Westminster Hall Debate: Progress on ending homelessness 21 October 2025

• Councils are at the sharp end of the housing and homelessness crisis. Every day, local authorities work tirelessly to prevent and relieve homelessness and support those who are at risk, but without fundamental reform and a truly joined-up approach across government, homelessness will continue to rise.
• The LGA welcomes Government reforms including commitments to ban “no fault” evictions, introduce a multi-year social housing rent settlement, and increase the Affordable Homes Programme and homelessness funding. However, councils need long-term, sustainable solutions to deliver on the shared goal of ending homelessness for good.
• Councils stand ready to deliver but cannot solve this challenge alone. Homelessness prevention requires a whole-society approach: national and local government, the NHS, schools, employers, landlords, the voluntary sector and communities all have a role to play.

Key asks from HMG

• Uprate Local Housing Allowance (LHA) rates to the 30th percentile of local rents beyond 2025/26 and uprate temporary accommodation reimbursement rules to 90 per cent of the prevailing LHA rates.
• Remove the ringfence within the Homelessness Prevention Grant.
• Joint commitments to prevent homelessness could be impacted by the reduction of the Move On period back to 28 days for single adult asylum seekers and we would welcome working across Government on resolving this issue. Amend the New Burdens doctrine so that all new burdens placed on local authority HRAs – including proposals for a revised Decent Homes Standard and Minimum Energy Efficiency Standards – are fully assessed and funded.
• Implement rent convergence from April 2026 at a minimum of £2 per week until all properties have reached formula rents.

Homelessness and temporary accommodation pressures

Local authorities face unsustainable pressures from increasing homelessness demands and the cost of temporary accommodation (TA) provision:

• 132,410 households were in TA on 31 March 2025, including 172,420 children which is up 35 per cent since 2019.
• Demand for TA has increased 53 per cent since 2019 (from 86,240 to 132,410 households). 

In 2024/25, councils spent nearly £2.8 billion on temporary accommodation alone.

• Increasing costs of providing homelessness services with complex contributory factors such as asylum and resettlement issues has meant councils’ net spend on homelessness services has increased by £966 million (126.7 per cent) in real terms from 2019/20 to 2024/25.
• The net cost to local budgets of providing temporary accommodation has increased by 220 per cent in real terms (or £725 million) in five years, including by 35.8 per cent alone from 2023/4 to 2024/5.
• The TA Subsidy shortfall has grown to £260 million, a 30 percent increase in one year and £1 billion over six years. Councils could have had £941 million reimbursed rather than £780 million if the system reflected the LGA call for reform. These escalating costs, combined with rising rents and a frozen Local Housing Allowance (LHA) rate cannot be sustained. Without intervention the crisis will continue to worsen, and councils will be forced to make further cuts to other essential services.

The LGA has long supported whole-system reform to work towards ending homelessness, and our recommendations for the role Government can play to best support this work are by:

• Creating accountability: Ensuring that stakeholders are incentivised to prevent homelessness and held to account for delivering their role in prevention. 
• Ensuring deliverability: Ensuring that resources are aligned with preventative goals, flexible, stable in the long-term, and sufficient for stakeholders to effectively deliver their role in homelessness prevention. 
• Fostering collaboration: Creating the conditions for effective local-level partnerships. 
• Driving evidence-based policy: Driving and sharing the results of experimentation and rigorous evaluation and supporting efforts to scale proven interventions. 

Enabling sustainable funding structures

• Pool funding for prevention at a local level. Long-term, flexible, multi-agency homelessness prevention budgets should be established. This would support joined-up commissioning between councils, the NHS and partners, reducing fragmentation and enabling strategic planning.
• The ring-fencing of current funding pots, such as the Homelessness Prevention Grant, prevents councils from flexibly meeting local pressures. Lifting this ring-fence would support the strategic planning required to meet demand.
• Uprate the temporary accommodation subsidy rate to 90 per cent of the prevailing Local Housing Allowance (LHA) rate. This would better reflect the true costs faced by councils and support financial sustainability.
• Fully fund and deliver on existing homelessness commitments, including recruitment, training and retention of skilled housing officers, caseworkers, and prevention specialists. Without the resources to match rising demand, councils will remain in a cycle of firefighting.
• Invest in supported housing and housing-related support through a sustainable long-term funding settlement and accelerate the rollout of the Supported Housing Act 2023. Supported housing plays a critical role in both preventing and resolving homelessness while reducing reliance on costly emergency accommodation and hospital services.

Housing and accommodation delivery

• Invest in social and affordable homes, with at least 100,000 new social homes per year. A step change in the supply of genuinely affordable, secure, high-quality homes is vital to relieve pressure on homelessness services and would improve public finances by £24.5 billion over 30 years.
• Provide councils with the tools and flexibilities to acquire settled housing and incentivise short-term temporary accommodation providers to offer longer-term, settled homes, such as through an intermediate housing product with rents charged at ‘LHA’ rates.
• Implement further reform to the Right to Buy, including reviewing eligibility criteria and allowing councils to set discounts locally. This would support councils to increase the supply and quality of affordable housing to meet growing demand.

Securing income and reducing poverty

• Local Housing Allowance rates must at minimum keep pace with the bottom 30 per cent of local rents. This will prevent shortfalls in rent that force households into homelessness. Eviction from the private rented sector remains one of the leading causes of homelessness, and supporting people to afford their accommodation in line with market rents will help lower demand.

Driving evidence-based policy

• Establish an innovation and evidence hub to evaluate what works in homelessness prevention, aligned with the LGA’s wider work on public service reform. This will support councils and partners in scaling successful approaches through a stronger evidence base.

Strategic alignment and joint accountability

• Ensure the homelessness strategy is aligned with other government strategies and includes ending homelessness as a clear national outcome. Strengthening user-led service design will support effective reform and outcomes.
• Develop a cross-departmental approach to prevention with ending homelessness adopted as a shared outcome across departments, including specific provisions for cohorts at risk of homelessness such as refugees and asylum seekers, care leavers, people leaving prison, and victim-survivors of domestic abuse.
• Introduce a clear duty across public services, including housing providers, schools, and the NHS, to identify, act, and collaborate to prevent homelessness, ensuring shared accountability across the whole system.

Elliot Gregory, Public Affairs and Campaigns Advisor 

Email: [email protected]