Written statement: Tackling Poor Conditions in Temporary Accommodation - June 22

Minister for Local Government and Homelessness (Alison McGovern): I am grateful to the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee for their report published 22 April 2026 and our response, laid and published today, sets out the actions Government is 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 is 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, particularly unlawful use of B&B accommodation for families where essential facilities, such as kitchens and/or bathrooms, are shared. We have achieved a 63% fall in families with children 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.(opens in a new tab) 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 engage 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.

Our progress on B&B reduction shows what we can do with a clear national focus. Today I have announced allocations for the first year of our newly expanded £30m Emergency Accommodation Reduction Programme. In year 1, the vast majority of the £10 million funding will be targeted on reducing B&B use but we will then expand the Programme to address wider poor practice.

We are also taking wider action to improve quality, suitability and support for households, whilst also improving the evidence-base to inform future policy.

We are improving quality and increasing protections against poor housing conditions. Our guidance is clear that accommodation must be free of the most serious category 1 hazards, and local authorities must now set out in their temporary accommodation policies how they will ensure this is the case. We will soon be consulting on extending the scope of Awaab's Law from the social rented sector to also include temporary accommodation occupied under licence and tenancies in the private rented sector. We intend to apply the reformed Decent Homes Standard to temporary accommodation wherever possible, and will publish guidance by the end of 2026 to help landlords prepare for this. We have recently achieved Royal Assent to the Renters' Rights Act 2026, which introduces a new power for local authorities to issue fines up to £7,000 where a category 1 hazard is found in private rented homes, and are considering extending this to other forms of temporary accommodation.

In keeping our focus on moving families out of B&B, we must not see them moved into other unsuitable alternatives. I have heard concerns about unsuitable out of area placements and of failure to provide notifications to receiving areas. Requirements to notify are clear in law, and we are actively engaging with stakeholders to improve practice and make expectations on placing and receiving local councils clear. Safeguarding risks must be minimised across all forms of accommodation. This is why eliminating B&B has been our core focus, but we will review wider models of shared accommodation and consider whether further action is needed as part of our wider work to improve quality. Our guidance is clear local authorities must provide adequate space for cots and support where families do not have one. Concerns have been raised that this is not happening and we will work with local authorities to ensure this is the case.

We are making progress on our cross-government commitments to improve the health and education outcomes of families in temporary accommodation. I am delighted we have now reached Royal Assent on the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026 which, from September, introduces a new duty on local housing authorities to notify health and education bodies when a child is placed in temporary accommodation. We will provide guidance on this in the coming weeks. We committed to ending the practice of discharging newborns into B&Bs, or other unsuitable housing, and are working with the NHS on safe and robust pathways.

To complement this action on improving suitability, we are working with the sector over the coming months to develop and share a consistent evidence base to support local authorities in making risk-based assessments based on suitability for specific household needs. This includes wider work to review child mortality data and working with the NHS on their commitment to improve clinical data collection for children in temporary accommodation, to ensure we understand risks and take the right preventative action. My department's Local Artificial Intelligence division are also using data to explore how an AI tool could be used to assist in the matching of homeless families with appropriate accommodation using a transparent weighted-scoring algorithm. If taken forward, Match(opens in a new tab)' would join a suite of AI-backed tooling for case workers in local government across England, including Local Transcribe(opens in a new tab) and upgrades to StreetLink(opens in a new tab). We hope to say more on this work in the autumn.

I am committed to continuing to work together to protect households and improve their experience in temporary accommodation while our long-term strategy enables us to get back on track to ending homelessness for good.