More than 150 councils this week attended an emergency summit as the cost of temporary accommodation to local authorities increases rapidly.
Launching a call for ‘urgent Government help’ ahead of this month’s Autumn Statement, councils gathered on Tuesday to discuss the ‘escalating social and financial crisis created by the unprecedented demand’ for temporary accommodation as they attempted to ramp up their lobbying.
The latest Government figures have revealed that councils in England spent £1.7bn to house 104,000 households in temporary accommodation in 2022-23 - up by 9% on the previous year and by 62% in the past five years.
Chair of the Local Government Association, Shaun Davies, lobbied housing minister Felicity Buchan and levelling up minister Jacob Young over the issue in meetings last week, calling on them to increase housing benefit to make more private rented homes affordable to people receiving welfare support and to reform housing rules to allow councils to build more social housing.
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