs. The teenager missed half a term of education before Devon put travel arrangements in place. The episode had “a major impact on his mental health” and “led him to be at significant risk of self-harm”.
Authorities are failing to meet these obligations for reasons that are well documented: significant under-resourcing, increasing demand, more complex cases and a struggling housing market. All of these are outside the control of a local council. Even in cases where councils do seek solutions, those solutions are often inadequate. Without addressing the root causes of the housing crisis, there can be no real long-term answer.
Some authorities have attempted to reduce the distance at which they place households in temporary accommodation, with varying success. Tower Hamlets has paused the creation of new “zones” outside its boundaries marking the maximum distance that it will place households, after significant backlash. Critics raised concerns that the proposal risked creating a punitive policy, akin to differentiating between “worthy” and “unworthy” households.
Under statutory guidance, local authorities are meant to keep households within their local area for temporary accommodation wherever possible. But this is routinely ignored because of cost. Many authorities block-book accommodation, placing households in cheap lodgings, regardless of whether it suits their individual circumstances. In 2015, Tower Hamlets placed 71 households at Vantage House, a converted office block on an industrial site in Merton, more than an hour away from the east London borough on public transport.
This picture is complicated further by the asylum system. While asylum claims are processed, the Home Office places claimants into accommodation without coordinating with local councils. After claims are processed, asylum seekers lose their Home Office accommodation at short notice; at that point, with nowhere to live, they seek housing support from the local authority where they were placed. It is that authority which then picks up the bill for housing refugees. Under successive Conservative governments, the Home Office dispersed asylum seekers across the country, with little consideration for rates of homelessness or households in temporary accommodation in a given area. This approach has made it more difficult for authorities to manage demand.
The far right has made this a flashpoint. In August, as anti-immigrant riots spread across the UK, rioters mobbed a hotel in Rotherham which they believed was housing asylum seekers and tried to set fire to the building. On social media, the wife of one Northamptonshire Conservative councillor called for fire to be set “on all the fucking hotels full of the bastards”. She has since been sentenced to prison for stirring up racial hatred.
Under years of Conservative austerity, homelessness in Britain rose steeply. Today, households have limited means to protect themselves from this hardship. Local authorities, meanwhile, have few levers to pull.
Locally, campaigners are organising to make life better for people who end up in temporary accommodation—and authorities are becoming more aware of the serious health and educational costs of a life in temporary accommodation. In Camden, for instance, campaigners supported by a local charity, Doorstep, secured a concession from the local authority to provide temporary accommodation sites with wifi (though Camden still hasn’t delivered on that promise, 12 months on). Lewisham is also exploring how it can provide wifi through private sector partnership.
Doorstep’s chief executive, Vicky Fox, told me that the households supported by her charity are being “penalised for a lack of understanding” over their statutory rights and the requirements placed on them. Support has moved online since the pandemic, making it even harder to get help. Fox wants local authorities to provide more support to families where English is their second language, and she wants to see caseworkers visiting households in temporary accommodation in person.
Labour has promised that growth will improve lives for ordinary people. Aside from boosting the economy, the government’s goal of building 1.5m homes over the next five years is intended to provide an opportunity—through supply-side reform—to prevent more households facing homelessness and ending up in temporary accommodation. More homes will, eventually, provide an exit route for households in this precarious position, but that will not happen in this parliament.
Much of the interest in housebuilding has coalesced around economics. New homes, the government and economists insist, are key to “growth, growth, growth”. The moral case for housebuilding has been underdiscussed by comparison, despite adequate housing being recognised in international law as an essential human right. Housebuilding should be “measured in problems solved” as well as homes built, as Bill Payne, the former chief executive of Metropolitan Thames Valley, a housing association with roots in building homes for Afro-Caribbean communities in the 1950s, said in 2011.
While people in temporary accommodation languish on waiting lists for new properties, the bill for local councils is skyrocketing—and some households are spending years in inadequate homes, often far from their communities, work, school, friends and family. Sarah Smith*, placed in temporary accommodation in Woolwich by Tower Hamlets more than seven years ago, is tired of waiting.
“All I do at the minute is cry,” she tells me, recounting the bus and three London Underground trains she takes every morning to get her son to school—a two-hour round trip. “It’s like I’ve been forgotten.”
*Names have been changed
