London households in temporary accommodation

Last updated: April 2025
Next estimated update: June 2025

What’s this indicator?

When a household becomes homeless, their local authority has legal duties to provide them with accommodation. While they wait for a await a solution, local authorities house people in temporary accommodation.

What does it tell us?

Every borough in London 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, 54.12 are living in temporary accommodation. Other boroughs with high rates include Southwark (27.44 per 1,000 households) and Redbridge (26.79 per 1,000 households). In contrast Bexley (5.43 per 1,000 households) and Camden (5.8 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, 20.13 were housed in temporary accommodation outside of the borough in the third quarter of 2024. 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 2024. Figures for Lambeth have not been reported due to missing data on all four quarters.

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.