Councils’ temporary housing costs to more than double by 2029-30, says LGA
📖 Full Retelling
<p>Exclusive: Local Government Association says figure to house homeless people in England will reach almost £4bn</p><p>The cost to councils of providing temporary accommodation for homeless people in England is projected to more than double to almost £4bn by 2029–30, the Local Government Association (LGA) has said.</p><p>The national membership body for councils found that since 2017-18, local authorities across England had spent almost £1.5bn more on temporary acc
Entity Intersection Graph
No entity connections available yet for this article.
Original Source
Councils’ temporary housing costs to more than double by 2029-30, says LGA Exclusive: Local Government Association says figure to house homeless people in England will reach almost £4bn The cost to councils of providing temporary accommodation for homeless people in England is projected to more than double to almost £4bn by 2029–30, the Local Government Association has said. The national membership body for councils found that since 2017-18, local authorities across England had spent almost £1.5bn more on temporary accommodation than had been reimbursed in housing benefit from the government. Without intervention, this figure is set to balloon to £3.9bn in the next four years, the LGA said as it urged the government to take action to help councils facing soaring demand and funding pressures. It also found that the annual cost to councils of TA was set to grow by 65% in the next five years, from nearly £360m to £595m. Tom Hunt, the chair of the LGA’s inclusive growth committee and leader of Sheffield city council, said the TA “subsidy gap was a problem that is getting worse each year”. “Because of this ever-widening issue, councils are caught in a vicious cycle of ever-increasing temporary accommodation costs versus static rates they receive back to cover their costs,” he said. The scale of the temporary accommodation crisis in England, in which homeless people are placed in hotels, B&Bs or self-contained flats, shows no sign of abating after soaring to record levels following the Covid pandemic. Last week, data showed the number of children living in temporary accommodation had increased to the highest levels on record , up 12,020 in a year to 175,990. More than 130,000 households live in TA in total. Local authorities cover the cost of temporary accommodation, and the amount they can claim back from the Department for Work and Pensions is capped at 90% of local housing allowance rates set back in 2011. The LGA said the problem was increasingly getting worse as the ...
Read full article at source