London is getting homeless families out of hotels – but the crisis is far from over
Councils in the capital have managed to vastly reduce the number of families in hotels and B&Bs, but is this really a win in the battle against homelessness?
“I still feel traumatised from it to be honest. In my time of need, after working all my life, I felt like I was nothing.”
Jessica*, a single mum from Waltham Forest in north-east London, was made homeless in January after fleeing domestic violence. For seven weeks, she lived in temporary accommodation with her children in a hotel in neighbouring Newham.
The over-reliance on temporary accommodation is a key symptom of the child poverty crisis in the UK. According to new quarterly figures released just last week [October 16], more than 172,000 children were trapped in temporary accommodation at the end of June this year. This is an 8.2 per cent rise on the same period last year and marks the tenth consecutive new record level.
Jessica remembers how living in the tiny room with two single beds turned her family’s life upside down, leaving her unable to cook, work effectively or even have a proper shower. “My three-year-old couldn’t sleep, my 19-year-old went off the rails and couldn’t handle the situation,” she tells The Lead.
She was relocated by Waltham Forest Council to a more suitable flat seven weeks later. Hotels and B&Bs are widely considered the least suitable form of temporary accommodation for families, due to the lack of privacy and access to vital facilities needed to live a normal life. This is why councils across London have been trying to reduce this deeply damaging practice that is also financially crippling local authorities in the context of record high demand for homelessness services.
So far, the results have been positive – in the last year, the number of families placed in hotels and B&Bs in London has almost halved. Instead they are being given more suitable temporary options like self-contained flats owned by private companies or housing associations.
But is this actually a rare win in tackling the crises of homelessness and child poverty? The Lead spoke to councils, homeless families and housing campaigners and discovered it’s really not that simple.
How London councils got families out of hotels
A total of 11 London councils received small pots of funding from the government to pilot ways of getting families out of hotels and B&Bs through the Emergency Accommodation Reduct Pilot [EARP] scheme which was launched in January 2025.
One of these is Greenwich, which in the last 18 months has managed to reduce the number of families in hotel rooms to zero from a peak of nearly 300.
Shaun Flook, Greenwich’s Assistant Director of Housing Needs and Tenancy, told The Lead how the council set up a board to tackle this crisis in September 2023, with hundreds of families in unsuitable conditions and the council facing bankruptcy.
“What that board did was galvanise the whole council to come together on the homeless and temporary accommodation crisis,” Flook says.
The solutions that ended up making a difference were purchasing new temporary accommodation with the help of government grants, offering council homes to people who had been in temporary accommodation for long periods to free up more suitable self-contained alternatives to hotels, and working with landlords to find long-term tenancies.
“We’re also trying to make people’s lives easier,” says Flook, pointing to work with community organisation Creating Ground supporting people with storage and internet access. He adds that funding from the EARP scheme has been used to boost this work, leading to more welfare visits and supporting people with employment and bidding for permanent housing or accessing private tenancies.
Despite the progress, Flook says too many people are still in other temporary accommodation with shared facilities. He says it is “completely impossible” to place all of Greenwich’s 2,000 homeless households within the borough, but there are plans to reduce the number being sent out of area.
In the longer term, Flook says firefighting will move towards more early intervention and prevention, with ideas being explored through the London Ending Homelessness Accelerator Programme.
Other boroughs that have managed to drastically reduce families in hotels and B&Bs were Tower Hamlets, Ealing, Hillingdon, Waltham Forest, Enfield, and Redbridge.
Hillingdon went from 43 in March 2024 to zero, just a year later. There are currently 1,500 households in temporary accommodation in Hillingdon, which the council says is stretching its finances “to the absolute brink.” The authority has worked hard to move families out of shared accommodation, by building better relationships with private landlords with a landlord conference, acquiring new council-owned properties and working with the MoD to bring empty former military homes back into use.
Hillingdon council has used EARP funding to recruit additional officers to enable households to move out temporary accommodation, to transfer households from shared accommodation into self-contained accommodation, and identify units that aren’t being occupied.
Tower Hamlets is another council that has reduced the number of families in hotels and B&Bs down to near zero from 165 as of March 2024. The council said that instead of hotels, families are placed into self-contained homes, due to dedicated efforts to procure more temporary and private rented accommodation. The authority added that funding from the EARP scheme had enabled them to improve oversight with better data, strengthen placement governance, and expand access to self-contained and private rented accommodation.
Out of the hotel, but where next?
While fewer families are in hotels, the alternatives are not always much better, as Shaun Flook of Greenwich council has already alluded to.
Jessica and her family were moved out of the hotel room into a two-bed flat on the edge of her home borough of Waltham Forest. As recommended by local mental health services, this was self-contained accommodation near her support networks. Despite now being in more suitable accommodation than the hotel room, she is worried about health hazards in the property that she feels is a risk for her young daughter.
“You’re so scared to complain because you don’t want to go back to the hotel – to somewhere even worse – so I have to grin and bear it,” she says.
