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Waltham Forest Council is facing a £23 million overspend on temporary accommodation. Aa crisis that’s forcing a rethink of how and where people are housed. The council now plans to prioritise “good homes over location,” meaning more families could be moved out of the borough altogether. Sounds sensible, right?
I wrote recently about why London doesn’t feel like it used to, and this story connects directly. Every policy like this, however well-intentioned, chips away a little more at what makes a place feel like home. When people with deep roots are pushed out because they can’t afford to stay, we’re not just losing residents. We’re losing history, culture, and continuity.
A national problem, not a local one
It would be easy to see this as a local issue. A council stretched too far by rising rents and limited housing stock. But the truth is far bigger. Across England, councils are drowning under the cost of temporary accommodation. Collectively, they spent a record £2.8 billion in 2024–25 (Source: Shelter), a rise of around 25% in a single year, just to keep people off the streets.
The number of households in temporary accommodation has now reached 131,000, and many local authorities are warning that this is financially unsustainable. In London alone, boroughs face a £740 million shortfall between what they spend and what central government reimburses (Source: LSE). Further analysis by London Councils and detailed by Local Government Lawyer shows that eight boroughs alone spent £543 million last year, leaving a £223 million funding gap, and the crisis is still widening.
Some councils are spending over 20% of their entire budgets on temporary housing, an impossible burden for local authorities trying to keep basic services running.
So why is this happening?
It’s a perfect storm of rising private rents, frozen housing benefit rates, and a chronic shortage of social housing. Councils are legally obliged to house homeless families, but the money they receive from central government no longer covers the cost. The result is a growing reliance on private landlords and nightly-paid accommodation. Expensive, unstable, and often outside the local area.
And that’s where the human cost begins
When families are moved miles away, they lose access to schools, jobs, and vital support networks. Children’s education is disrupted. Parents lose informal childcare and local healthcare connections. People are uprooted from the communities that keep them afloat. What looks efficient in the short term can become a long-term social and economic drain, both on the displaced families and on the areas that absorb them.
Yet the answer isn’t to keep everyone in the same postcodes forever. London and other major cities are overcrowded, expensive, and short on housing land. We do need to create new, sustainable communities elsewhere, places with proper transport, healthcare, and jobs, so that moving away doesn’t feel like exile. But that requires coordination, not forced moves.
If relocation is part of the strategy, it has to come with incentives and support: help with retraining, job placement, travel, and the costs of rebuilding a life. Moving people should be about opportunity, not displacement. About building new roots, not tearing up the old ones.
We need real change
The only real solution lies at a government level. Councils can’t fix this alone. We need a national plan to build affordable homes, reform how temporary accommodation is funded, and update housing benefit rates to reflect real-world rents. There also needs to be safeguards to prevent the quiet erosion of community ties through mass out-of-borough placements.
Because once again, we’re seeing the same pattern: a narrow, short-term fix that ignores the wider cost. “Good homes over location” might solve an immediate budget problem, but at what price to the people, and the places left behind?