Temporary Accommodation: Haringey

(asked on 11th October 2017) - View Source

Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:

To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, what information his Department holds on the number of households from the London Borough of Haringey who have been placed in temporary accommodation outside of that borough in the last 12 months.


Answered by
Marcus Jones Portrait
Marcus Jones
Treasurer of HM Household (Deputy Chief Whip, House of Commons)
This question was answered on 17th October 2017

Time spent in temporary accommodation ensures no family is without a roof over their head. The Government is assisting areas to ensure that families spend no longer than 6 weeks in B&Bs, which includes protecting and maintaining the homelessness prevention funding at £315 million. We have also replaced the Department of Work and Pension’s Temporary Accommodation Management Fee with a Flexible Homelessness Support Grant which local authorities can use more strategically to prevent and tackle homelessness. This amounts to £402 million over the two years from 2017/18.

While the number of households in temporary accommodation is below the 2004 peak, the law is clear that households with dependent children should only be accommodated in B&B in an emergency and for no longer than six weeks, which commences when the household moves in.

My Department publishes regular statistics on rough sleeping, statutory homelessness, temporary accommodation and homelessness prevention and relief. These are published at national, London and local authority level . The latest statistics can be found at: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/homelessness-statistics

We are remodelling the statutory homelessness data collection alongside the introduction of the Homelessness Reduction Act to give us better insights into the causes of homelessness and the support people need. We will move from aggregated to case-level data which will give us a much more detailed picture of what help people have received and whether it helped prevent their homelessness.

Local authorities have a duty to ensure that any accommodation provided for a homeless household under the homelessness legislation must be suitable. In considering ‘suitability’ authorities must, by law, consider whether the accommodation is affordable for the applicant, its size, its condition, its accessibility and also its location.

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