Jessica has been supported by the London Renter’s Union [LRU], and her experience is echoed by fellow members. LRU campaigner Jae Vail tells The Lead: “With temporary accommodation, we often see people in really cramped and unsafe conditions, whole families in bedsits, it’s not just people who are unemployed.”
Vail describes families being moved out of hotels in cramped, mouldy flats, people being stuck in temporary accommodation for years, being constantly moved from one place to another at short notice, and councils offering people homes outside of London, as previously reported by The Lead. He also said LRU members are living in tower blocks earmarked for demolition, which means very little is being done to improve the poor living conditions, such as Millford Towers in Lewisham and Woodberry Down Estate in Hackney.
“What we hear, time and time again, is that if you’re being offered unsuitable accommodation, you kind of have to accept it because otherwise you can get put down as ‘intentional homelessness’, where the council will not provide any further support,” Vail says. “The private providers are profiting from the system, it’s just a tremendous waste of public money.”
What makes this even more concerning is that a large majority of families in temporary accommodation include children. According to a report last year, 58 per cent of families had stayed for two years or more in temporary accommodation, and 20,430 households in London had been stuck for more than five years. Research from the London Assembly in 2023 noted that families in temporary accommodation in London are more likely than elsewhere to face infestations (42 per cent in London vs 27 per cent outside), heating problems (35 per cent vs 23 percent), and twice as likely to experience problems with access to running water.
As noted in a recent report by the New Economics Foundation, more than half of the children in temporary accommodation miss school days due to housing instability, while poor conditions such as damp, mould, and overcrowding directly affect their physical and mental health.
Mairi MacRae, director of campaigns and policy at Shelter, shares similar concerns: “While numbers have gone down for homeless families stuck in B&Bs in the capital, more are being moved miles away from their home area and communities.
“Many are simply crammed into other grim one-room units, where children are forced to share beds, and have no space to play or do their homework,” she adds. “Families are trapped in dire conditions for months, even years, with no stability, privacy, and very little hope of moving into a safe and secure home.”
What should the government do?
A spokesperson for London Councils, the umbrella organisation for the capital’s local authorities, says the reduction in B&Bs was “good news for Londoners”, but the number of households in temporary accommodation was “utterly unsustainable”. Urgent action is needed at national level, they say, to prevent homelessness, sustain local homelessness services, and getting homeless families into permanent housing.
Specific demands from London Councils include unfreezing Local Housing Allowance rates, which currently mean councils lose money for every person in temporary accommodation. This form of housing benefit has been frozen since 2011 and limits what councils can claim back from the government. London Councils is also calling for the government to progress work on the national cross-departmental strategy to reduce homelessness, and make sure that housing poverty is considered when reviewing how much government funding each council gets from 2026/27 onwards.
This is echoed by the councils we interviewed and by Shelter’s MacRae: “If the government is serious about tackling homelessness, it must first use the Autumn Budget to unfreeze local housing allowance, so that struggling families can afford to pay their rent,” she says, adding that the only long-term solution was building nearly a million social homes over the next decade.
Jessica, despite now living in slightly less inappropriate accommodation, is having no luck bidding for council homes and can’t afford to rent on her salary. Meanwhile her life is frozen in limbo.
“It’s about not being able to make your home – you could be moved at any minute,” she says. “The constant not knowing builds up over months and months, and it’s overwhelming.”■
About the author: Matty Edwards is a freelance journalist based in Bristol who mostly writes about housing, local politics and the environment. He was previously a reporter and editor at local media cooperative the Bristol Cable between 2018 and 2025.
The Lead is campaigning to end child poverty. Earlier this week, our National Editor Natalie Morris wrote about the racial inequalities that lie at the heart of the child poverty crisis in the UK. Subscribe to join our campaign, and you can expect more powerful journalism that gets to the heart of the crisis.
 | A guest post by
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I worked for a Low Income Housing Society in Vancouver Canada for 3 years. The one thing I learned that escapes most people is that having a safe place to call their own is a priority. Many of the people we talked to and housed were drug abusers. So we built a special accommodation to take care of those so that they could work on their personal issues without having to fight the daily grind on the streets as well. We got government funds to build the first downtown Eastside residence in the worse drug and alcohol strip in the city. Many of those we housed were given help to overcome their addictions and some went on to volunteer to help others. It actually cost the city less than drug enforcement was costing! I've been away from Canada for a few years now and I hope that that lesson was learned by many cities since. We need to build homes of buildings that are no more than 4 stories high and contained a living room/bedroom, kitchen with appliances already installed and a private bathroom/shower. These are the basics for a single person. For women escaping domestic violence with children would of course need a separate bedroom or two depending on how many children they have. I myself was brought up in a council house that had 3 bedrooms. My parents had one and because their were 7 siblings the 4 girls had one and the 3 boys shared the 3rd. It didn't feel crowded as that was all we knew. We were happy and even though we never had all the mod-cons we survived well enough. My father was the sole earner and his army pension (24 years service) paid for our school uniforms each year. We lived paycheque to paycheque and didn't have a luxuries. I had my books and the rest had their comics each week. Candies and cookies and fresh fruit were purchased now and then and much appreciated. Christmas time meant new socks and underwear lol.