Temporary Accommodation: Tackling Poor Conditions

I am grateful to the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee for their report published on 22 April 2026, and our response, laid and published today, sets out the actions Government are taking to improve the quality and supply of temporary accommodation. My long-term priority remains to prevent homelessness and tackle the root causes, but where temporary accommodation is necessary, it must be safe, decent and stable. Today I want to set out the wider steps Government are taking to ensure this is the case.

We are making encouraging progress against commitments we set out in December 2025 in our cross-Government child poverty strategy and national plan to end homelessness. First and foremost, we will continue to focus on the most harmful forms of homelessness, and particularly the unlawful use of B&B accommodation for families where essential facilities, such as kitchens and bathrooms, are shared. We have achieved a 63% fall in families with children staying in B&Bs beyond six weeks, compared to the same time last year, and remain on track to eliminate this by the end of the Parliament. More widely, the latest homelessness statistics show some signs of stabilisation, with numbers of households in temporary accommodation falling for the first quarter since 2022. We are also helping councils invest in good-quality temporary accommodation, through delivery of the £950-million fourth round of the local authority housing fund, and through exploring options for partnerships with social impact and institutional investors.

Councils work extremely hard to find suitable accommodation, but we know performance varies between different councils. Through the national plan to end homelessness, we are establishing routes to escalate and intervene to address poor performance. We will not shy away from calling out councils if they are not taking adequate steps to improve. To aid this, in May we published the first of the toolkits committed to in the national plan on local performance and accountability. This includes detail on the requirements, via grant conditions, for local authorities to produce a policy to ensure temporary accommodation is suitable, and to set out how the local authority will mitigate disruption and avoid multiple moves, ensure access to support services (particularly where safeguarding issues exist), and ensure access to key facilities—including cooking and laundry facilities, storage and wi-fi. Action plans must be published by December 2026, and will be an important tool to identify and tackle poor practice.

But we are not waiting until December. In our national plan, we committed to engaging with the sector to assess what urgent action is needed to address the worst outcomes in the short term. During this engagement, we have heard about a wide range of issues, including poor physical quality, multiple moves, a lack of facilities, out-of-area placements and overcrowding.