Proportion of households in temporary accommodation in London boroughs (2024 Q1)
Last updated: September 2024
Next estimated update: April 2025
What’s this indicator?
When a household becomes homeless, their local authority has legal duties to provide them with accommodation. While they await a permanent solution, local authorities house people in temporary accommodation. You can find a map of the data at the bottom of the page.
What does it tell us?
Every borough in London, except Hounslow, has a higher proportion of households living in temporary accommodation than the average in England.
Newham has by far the highest rate of households in temporary accommodation - for every 1,000 households, 50.25 are living in temporary accommodation. Other boroughs with high rates include Redbridge (26.89 per 1,000 households), and Southwark (26.05 per 1,000 households). In contrast Hounslow (3.26 per 1,000 households) and Merton (4.39 per 1,000 households) have some of the lowest rates.
Housed in different local authorities
Sometimes local authorities will provide temporary accommodation outside of their area. This is particularly common in London, where local authorities face the twin challenges of greater demand for homelessness services and more expensive accommodation in which to house people. For every 1,000 households in Newham, 17.58 were housed in temporary accommodation outside of the borough in the third quarter of 2023. This is the highest proportion for any local authority in London.
Note:
All figures provided here refer to “households”. This refers to groups of people who live together (such as families, couples and other multi-adult households) and single adults. The dates span 4 quarters up to Q3 2023. Figures for Lambeth have not been reported due to missing data on all four quarters.
Map of London households in temporary accommodation
Households in temporary accommodation per 1,000 (2024 Q1)
Want to know more?
If you want to explore this data in more depth, check the 'data source and notes' button on the above charts. This will tell you where the data comes from, where you may be able to dig deeper.