'I’m a councillor. Temporary accommodation costs are forcing me to bring in brutal cuts'

In May, Lewisham voted for change, electing a majority Green council for the first time in its history. We stood on a message of hope: that a council could be firmly on the side of renters, fix the homes it owns, and stop families falling into temporary accommodation.

Five months later, I found myself sat around a table with my cabinet colleagues discussing the £40 million of cuts we will have to make over the next four years.

It was a conversation we should never have had to have, but it was playing out nonetheless because of one number that has remained frozen for 15 years.

When a family becomes homeless and we place them in temporary accommodation, the government pays us back — but at no more than 90% of what housing benefit covered in January 2011. Rents have risen for 15 years since, by more than half in the last ten years alone. Every pound of the difference comes out of the council’s budget.

In Lewisham, that gap cost us £24 million last year.

Over four years, this overspend adds up to far more than the £40 million we are being asked to find. If the subsidy were unfrozen, we would not even be having the conversation about which of our already stretched services would have to take a further hit.

Read more:

• An academic put trackers on homeless people to see what they could learn. Here’s what they did next
• There is a taboo around periods and homelessness. It’s leaving women sleeping rough on the streets
• What counting women sleeping rough in London taught me about Andy Burnham’s homelessness promise

This story is not unique to Lewisham. Councils in England spent £2.93 billion on temporary accommodation in 2025-26, more than £8 million a day. But our borough feels it more than most. One in every 53 of our residents lives in temporary accommodation, the 12th highest rate in the country.

In the face of this our officers have done everything they can. In a year, we cut the number of households in temporary accommodation from 2,706 to 2,384. But despite this, our total spend has risen, not fallen, because private rents keep soaring.

That is why, this budget, the housing leads of the six Green-run councils in London are calling on Andy Burnham to do one thing above all: unfreeze the temporary accommodation subsidy. It needs no new legislation, only a decision on 28 October.

But if the prime minister wants to turn the rising tide of homelessness, rather than just pay for it, he should do two more things.

Unfreeze local housing allowance, the housing support that private renters on low incomes rely on. It is meant to cover the cheapest third of rents in each area, but it has been frozen since April 2024 while rents keep climbing.

A frozen allowance is a pipeline straight into temporary accommodation. In Lewisham, the allowance covers just 7.3% of one-bed homes that are currently available. Relinking it would cost around £2 billion a year by 2029-30 — less than councils already spend on temporary accommodation in a single year.

And bring in rent controls, so that public money stops being swallowed by the next rise in private rents. As one resident put it to us: “Landlords know that they can raise the rent, and the council has to pay it”. The New Economics Foundation estimated in 2024 that government would hand private landlords around £70 billion in housing support over five years. We don’t think that’s right. Critics say controls would drive landlords away, but economists at UCL found that even a 20% rent cut would leave the average mortgaged landlord with a 64% pre-tax profit margin, 4.5 times the average for UK businesses.

I did not come into politics to manage decline. Hope is not naive. But it does need the people with power to act.

On 28 October, the prime minister can make the change that would let councils like mine get on with the job we were elected to do. If he does one thing, it should be to unfreeze the subsidy. If he wants to end the rising tide of homelessness, he will do all three.

Natalie Thomas is the cabinet member for housing at the London Borough of Lewisham.

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