Council temporary accommodation spending up by £34m in a year – the biggest jump in a decade

Spending on temporary accommodation by a central London council has increased by £34million in a single year – the biggest jump in a decade, a Freedom of Information (FoI) request has shown.

Westminster City council spent a total of £95million on temporary accommodation during the 2023/24 financial year, a 55per cent rise from the previous year.

The council’s share of spend as a percentage of its full budget has also jumped from 0.07pc in 2022/23 to 0.11pc this last financial year – the largest increase since 2014, records show.

The council said that in the last year, 3,000 households applied as homeless, which it said represented a 35 per cent increase from the previous 12 months. The local authority added that the number of households in temporary accommodation has also increased by more than a quarter in the two years from April 2022, to 3,494.

The council has earmarked £178million to buy more properties that it can use as temporary accommodation in a bid to alleviate its reliance on third parties, such as hotels.

A council spokesman said: “The end of private rented tenancies and the inability to find alternative affordable accommodation, together with family breakdown and domestic violence are the most common reasons given by those seeking housing support. Where the council has accepted a housing duty it must provide homeless households with accommodation and consequently, demand for temporary accommodation continues to increase.”

The share of the council budget used to pay for temporary accommodation has also almost tripled since 2014/15 from 0.04pc to 0.11pc. The council said the increase has also been driven by the cost of accommodation.

The council said the properties they hire vary according to size, location and design with about 60 per cent of its temporary accommodation being outside the borough. Simone Strachan, London Service Lead at Shelter, a homelessness charity, said decades of failure to build enough social homes, coupled with runaway rents and rising evictions are causing homelessness to ‘spiral out of control’.

He said: “Councils are stuck between a rock and a hard place – without the funding to build social rent homes, they’re forced to sink eyewatering sums into temporary accommodation because there’s nowhere else for people to go.

“Too many children are homeless in grotty, cramped hotels and hostels, sharing beds with their siblings, with no place to play or do their homework.

“The only way to end homelessness for good is for the Government to build new social homes with rents tied to local incomes – we need 90,000 a year for 10 years.”

In March, the council promised to buy more properties to be used as temporary accommodation in two years than it had in the last decade.

At a Housing and Regeneration Policy and Scrutiny Committee meeting, Conservative Councillor David Harvey described the situation facing the local authority as ‘impossible’.

He said alongside the population increase in recent years, ‘we haven’t built houses. And so to an extent, I feel we are almost trying to put a sticking plaster over a bucket with a lot of holes in it’.

Pictured top: Westminster city council headquarters in Victoria Street (Picture: Google Street View)